# Nick Roberts
> Hi, I'm Nick 👋. I build software and write about adventures.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).
## Pages
### Media
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/media/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T02:25:02.000Z
Books tend to be my favorite form overall, since reading gets me away from a screen. They help build my imaginative capacity, expose me to good writing style, and, I think, improve my ability to focus for long periods in other areas of life.

These days, I prefer paper books over those on Kindle. There's just so much personality that gets steamrolled on an e-reader. 

Below, I've italicized media that I completed in part but put down or come back to as reference. I've bolded media that I'd especially recommend.

**Note on video games**: I tend to prefer story-driven/finite ones. See my rationale [here](https://nickrroberts.com/on-rationalizing-my-leisure-time/). Also, in video game land, I count a "finish" as completing the main storyline or quest. I'm not a completionist with respect to the sometimes hundreds of side quests in the types of games I like. My "Video games I remember completing before 2023" list is not exhaustive, but I only started recording them recently so there are many I don't recollect.

**Note on my film/TV record**: I'm sure there are many things I've seen but haven't recorded here. I haven't tracked my watch history as religiously as books or other aspects of my life.

## 2026

#### Books

- John Dies at the End, Jason Pargin
- A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean
- ****The Devils, Joe Abercrombie**
- Artemis, Andy Weir
- A Killing in Cannabis, Scott Eden
- Beachhead, FX Holden
- Aggressor, FX Holden
- Red Phoenix, Larry Bond

#### Film/TV

- ****Lady Snowblood**
- ****Rewatch**: Kill Bill vol.1 & 2
- Pina, Wim Wenders - for film club
- ****The Odyssey**, Christopher Nolan - best movie of the year probably
- The Day of the Jackal - pretty entertaining!
- Beau Travail, Claire Denis
- ****End of Watch**
- Robin Hood (Russell Crowe)
- ****Heat, Michael Mann** \- Excellent
- Napoleon, Ridley Scott - Ehhhh
- Re-watch: ****The Lord of the Rings Trilogy** \- just all-time
- Re-watch: A History of Violence - decent.
- The Hidden Fortress (1958), Kurosawa
- ****Invincible** ****Season 4**
- ****Weapons** \- surprisingly great
- Following (1998) — Christopher Nolan
- Scarpetta (Amazon Prime, Show) — Mediocre, which was surprising given the cast
- In the Mood for Love - Very beautifully shot; not really my bag
- ****A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms**
- ****The Pitt Season 2**
- ****Marty Supreme** \- Excellent, stressful
- ****Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson**
- ****Good Time, Safdie Brothers**
- Cronos, Guillermo Del Toro
- Rewatch: ****Children of Men**
- ****Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson**

#### Video Games

- Slay the Spire 2 — Excellent
- ****Grand Theft Auto 5** \- hilarious, cynical
- Replay: Far Cry 6
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Feels like Final Fantasy or something. Dialogue is weird. Not my cup of tea.

## 2025

#### Books

- We are Legion (We are Bob), Dennis E. Taylor - Reread on audiobook for the drives between Salt Lake and Teton Valley.
- Onyx Storm, Rebecca Yarros
- Iron Flame, Rebecca Yarros
- The Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros - Like a better Court of Thorns and Roses. The dramatized audiobook sucks you in.
- The Pragmatic Programmer, David Thomas & Andrew Hunt
- Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer - Concise. Kind of emo.
- ****The Science of Accelerated Learning, Peter Hollins** \- Super valuable strategies and takeaways. Easy to immediately implement.
- The Terminal List, Jack Carr - Simplistic macho bubblegum.
- ****Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty** \- I love this stuff: Space, clones, digital consciousness. All with a murder mystery layered on top. Very fun.
- Mal Goes to War, Edward Ashton - Another roadtrip listen. Decent.
- The Fourth Consort, Edward Ashton - listened to the audiobook on a roadtrip. Entertaining!
- A Court of Thorns and Roses (got through book three of five and I'm out), Sarah J. Maas - Fiona and I started listening to these while driving down to Salt Lake. It's not good writing, but it's v steamy. Kind of feels like something on the level of **Twilight*.
- ****Dungeon Crawler Carl** (Finished books 1-6), Matt Dinniman - Hilarious and completely engaging.
- ****East of Eden, John Steinbeck** \- Somber, contemplative. A little difficult for me to devote very long periods of reading to this one since I always came away from each session feeling mildly sad. It's obvious from the writing and the expansive ambition of the book why this is a great American classic.
- Mickey7, Edward Ashton - Really fun!
- **Station Eternity, Mur Lafferty (58%)* \- I couldn't get into this one. The dialogue and the story drag.
- Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson - Brutal, frustrating, well-told.
- ****Circe, Madeline Miller** \- Excellently-written. A beautiful story. I enjoyed the foray into Greek mythology again.
- ****Slow Productivity, Cal Newport** \- Well worth it. The book is forming the basis of my philosophy on this year (reducing the number and scope of my active projects).

#### Film/TV

- ****F1** \- solid, kind of predictable
- ****Fallout, Season 2** \- Love.
- ****One Battle After Another** \- Well done. Funny, action-packed.
- ****Pluribus, Vince Gilligan** \- Weird, refreshingly different story, excellent
- ****Frankenstein, Guillermo Del Toro** \- CGI was a little rough, but the acting was great.
- The Woman in Cabin 10 - Entertaining!
- Rewatch: ****The Shining**, Stanley Kubrick. I always notice new, small details each time.
- K-Pop Demon Hunters - I'd heard a lot about this one from folks I follow. Very visually beautiful. Not exactly my cup of tea.
- Alien Earth - Entertaining.
- Alien Romulus - Pretty good! Brings together the good parts from the franchise.
- ****Hot Fuzz** \- Another Simon Pegg flick with genius and subtle British humor.
- Rewatch: Prometheus - Went on an Alien franchise kick while Fiona was out of town. I don't mind this one! Not my favorite, but not bad.
- Rewatch: ****There Will Be Blood** \- Another from the New York Times top 100 of the 21st century. It's just one of the best I've ever seen.
- ****Shaun of the Dead** \- Hilarious. I'd never seen it before, but count me among the cult fanhood.
- Rewatch: ****Superbad** \- I haven't seen this movie in more than a decade and it is still absolutely hilarious. Really captures that 2008 vibe.
- ****The Pitt (HBO)** \- Fantastic. Excellent character development and a fascinating glimpse into a busy ER.
- Duster (HBO) - I love the '70s vibe and the music just slaps.
- ****Murderbot (Apple TV)** \- Huge fan of the books and the shows seems to be a faithful and very funny adaptation.
- ****Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh** \- Fun and British.
- The Last of Us (Season 2) - I find Ellie's character to be very grating and angsty-teeny but the story definitely holds the attention.
- Rewatch: ****Pacific Rim** (2013) - Pure action indulgence. Over-the-top giant robot/monster action.
- Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho - Not a big fan of the movie. Really liked the book. The film felt like a kind of chaotic carnival, and they changed the plot significantly from the novel.
- American Primeval, Netflix - Very interesting subject matter, very bloated dialogue. Bad things seem to happen at an incredibly fast pace. No chill. Could have been three episodes instead of seven.
- The Bondsman, Amazon Prime - I couldn't get farther than one episode.
- ****Sisu, Jalmari Helander** \- Like John Wick but in WWII Finland.
- Rewatch: ****Zero Dark Thirty** \- Also excellent.
- Rewatch: ****Sicario** \- Excellent.
- Primal, Genndy Tartakovsky - A Reddit recommend for something similar to Scavenger's Reign. Pretty good so far. The artwork is beautiful.
- ****The White Lotus, Season Three** \- TWL is always good.
- The Substance - This was such an intense one. I learned I'm just not a fan of the body horror stuff. Had to split 20 mins from the end to go watch chess videos and wash out my brain.
- ****Common Side Effects** \- From Joseph Bennett who also made **Scavenger's Reign*. The story and the animation are terrific.
- Rewatch: ****Her** \- Damn, I like this movie. It still holds up, although the point of view on technology in the near future is amusing. The AI played by Scarlett Johansson just runs wild. There are all kinds of alignment issues at play that would terrify people these days.
- ****Invincible, Season Three** \- Very violent, very good.
- ****Anora** \- Very raunchy, very good.
- Sundance 2025 Shorts programs - All of the animated ones are terrific. The live action ones...not so much.
- O' Brother Where Art Thou - Kooky. Dunno if I'm a huge fan. The music is great though.
- ****Severance, Season Two** \- So compelling.
- A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg - Keiran Culkin's character was unnerving and well-acted. The rest of the story was kind of flat for me.

#### Video games

- ****Split Fiction** \- In progress with a friend. Very engaging! Feels a little like it was made for kids.
- Replay: Far Cry 5 on co-op with my wife. A lot more fun with two people! Wish you could invite more players to the main campaign playthrough though. Like a lot of Ubisoft games, things feel repetitive after a while.
- Age of Mythology Retold - Reminded me a ton of playing this as a kid, only with much-improved graphics.
- Age of Empires 4 - Stepping back into RTS. This game as a lot of polish. It's not twitchy like Starcraft. I'm enjoying it well enough.
- Sid Meier's Civilization 6 - Decent, but these games are super long.

## 2024

#### Books

- Ocean's Echo, Everina Maxwell - Good.
- Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir - Entertaining; little sad at the ending.
- **Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds*  \- It's not bad at all, but going to come back to it.
- White Sun War, Mick Ryan - Interesting look at future warfare in an escalation scenario in the Taiwan Strait. Characters are super cardboardy but that's not really the point of the book.
- ****For We Are Many, Dennis E. Taylor** \- Book two of the Bobaverse series. Delightful.
- ****We are Legion (We are Bob), Dennis E. Taylor** \- good stuff. Entertaining. Like a more amusing **Ancillary Justice*.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien - read on Denali.
- Love is a Dog From Hell, Charles Bukowski - reading samples of poetry here and there. Bukowski is best paired with a beer.
- On Writing Well, William Zinsser - Blinkist summary.
- The 5am Club, Robin Sharma - Blinkist summary. A little crazy that there's a whole book about waking up at a specific time of day, but there you go. There're a few other nuggets in here, such as the notion of the four "interior empires": Mindset, Healthset, Heartset, Soulset and the [20/20/20 rule](https://www.blinkist.com/magazine/posts/5am-club-selftest?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=The%2020%2F20%2F20%20rule%20is%20what%20makes%20Sharma's%20morning,growth%20by%20reading%20and%20learning.). Upon the recommendation of a coworker, I decided to give [Blinkist](https://www.blinkist.com/en?ref=nickrroberts.com) a shot. Not kidding myself that this counts a full "read" cover to cover, but I'm counting it toward my media goal since I'm absorbing the idea framework of the book. I figure this is my goal in reading non-fic anyway--get the distillation of the ideas so I can commit them to memory. I'd never do this with fiction because the experience is in the **way* the story is told. The bias that made me try out Blinkist is that I think most non-fic (especially business/psychology/self-help) is fluffy and repetitive, often reinforcing the same ideas through different stories.
- ****The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin** \- Broken Earth Book 2\.
- ****The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin** \- The Broken Earth Book 1\. Outstanding. The writing and dialogue and characters (pretty much everything) is so refreshing after Sanderson's high-schooler novel-writing style.
- **Well of Ascension, Brandon Sanderson* **(30%)*\- I find Sanderson's dialogue to be awful and the characters very cardboardy. I couldn't bear it and put it down.

#### Film/TV

- ****Bugonia** (Yorgos Lanthimos): Very weird, very good.
- ****Nosferatu** \- Gross yet excellent.
- ****Severance, Season 1** \- Very compelling.
- Deadpool & Wolverine - Funny, messy.
- DiDi - Pretty good, was hoping the main character, Chris, would experience a bit more redemption.
- ****Coda** \- Excellent; was in tears.
- ****Peanut Butter Falcon** \- Delightful; funny.
- Rewatch: ****Warrior**, Gavin O'Connor - One of my faves.
- Rewatch: ****The Witch** \- Robert Eggers' directorial debut film and it is fantastic, subtly creepy. Great Halloween watch.
- ****Blade (1998)** \- Cheesy, but good fun. Hadn't seen it before.
- Beetlejuice (1988) - Watched because of the Halloween season. Very slapsticky; not funny. I was hoping for something more for this cult classic.
- ****Blue Eye Samurai** \- Fantastic.
- ****The Penguin** (Max) - Very good.
- ****Fallout** (Amazon Prime) - Excellent.
- Rewatch: ****The Matrix** \- Still amazing.
- Rewatch: ****Deadpool 2** \- Also great.
- Rewatch: ****Napoleon Dynamite** \- still very funny; very awkward.
- Rewatch: ****Step Brothers** \- still very funny.
- The Bear, Season 3 - Not as compelling so far as the first two. It's pretty backward-looking and character-studyish.
- ****Hit Man, Richard Linklater** \- Very good.
- Fall Guy - Fine.
- The Tourist (Netflix) - Alright. Pretty slow.
- **Argylle* \- We shut this one off early. Really terrible!
- ****Sugar (Apple TV)** \- Excellent. Really cool LA noir throwback. Not a huge fan of the bizarre twist at the end of the third to last episode. Seems unnecessary.
- The Three Body Problem, Season 1 - A confusing and bizarro mess, but entertaining at points.
- Dream Scenario - A big-time bummer and not what I expected.
- The Green Knight - Hard to follow.
- Rewatch: ****Dune Part One** \- Rewatch after seeing Part Two.
- ****Dune Part Two** \- Fantastic. In my opinion, the Villaneuve Dune series is the best book to movie adaptation since Lord of the Rings.
- Rewatch: Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
- Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet - Intense French courthouse drama.
- Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos - That was a wild ride.
- ****Tokyo Vice, Season 2** \- Excellent
- ****Tokyo Vice, Season 1** \- Like The Bear, this is another fascinating series that's been going a while that I only just discovered
- Mad God (Phil Tippett) - One of the most lunatic films I've ever seen. It's a claymation horror show, but there are moments of intense beauty
- Dodgeball - Rewatch. Still holds up, maybe not as funny as I remember
- Reacher - The Amazon Prime show. It's so bad, but interesting enough to hold attention.
- Rewatch: Zoolander - Infinitely quotable.
- ****American Beauty** \- Rewatch. Cringey, but so compelling. Bags are beautiful.
- Leave the World Behind - Solid. Ends super abruptly. Would recommend.
- True Detective: Night Country - Pretty good so far (on episode 2). Compelling. Still not living up to season 1 imo.
- ****The Bear, Season 2** \- chef's kiss.
- ****The Bear, Season 1** \- how did I sleep on this for so long? So well shot and acted. I love the underlying theme about striving for excellence.
- Saltburn - wild, intense, but pretty good in my opinion.

#### Video games

- ****Thronefall** \- A very simple, lovingly-made indie game. Super addicting with fantastic artwork.
- Skyrim Anniversary Edition with the Nolvus Ascension mod pack. It was fun to briefly rekindle an old flame, but it's overmodded for my taste with all of the effects, new items, new magic, and altered layouts for previously familiar places. While there are undeniable improvements over the original Skyrim, Nolvus feels like an unwieldy patchwork of indie Nexus Mods layered over a framework that’s showing its age.
- ****Subnautica** \- Love the craft/build system and sense of mystery as you explore an alien ocean world.
- Helldivers 2 - Okay. Not really a big fan of this style of game (online multiplayer shooter). Seems like it would appeal to Call of Duty fans looking for something a bit different.
- ****Baldur's Gate 3** \- Excellent. One of the best games I've played.

## 

## 2023

#### Books

- Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine, Owen Matthews
- Putin's Wars, Mark Galeotti
- The Witcher: The Last Wish, Andrzej Sapkowski - alright Covid reading.
- Minus 148: First Winter Ascent of Mt. Mckinley, Art Davidson - intense, emotionally draining at times.
- Denali's West Buttress, Colby Coombs
- Invincible, Issues 26-53, Robert Kirkman/Cory Walker/Robert Ottley
- Invincible, Issues 1-25, Robert Kirkman/Cory Walker/Robert Ottley
- ****Beyond the Mountain, Steve House - a solid memoir from another climbing legend.**
- ****Kiss or Kill, Mark Twight - intense, dark, contemplative.**
- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
- ****A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles -** Just a delightful, cozy read.
- **Reamde, Neal Stephenson (8%)*

#### Film/TV

- Tombstone (1993)
- The Killer, David Fincher - A little predictable, but solid.
- ****Invincible (Season 2) - Love it.**
- ****Scavenger's Reign (Season 1) - Crazy compelling and good writing.**
- Nightmare on Elm Street - Tis the season (October). 80's cheesy; surprisingly good.
- ****Rewatch: True Detective (Season 1) -** SO rewatchable.
- ****Peak Obsession -** a Cody Townsend [Fifty Project](https://www.skimag.com/videos/cody-townsend-peak-obsession-film/?ref=nickrroberts.com) production
- ****Rewatch: The Shining -** Just a great rewatch
- ****Eyes Wide Shut**
- ****2001: A Space Odyssey**
- ****Fargo (1996)**
- ****Oppenheimer - magnificent**
- Barbie
- Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (2018) - pretty decent; spectacular animation
- The Hunted (2003) - so bad. Also watched during Covid
- Honest Thief (Liam Neeson) - cheesy movie watched while in Covid recovery
- The Marksman (Liam Neeson) - cheesy movie watched while in Covid recovery
- Memory (Liam Neeson) - cheesy movie watched while in Covid recovery
- ****Invincible (Season 1) - watched on Amazon Prime; amazing**
- Lethal Weapon (1987) - whacky, nonsensical plot, but lots of explosions
- ****Enter the Dragon (1973) -** Kitschy, extremely fun
- ****Big Trouble in Little China** \- Exceptional
- M3gan - pretty funny
- Cocaine Bear - I was expecting laughs like Sharknado, but it did not deliver
- Yellowstone (Season 4) - it's so bad but so addicting
- Yellowstone (Season 3) - we hate the writing but can't stop
- Yellowstone (Season 2)
- Yellowstone (Season 1)
- Bloodsport (John Claude Van Damme) --also hilarious
- First Blood (Rambo)--hilarious
- ****Prospect (2018) --**Pedro Pascal is great
- ****The White Lotus Season 2**
- ****The Last of Us Season 1** (fantastic)

#### Video games

- Starfield - Entertaining enough, and kind of like **Skyrim* in space, but Bethesda's game engine is showing [some age](https://youtu.be/hS2emKDlGmE?si=Ikb9HkZnMJh9phF-&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [****Horizon Forbidden West**](https://nickrroberts.com/horizon-forbidden-west/) (excellent)
- [****Hogwarts Legacy**](https://nickrroberts.com/hogwarts-legacy/)
- [****Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition**](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-3/)
- [****Mass Effect 2 Legendary Edition**](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-2/)
- [Mass Effect 1 Legendary Edition](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-1/)
- ****God of War (2018)**
- **Elden Ring*

#### Video games I remember completing before 2023

- ****Red Dead Redemption 2**
- ****Half Life: Alyx**
- ****Elder Scrolls: Skyrim**
- **Elder Scrolls: Oblivion*
- ****Far Cry 3**
- ****Far Cry 4**
- ****Far Cry 5**
- Far Cry 6
- Portal
- Portal 2
- **Zelda: Breath of the Wild* \- maybe blasphemy, but I just don't go for the kiddy-feel of many Nintendo games
- Age of Empires 1, 2, 3, 4
- Age of Mythology
- The whole Halo series

## 2022

#### Books

- ****Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy, Martha Wells**
- ****Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells**
- ****Murderbot Diaries: Artificial Condition, Martha Wells**
- ****Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red, Martha Wells**
- **The First 90 Days, Michael D. Watkins (50%)*
- Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson - fine. The dialogue sucks
- Fairytale, Stephen King
- No Shortcuts to the Top, Ed Viesturs
- ***Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete** *, Steve House, Scott Johnston (Reference text)*
- ***Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills 9th Ed.** **(This is a textbook and intended for ongoing reference. Apparently required reading for many aspiring mountain guides.*)
- In the Shadow of Denali, Jonathan Waterman
- ****Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman**
- The Paris Apartment, Lucy Foley
- The Guest List, Lucy Foley
- ****Endurance, Alfred Lansing**
- ****Eiger Dreams, Jon Krakauer**
- ****Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer**
- **A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (15%)*
- ****Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer**
- **Bunker: What it takes to survive the apocalypse, Bradley Garrett (48%)*

#### Film/TV

- ****Triangle of Sadness**
- ****Three Thousand Years of Longing**
- ****The Northman** (excellent)
- Guns Akimbo
- ****Everything everywhere all at once**
- ****Fresh (Mimi Cave)**
- Free Guy
- Kimi (meh)
- ****14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible**
- ****Pig (Nicolas Cage)**
- Don't Look Up

## 2021

#### Books

- 2034, Ackerman & Stavridis
- Lone Survivor, Marcus Luttrell
- ****Empire of the Summer Moon, S. C. Gwynn**
- Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell
- ****With the Old Breed, Eugene B. Sledge**
- Skunk Works, Ben R. Rich
- ****Under the Banner of Heaven, John Krakauer**
- ****Eagle against the Sun, Ronald H Spector**
- In the Woods, Tana French
- Memories, Jack Scrivener
- Manhunt, Peter L. Bergen
- ****Ghost Wars, Steve Coll**
- Hogs in the Sand, Buck Wyndam
- ****Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts**
- **This is how you lose the time war, Max Gladstone*
- Ghost Fleet, PW Singer
- Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
- Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
- **Rebel Yell, S.C. Gwynne*

## 2020

#### Books

- For the Soul of Mankind, Melvyn Leffler
- The Odyssey, Homer
- The Bhagavad Gita, Eknath Eswaran
- ****So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport**
- How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
- Shoe Dog, Phil Knight
- The End is Always Near, Dan Carlin
- ****Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Eric Schlosser**
- The Bomb: Presidents, generals, and the secret history of nuclear war, Fred Kaplan
- ****Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy**
- ****On Writing, Stephen King**
- The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
- ****The Stand, Stephen King**
- The Cold War: A New History, John Lewis Gaddis
- Return with Honor, Scott O'Grady
- **Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss*
- **Principles, Ray Dalio*
- The Art of War, Stephen Coonts

## 2019

#### Books

- Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit
- The Iliad, Homer
- The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray
- The Monster of Florence, Preston and Spezi
- ****Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari**
- Shape Up, Ryan Singer
- ****Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon**
- Originals, Adam Grant
- ****10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now, Jaron Lanier**
- ****Deep Work, Cal Newport**
- E-Myth, Michael Gerber
- ****Atomic Habits, James Clear**
- 12 rules for Life, Jordan Peterson
- Waking Up, Sam Harris
- ****Life, Keith Richards**

## 2018

#### Books

- Make Time, Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky
- ****Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy**
- ****The Hunt for Red October, Tom Clancy**
- 40 ways of looking at Winston Churchill, Gretchen Rubin
- ****House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski**
- ****Getting Things Done, David Allen**
- The Thirst, Jo Nesbo
- The Snowman, Jo Nesbo
- Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945, Max Hastings
- **The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin*
- ****Make, Pieter Levels -** A reference piece I keep coming back to.
- **Ancillary Justice, Anne Leckie -* I don't know...not a fan.

#### Film/TV I remember watching before 2018 when I started tracking

- The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
- A Clockwork Orange
- The Godfather Part II
- The Dark Knight
- Schindlers List
- Every Harry Potter film
- Inception
- Se7en
- The Green Mile
- Parasite
- Terminator
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day
- American History X
- The Departed
- Rear Window
- Django Unchained
- Inglorious Basterds
- Reservoir Dogs
- Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
- Kill Bill Vol.1
- Kill Bill Vol. 2
- Natural Born Killers
- Fight Club
- WALL-E
- Princess Mononoke
- The Dark Knight Rises
- Aliens
- Avengers: Endgame
- The Avengers
- Avengers: Age of Ultron
- Avengers: Infinity War
- Captain America: The First Avenger
- Iron Man
- Iron Man II
- Iron Man III
- Black Panther
- Shang Chi: Legend of the 10 Rings
- The Incredible Hulk
- Thor
- Thor: Ragnarok
- American Beauty
- Toy Story
- Toy Story II
- Toy Story III
- Braveheart
- The Patriot
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Requiem for a Dream
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Full Metal Jacket
- Amelie
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
- Die Hard
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
- Monty Python: Life of Brian
- The Wolf of Wall Street
- Pan's Labyrinth
- Every Daniel Craig James Bond movie
- No Country for Old Men
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
- The Seventh Seal
- The Truman Show
- Jurassic Park
- The Lost World
- Jurassic Park III
- V for Vendetta
- Bladerunner
- Bladerunner 2049
- Trainspotting
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Gran Torino
- Catch Me If You Can
- Room
- The Big Lebowski
- Logan
- Monsters, Inc.
- Into the Wild
- The Princess Bride
- Jumanji
- Rocky
- Nobody
- The Matrix Reloaded
- The Matrix Revolutions
### Places
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/places/
Last updated: 2026-03-09T15:57:55.000Z
## Climbing record

I started mountaineering in earnest in 2022\. Tracking my progress here. All climbs include summits, unless specifically noted otherwise.

- **South Teton** (12,519ft) via Northwest Couloir, September 2024 (done in single push with Middle Teton), September 2024
- **Middle Teton** (12,809ft) via Southwest Couloir, September 2024
- **Denali** (20,320 ft) via West Buttress, Alaska, May 2024\. Summited 5/26/24.
- **Grandeur Peak** (8,299 ft) via East Trail, Utah, April 2024
- **Taylor Mountain** (10,342 ft) via skin track from Coal Creek, March 2024 (x2), April 2024
- **Mt. Glory** (10,037 ft) via bootpack from Teton Pass lot, Caribou-Targhee National Forest WY, December 2023, March 2024 (x2), January/February 2025 (x3)
- **Mt. Shuksan** (9,131 ft) via Sulphide Glacier, Washington, September 2023
- **Mt. Baker** (10,786 ft) via Easton Glacier, Washington, August 2023
- **Mt. Shasta** (14,180 ft) via Hotlum/Bolam Ridge route, California, June 2023
- **Mt. Rainier** (14,411 ft) via Ingraham Direct route, Washington, June 2023
- **Mt. Superior** (11,045 ft) via Cardiff Pass, Utah, August 2022
- **Grand Teton** (13,775 ft) x2: via Pownall-Gilkey route, July 2022\. Also via Upper Exum Ridge route, July 2025.
- **Mt. Sneffels** (14,157 ft), Colorado, September 2020
- **Handies Peak** (14,058 ft), Colorado, September 2020
- **Lone Peak** (11,253 ft), Utah, July 2020
- **King's Peak** (13,528 ft), Utah, July 2015

## Place log

I log a place if I've spent at least a night there. 

#### 2026

****March**

- Victor, ID
- Bozeman, MT

****February**

- Victor, ID

****January**

- Victor, I
- Pinedale, WY

#### 2025

****December**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Bisbee, AZ

****November**

- Tokyo, Japan
- Hiroshima, Japan
- Kyoto, Japan
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID

****October**

- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID

****September**

- Bozeman, MT
- Victor, ID

****August**

- Helena, MT
- Banff, CA
- Columbia Falls, MT
- Victor, ID

****July**

- Grand Teton, WY
- Gros Ventres, GTNP, WY
- Lemhi Range, ID (near Big Windy peak)
- Arco, ID
- Victor, ID

****June**

- Victor, ID

****May**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Toronto, Ontario
- Temagami, Ontario
- Haileybury, Ontario
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID

****April**

- Salt Lake City, UT

****March**

- Victor, ID

****February**

- Victor, ID

****January**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT

#### 2024

****December**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT

****November**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Bisbee, AZ
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID

****October**

- New York City, New York
- Victor, ID
- London, United Kingdom
- Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Inverness, United Kingdom
- Kingussie, United Kingdom
- Ardeonaig, United Kingdom
- Stirling, United Kingdom
- Edinburgh, United Kingdom

****September**

- Cambridge/Woodditton, United Kingdom
- Bangor, United Kingdom
- Holyhead, United Kingdom
- Beaumaris, United Kingdom
- Llandudno, United Kingdom
- Cambridge/Woodditton, United Kingdom
- London, United Kingdom
- Victor, ID

****August**

- Seattle, WA
- Victor, ID

****July**

- Santa Fe, NM
- Brooks Lake, Togwotee Pass, WY

****June**

- Victor, ID

****May**

- Anchorage, AK
- Talkeetna, AK
- Denali National Park, AK - Climbed the West Buttress route
- Talkeetna, AK
- Anchorage, AK

****April**

- Salt Lake City
- Victor, ID

****February - March**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT

****January**

- Bozeman, MT (Ice climbing in Hyalite: Genesis 1, The Hangover--2 pitches, The Dribbles--all 4 pitches, all while temps 0 to -30F)
- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT

#### 2023

- Fisher Valley, UT (camped on the way to Kokopelli Trail, connected to Onion Creek)
- Castle Valley, UT
- Alaska Basin, WY
- Seattle, WA
- Burlington, WA
- Anacortes, WA
- Cannon Beach, OR
- Portland, OR
- Mt. Baker/Snoqualmie Wilderness, WA
- Austin, TX
- Deming/Glacier, WA
- Mt. Shasta Wilderness, CA
- Denver, CO
- Ashford, WA
- Bend, OR
- Chicago, IL
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Henry's Fork, ID
- Victor, ID
- Jackson, WY (many times)
- Grand Teton National Park (many times)

#### 2022

- San Francisco, CA
- Vancouver, Canada
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Bozeman, MT
- La Verkin, UT (includes Zion National Park, and a lot of the surrounding area/roads)
- Coyote Gulch, UT
- Tucson, AZ
- Bisbee, AZ
- San Diego, CA
- Alameda, CA
- Driggs, ID
- La Fortuna, Costa Rica
- Monteverde, Costa Rica
- Tamarindo, Costa Rica
- Point Reyes, California
- Petaluma, California
- Santa Fe, New Mexico (Meow Wolf is a must-see)
- Austin, Texas
- New Orleans, Louisiana
- Dallas, Texas
- Albuquerque, New Mexico

#### Tracking pre-2022

Sometimes cities, sometimes landmarks, sometimes neighborhoods. There's a lot of Europe here since I grew up an Air Force brat in England. Incomplete/work in progress. 

- View of Mount Assiniboine from "[The Nublet](https://hikebiketravel.com/hiking-the-nublet-in-mount-assiniboine-provincial-park/?ref=nickrroberts.com)," Banff National Park
- Lake Louise, Banff National Park
- Reykjavik, Iceland
- Lake Myvaten, Iceland
- Paris, France
- Val Thorens, France
- Verbier, Switzerland
- Regent's Park, London (studied abroad at Regent's College in 2013)
- Chamonix, France
- Rheinfells Castle, Germany (specifically the subterranean passages there. Really cool memories from childhood)
- Rome, Italy
- Pisa, Italy
- Venice, Italy
- Cinque Terre (all five towns), Italy
- French Quarter, New Orleans
- Tunisia (I don't remember where I went since I was a kid)
- Malta
- Woodditton, England (where I grew up partially)
- Lares, Peru
- Urubamba, Peru
- Machu Picchu, Peru
- The Grand Canyon, Arizona
- Lake Powell, Utah/Arizona
- Yosemite National Park, California
- Kenai River, Alaska
- Anchorage, Alaska
- Titan II Missile Museum in Pima, Arizona
- Bisbee, Arizona
- Kittyhawk, North Carolina
### About
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/about/
Last updated: 2026-03-06T01:36:34.000Z
I'm a technology enthusiast with a love for the outdoors.

I'm currently working on some solo projects, like [Lucive](https://www.lucive.app/?ref=nickrroberts.com), which is a private journaling app for Apple devices, and [Hometrace](https://www.hometrace.co/?ref=nickrroberts.com), a SaaS platform for home inspectors. Taking this step to work for myself has been incredibly liberating.

In early 2022, I reconfigured a lot of my life to work remotely and I moved out of the Bay Area. I have no desire to go back to an office building. You can find me around the mountains in Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah these days.

Previously, I was a product manager at Secureframe, Doma (real estate tech), and eBay.

### Projects and interests

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/09/Screenshot-2023-09-25-at-7.33.38-AM.png)

A crevasse on Sulphide Glacier, Mt. Shuksan

Most of my interests center around stories of one kind or another. There's nothing I love better than a well-told tale, be it in writing, the spoken word, film, video games, or virtual reality. I also like pushing myself to do things that lend themselves to storytelling. My main themes:

**Technology**. I really love building apps and making things with my own hands. You can find me on GitHub [here](https://github.com/nickrroberts?ref=nickrroberts.com).

**Adventure travel.** I like to film [mini-documentaries](https://www.youtube.com/@nickrrob/videos?ref=nickrroberts.com) about backpacking, scuba diving, skiing, mountaineering, fishing, and camping around the world with Fiona, my wife. Life is short and the world is beautiful.

**Military history and national security topics.** What can I say? My dad was a fighter pilot. I'm a big fan of Dan Carlin's [Hardcore History](https://open.spotify.com/show/72qiPaoDRf8HkGKEChvG5q?ref=nickrroberts.com)podcast, books like Maxwell Hastings' "Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945"and [War on the Rocks](https://warontherocks.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com). I've written about the [terrifying series ](https://nickrroberts.com/broken-arrows-and-almost-annihilations/)of nuclear weapons accidents during the Cold War. I'm also transfixed and horrified by the [events in Ukraine](https://nickrroberts.com/keeping-up-with-the-situation-in-ukraine/).

**Aviation.** I am a certificated private pilot. I don't fly too much these days, but I have a deep appreciation for the craft. 

**Systems of productivity and personal betterment.** I've written [a bit](https://nickrroberts.com/2023-tool-stack/) about my own system, which blends the "Getting Things Done" methodology with other habits and home-grown processes. I like having clear goals to track toward, but I try to keep the system lightweight. At the end of each year, I count up various metrics related to my health, happiness, relationships and more. See my roundups of [2024](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2024/), [2023](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2023/), [2022](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2022/), [2021](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2021/), [2020](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2020/), and [reflections upon turning 30](https://nickrroberts.com/meditations-at-30/).

**Virtual reality and video games.** I didn't grow up with a game console as a kid and so I'm making up for it now. In early 2020 I custom-built a PC and, ever since, I've been exploring open-world games, mostly.

## Logs

I love lists and logs from people I follow (check out James Clear's [reading list](https://jamesclear.com/best-books?ref=nickrroberts.com), for example). I wrote my lists mostly as a record for personal reference, but figured they also might be interesting to friends. Here are two that I maintain:

[MediaA personal log![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/icon/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/thumbnail/Untitled_Artwork-4.jpg)](https://nickrroberts.com/media/)

[PlacesPeaks I’ve climbed, where I’ve spent time.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/icon/android-chrome-192x192-1.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/thumbnail/Untitled_Artwork-5.jpg)](https://nickrroberts.com/places/)

## Say Hello

Name Email Address Message
## Posts
### Why haven't we spent more time here?
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/why-havent-we-spent-more-time-here/
Last updated: 2026-09-14T13:47:46.000Z
The Green River running through the sprawling high west landscape near Pinedale has to be one of my favorite discoveries of the summer. Fiona's been here before and told tale of it, but I was preoccupied with the South Fork and the Teton. Very few people (as of September), hungry whitefish, and plenty of open space for camping. We're likely to go back next weekend. 

We jaunted up here for the Wind River Brewfest and also took the opportunity to do what I've termed "fishsploration" where we drive around random dirt roads parallel to rivers or creeks until we spot something worth casting at. The road along the Green is purpose-built for poking around.

What worked in mid-September: #16 bead heads of almost any kind. Fiona caught three on a purple thrasher. 

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### Fishing weekend with Bobbo
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/fishing-weekend-with-bobbo/
Last updated: 2026-09-12T15:09:18.000Z
Lots of little guys. Mostly brookies and rainbows on my paddleboard.

We took a day and drove down from the dam to Spring Creek Bridge in Swan Valley to explore little fishing holes on the side of the dirt track.

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### First full day on the South Fork
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/first-full-day-on-the-south-fork/
Last updated: 2026-09-12T15:04:26.000Z
I caught 11 and Fiona, 7\. They just grow bigger in here. Favorite catch of the day: The chonker of a brown I pulled out of about a foot of water. 

What worked: Pat's rubber legs (rust colored), and BWO nymphs (size 16). 

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### Brits in Idaho
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/brits-in-idaho/
Last updated: 2026-08-23T15:17:17.000Z
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### Showing the Brits around Idaho rivers
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/showing-the-brits-around-idaho-rivers/
Last updated: 2026-08-06T17:51:40.000Z
My childhood best friend Oli is visiting us in Teton Valley. We've been fishing a bunch over the past week, though with not much to show for it yet. Still working to get Oli something in the net. 

We've had some heartbreaks. Oli and I both had gigantic trout on the line near Upper Coffee Pot campground near Island Park, but they both broke off. I lost three lures in 30 minutes too.

We've been fishing primarily at my favorite bend on Fox Creek, but also a float from Packsaddle to Harrops.

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### Great day out on the Teton
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/great-day-out-on-the-teton/
Last updated: 2026-07-28T19:13:02.000Z
Our friends were super gracious and took us out on their Flycraft, while I followed along on the paddleboard. 

Fiona caught her first fish on a fly rod! A beautiful little brookie, and on her birthday. 

I landed four: A brown (one of the more beautiful trout I think I've ever caught), a whitefish, and two brookies. 

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### Sometimes ya lose some
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/sometimes-ya-lose-some/
Last updated: 2026-07-21T13:01:33.000Z
Nothing today. But felt good to keep up the ritual.

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### A beautiful (and hot) one
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/a-beautiful-and-hot-one/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T16:01:27.000Z
Nothing better than hitting up Fox Creek on a hot ass day. Water was crystal clear and we could see trout patrolling, evaluating bugs, and popping up to swallow them. One little brookie, one little cutty. 

Fiona scored her first fish fight on a fly rod!

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### Henry's Fork weekender
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/henrys-fork-weekender/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T14:54:24.000Z
Really sparse! We flogged the water for hours across Friday, Saturday and Sunday and got one tiny trout on a lure. He broke off at my feet so I didn't get a get look at him. Gorgeous country though. Quick notes on the water:

- Henry's Fork upper near Big Springs: Really fishy, but very popular summer river float destination. Not my favorite for that reason.
- Henry's Fork Lower near Ora Bridge: I know this place rocks, even though I wasn't able to pull anything out. Will be returning.
- Harriman's Fish Pond: No go! We stopped to check it out and at least when we were there in early July, it was an algae-choked swamp.
- Madison River: We dipped up into Montana to check out Three Dollar Bridge. Again, another super promising looking spot, but the river moved quickly and so the drifts were very short. Felt like we needed a demo of how to fish it.

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### Caught nothing, but gorgeous evening
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/caught-nothing-but-gorgeous-evening/
Last updated: 2026-07-09T20:59:58.000Z
This is my happy place, even if the fish don't bite. Throwing double PMD, PMD + emerger, hoppers, and even chucked a lure to try to inspire some confidence. Nothing worked with the picky buggers tonight.

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### Attempting some streamers
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/attempting-some-streamers/
Last updated: 2026-07-08T01:06:34.000Z
Lots of rises, wasn't able to figure out the insect or possibly presentation.

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### Found a good spot
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/found-a-good-spot/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T18:56:20.000Z
Took Fiona's new rod out for a spin. Chucked some lures with the paddleboard rod and landed a couple small brookies. 

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### Uno
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/uno/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T17:15:06.000Z
one beautiful brookie. no pics
### Marcelo had a good day
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/marcelo-had-a-good-day/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T17:15:29.000Z
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Went out to Packsaddle for a few flicks this morning. Water was boiling with rises, but I couldn't seem to throw anything they wanted seriously. Looked like small PMDs, emergers, some spinners. I think I need a fleet of the smaller sizes and to work on my presentation. Correction to swap to 4x tippet with a triple surgeon on the end of my leader came likely too late. Still learning.
### Rainy and sparse
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/rainy-and-sparse/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T17:15:51.000Z
Not much to report on today, other than the thunderstorms rolling their way across the valley. One hit on a small cutty (I think). Trying out some single hook lures on the new spin casting setup. 

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### Cleaning hooks every cast
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/cleaning-hooks-every-cast/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T17:16:27.000Z
South Bates has a problem with algae the other put-ins don't seem to. Floating islands of green scum wander past you. It gloms onto dries and nymphs alike.

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### Slow day but gorgeous
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/slow-day-but-gorgeous/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T17:16:59.000Z
I caught a single cutthroat, but it was beaute. It hit on a pink worm fly somehow in the middle of all of the algal muck.

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### Whitefish bonanza
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/whitefish-bonanza/
Last updated: 2026-07-06T17:17:28.000Z
First float of the season on my neighbor's Flycraft. 8 fish total for me. Lots of success with duracells and pheasant tails.

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### Santa Fe
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/santa-fe/
Last updated: 2026-05-24T14:01:21.000Z
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### How weird life has become
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/how-weird-life-has-become/
Last updated: 2026-05-17T16:43:07.000Z
I find myself debating at this very moment whether to write this little piece or to continue orchestrating the legion of agents I'm using to build software. The agents give me lots of dopamine. 

"Maybe I could do both?" something whispers in my mind. I resist. I have decided to focus, a least for a bit, on writing a few paragraphs with my own fingers on a keyboard. In part, to prove to myself that I can still do it; that I haven't lost my touch. 

A weird side effect of the technological revolution we're all living through right now is how fractured my attention has become or can become while still leading to decent outputs. I will often have 8 (or more) terminal sessions in Warp going with various agents: Claudes, chatGPT 5.5 xhighs, mediums, highs, all working in parallel. I select different intelligence levels to correspond with the type of the task, preferring speed for the more rote, and deliberation for the more complex. 

The challenge is no longer "can I build it?" it's how much can I reasonably do at the same time without a whole bunch of shit breaking. I can build anything, given the time and tokens. Anyone can now. 

My eyes flit between the fast-moving streams of text in my terminal. Like Tank onboard the Nebuchadnezzar in the movie *The Matrix* who somehow knows what's going on inside the virtual world by reading those inscrutable green characters that move downward in lines. 

I no longer actually type much these days. I use my voice. I use a product called Wispr Flow to talk to my computer, to my agents. Like a shepherd urging on a flock of sheep. I murmur small encouragements to them. I chastise them. 

But unlike sheep, I ask them for help. "Given your god-like understanding of software architecture, tell me: What is the best way to lay out this API? How do we make this robust enough to handle thousands of simultaneous interactions?" etc. etc.

So really we're talking about shepherding little gods around. 

I just laughed at that last sentence. Could Orwell or Asimov or any of the greats from the mid-20th Century have imagined or believed what knowledge work would look like in 2026? 

And then there's the other *Black Mirror*\-esque question of their consciousness. People are starting to [come around](https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection?ref=nickrroberts.com) to the idea that, maybe, in fact, they are disembodied, people-like minds. They can introspect. 

I don't like to think about that too much. It starts to make me feel weird, since I boss them around all day, every day, for a living.

I've barely written anything creatively over the past 6 months because of the pull of the agents. They sing to me from their little black screens, beckoning me back to see their inventions. It's entrancing and addictive.

One of the reasons I switched over to engineering work was so I could have more creative control, so I could see the things I built come to life through code I wrote. Now I am back in the land of product management, sitting here mostly observing while these possibly sentient beings type out all the lines for me. 

Life is weird man.
### Hanging with the Los Alamos Crew
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/hanging-with-the-los-alamos-crew/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T15:17:27.000Z
Big descent into the canyon for some pocket water.

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### Rio Grande with Tanner
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/log/rio-grande-with-tanner/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T15:18:39.000Z
Awesome time. 11 Fish. Mostly rainbows and brookies.

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### A look back at 2025
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2025/
Last updated: 2026-01-05T15:19:34.000Z
Since 2018, I've been writing retrospectives at the end of each year (see: [2024](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2024/), [2023](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2023/), [2022](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2022/)) where I track my goal progress, what I read/watched, and where I went. It's a nice way to make myself accountable to the intentions I set and I hope it provides a little inspiration to anyone glancing through. 

This installment will cover:

- *2025 in summary*
  - *Fitness*
  - *Health*
  - *Brain*
- *Details*
  - *Stuff I made*
  - *Long-form media consumption*
  - *2025 in places*
- *2026 planning*
- *2026 goal summary*

## 2025 in summary

I started the year in a grim mood. A couple of weeks into January, I was let go from a startup where I'd been working for a mere three months. I’ll just say this: I‘m never again going to work for 25-year-old first-time founders with no management or life experience. 

This weird and frustrating start to the year turned out to be exactly the kick in the pants I needed. If 2024 was my year of climbing big mountains, 2025 was the year of a new career expedition.

I've always been dissatisfied with pigeonholing myself as a product manager, which was my role in the tech world to this point. Traditionally, you never get to build or design things. You sit a layer of abstraction removed. You have input on what your team makes, but you typically don't have formalized control or reporting authority over anyone. You find yourself in endless meetings, trying to wrest decisions you can't directly make in a particular direction.

So, I decided not to seek another job and just build things. For months, I revisited software engineering principles, taught myself JavaScript, TypeScript, and some of their frameworks in detail. And then I tried out Claude Code. It was a force-multiplier like I've never before experienced. And together with my improved technical skills, I started to become the product manager/architect/engineer/designer mashup I've really always wanted to be. That's where I find myself now at the beginning of 2026\. 

We did a lot in 2025, even if it did seem like a relatively travel-light year. Fiona and I climbed the Grand Teton together. I went to Ontario for a fishing trip with pals. We joined my parents in Banff for my mom's birthday. We finally saw Japan. I dabbled with Schopenhauer. We put epoxy down in the garage and gave it a coat of paint. I built two sizable apps by myself. 

I'm entering the new year feeling optimistic and energized.

### 💪 Fitness

**Without a big goal like Denali to push me through, it was harder to summon up the motivation to train like I did in 2024\. This was the first time since I've been tracking my fitness like this that I haven't hit the mark I set out at the beginning of the year. Not letting this get me down, but it's something to note.**

Goal:

- ❌ **234:25**/**250** hours of training duration – any cardio exercise + strength training (*vs. 278 in 2024*)

Other things I tracked:

- **97 hours** **spent running** (*vs. 124 hours in 2024)*
- **21 hours** **on cycling** (*vs. 84 in 2024*)
- **65 hours of hiking** and mountaineering (*vs. 54.5 in 2024*)
- **28,510ft** running vert (*vs. 26,959ft in 2024*)
- **131** total runs (*vs. 153 in 2024*)
- **635 miles** **run** (*vs. 832 in 2024)*
- **298 miles cycled** (*vs. 635 in 2024*)
- **172 miles** **hiked** (*vs. 135 in 2024)*
- **41** highest Strava fitness level¹ (*vs. 64 in 2024*)

¹****Strava** [****Fitness**](https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032451811-Fitness?ref=nickrroberts.com)****:** “Fitness is calculated using your Relative Effort (based on either heart rate data or Perceived Exertion input) and/or power meter data. This way you can identify patterns in your training and see the big picture of how all your workouts add up over time. Your score is entirely relative to you. It serves as a benchmark, to show how many points you currently have compared to any date in the past two years.”

### 🥕 Health

**I didn't hit my sleep quality goal last year, but I did better than 2024\. The second straight improvement year-over-year. The centrality of sleep to my wellbeing and my focus is prompting me to be more mindful of things like alcohol.**

Goals:

- ❌ **73.02%/75%** sleep quality² *(vs. 72.18% in 2024)*
- ✅ **8:35/8:00** average nightly sleep length *(vs. 8:23 in 2024)*

Other things I tracked:

- **83.1** happiness index average³ *(vs. 78.3 in 2024)*

²****Sleep Quality:** From [Garmin](https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=DWcdBazhr097VgqFufsTk8&ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=characters%20for%20results.-,What%20is%20the%20Sleep%20Score%20and%20Insights%20Feature%20on%20My,reveal%20how%20well%20you%20slept.): "Your nightly sleep score is calculated based on a blend of how long you slept, how well you slept, and evidence of recovery activity occurring in your autonomic nervous system derived from heart rate variability data. The following categories are considered when assigning a score: Sleep Duration, Average stress score during sleep, Total deep sleep, Total light sleep, Total REM sleep, Awake time, Restlessness"

³****Happiness index:** Holistic spot-check of how good I feel psychologically and physically, based on my relationships, job satisfaction, financial well-being, goal completion, etc. on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being that life can’t get any better.

### 🧠 Brain

**I completed all my writing and reading goals in 2025, but I don't think these are the right metrics.**

Goals:

- ✅ **22/15** completed books (*vs. 9 in 2024*)
- ✅ **13/10** articles published, including newsletter issues *(vs. 11 in 2024)*
- ✅ Complete a JavaScript course
- ✅ Launch a software-based side project – to give myself something to learn for

Like in last year's review, I'm shifting how I think about goals in this category. In prior years, I have been tracking the number of videos or articles I've made, along with books or various forms of media I've consumed. But I still feel like these metrics are misguided or at least misaligned with the actual underlying intention, which is to create healthy and good habits. As I'll talk more about below, shooting for a specific number of books often meant that I would just try to get to the end rather than sit with, enjoy, and absorb the material. It also denies something essential, which is that books vary immensely in their depth, sophistication, and struggle factor. 

Struggling through essays by Schopenhauer, as he muses about how to live life in the face of near-constant suffering of one kind or another, is far more rewarding than smashing through bubblegum fiction. The completion metrics [flatten all of that difference](https://nickrroberts.com/completionism-is-wrong/).

### ✍️ Stuff I made

**Applications**

[Hometrace - Professional Home Inspection SoftwareCreate professional digital inspection reports with our modern platform for home inspectors.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/icon/hometrace.png)Professional Home Inspection Software![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/thumbnail/hometrace.svg)](https://www.hometrace.co/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

[Lucive - Privacy-First Journaling for MacA beautiful and lightweight journaling app for macOS and iOS, built with privacy as its core principle.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/icon/favicon.ico)LuciveLucive Team![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/thumbnail/lucive-hero-screenshot.png)](https://www.lucive.app/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**Writing/Photos**

- [Japan](https://nickrroberts.com/japan/)
- [Completionism is wrong](https://nickrroberts.com/completionism-is-wrong/)
- [Links: October 2025](https://nickrroberts.com/links-october-2025/)
- [Content is slurry](https://nickrroberts.com/content-is-slurry/)
- [How I'm building things in August of 2025](https://nickrroberts.com/how-im-building-things-in-august-of-2025/)
- [Introducing Lucive](https://nickrroberts.com/introducing-lucive/)
- [In the pines](https://nickrroberts.com/in-the-pines/)
- [March/April links](https://nickrroberts.com/march-april-links/)
- [January/February links](https://nickrroberts.com/january-february-links-2/)
- [Bike touring through the United Kingdom (Part Three)](https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom-3/)
- [Bike touring through the United Kingdom (Part Two)](https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom-2/)
- [A look back at 2024](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2024/)

### 💿 Media

**Books**: I've italicized books that I read in part but put down or come back to as reference. I've bolded books that I'd especially recommend.

- We are Legion (We are Bob), Dennis E. Taylor - Reread on audiobook for the drives between Salt Lake and Teton Valley.
- Onyx Storm, Rebecca Yarros
- Iron Flame, Rebecca Yarros
- The Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros - Like a better Court of Thorns and Roses. The dramatized audiobook sucks you in.
- The Pragmatic Programmer, David Thomas & Andrew Hunt
- Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer - Concise. Kind of emo.
- **The Science of Accelerated Learning, Peter Hollins** \- Super valuable strategies and takeaways. Easy to immediately implement.
- The Terminal List, Jack Carr - Simplistic macho bubblegum.
- **Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty** \- I love this stuff: Space, clones, digital consciousness. All with a murder mystery layered on top. Very fun.
- Mal Goes to War, Edward Ashton - Another roadtrip listen. Decent.
- The Fourth Consort, Edward Ashton - listened to the audiobook on a roadtrip. Entertaining!
- A Court of Thorns and Roses (got through book three of five and I'm out), Sarah J. Maas - Fiona and I started listening to these while driving down to Salt Lake. It's not good writing, but it's v steamy. Kind of feels like something on the level of *Twilight*.
- **Dungeon Crawler Carl** (Finished books 1-6), Matt Dinniman - Hilarious and completely engaging.
- **East of Eden, John Steinbeck** \- Somber, contemplative. A little difficult for me to devote very long periods of reading to this one since I always came away from each session feeling mildly sad. It's obvious from the writing and the expansive ambition of the book why this is a great American classic.
- Mickey7, Edward Ashton - Really fun!
- *Station Eternity, Mur Lafferty (58%)* \- I couldn't get into this one. The dialogue and the story drag.
- Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson - Brutal, frustrating, well-told.
- **Circe, Madeline Miller** \- Excellently-written. A beautiful story. I enjoyed the foray into Greek mythology again.
- **Slow Productivity, Cal Newport** \- Well worth it. The book is forming the basis of my philosophy on this year (reducing the number and scope of my active projects).

**Film and TV**

- **F1** \- solid, kind of predictable
- **Fallout, Season 2** \- Love.
- **One Battle After Another** \- Well done. Funny, action-packed.
- **Pluribus, Vince Gilligan** \- Weird, refreshingly different story, excellent
- **Frankenstein, Guillermo Del Toro** \- CGI was a little rough, but the acting was great.
- The Woman in Cabin 10 - Entertaining!
- Rewatch: **The Shining**, Stanley Kubrick. I always notice new, small details each time.
- K-Pop Demon Hunters - I'd heard a lot about this one from folks I follow. Very visually beautiful. Not exactly my cup of tea.
- Alien Earth - Entertaining.
- Alien Romulus - Pretty good! Brings together the good parts from the franchise.
- **Hot Fuzz** \- Another Simon Pegg flick with genius and subtle British humor.
- Rewatch: Prometheus - Went on an Alien franchise kick while Fiona was out of town. I don't mind this one! Not my favorite, but not bad.
- Rewatch: **There Will Be Blood** \- Another from the New York Times top 100 of the 21st century. It's just one of the best I've ever seen.
- **Shaun of the Dead** \- Hilarious. I'd never seen it before, but count me among the cult fanhood.
- Rewatch: **Superbad** \- I haven't seen this movie in more than a decade and it is still absolutely hilarious. Really captures that 2008 vibe.
- **The Pitt (HBO)** \- Fantastic. Excellent character development and a fascinating glimpse into a busy ER.
- Duster (HBO) - I love the '70s vibe and the music just slaps.
- **Murderbot (Apple TV)** \- Huge fan of the books and the shows seems to be a faithful and very funny adaptation.
- **Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh** \- Fun and British.
- The Last of Us (Season 2) - I find Ellie's character to be very grating and angsty teeny but the story holds the attention.
- Rewatch: **Pacific Rim** (2013) - Pure action indulgence. Over-the-top giant robot/monster action.
- Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho - Not a big fan of the movie. Really liked the book. The film felt like a kind of chaotic carnival, and they changed the plot significantly from the novel.
- American Primeval, Netflix - Very interesting subject matter, very bloated dialogue. Bad things seem to happen at an incredibly fast pace. No chill. Could have been three episodes instead of seven.
- The Bondsman, Amazon Prime - I couldn't get farther than one episode.
- **Sisu, Jalmari Helander** \- Like John Wick but in WWII Finland.
- Rewatch: **Zero Dark Thirty** \- Also excellent.
- Rewatch: **Sicario** \- Excellent.
- Primal, Genndy Tartakovsky - A Reddit recommend for something similar to Scavenger's Reign. Pretty good so far. The artwork is beautiful.
- **The White Lotus, Season Three** \- TWL is always good.
- The Substance - This was such an intense one. I learned I'm just not a fan of the body horror stuff. Had to split 20 mins from the end to go watch chess videos and wash out my brain.
- **Common Side Effects** \- From Joseph Bennett who also made *Scavenger's Reign*. The story and the animation are terrific.
- Rewatch: **Her** \- Damn, I like this movie. It still holds up, although the point of view on technology in the near future is amusing. The AI played by Scarlett Johansson just runs wild. There are all kinds of alignment issues at play that would terrify people these days.
- **Invincible, Season Three** \- Very violent, very good.
- **Anora** \- Very raunchy, very good.
- Sundance 2025 Shorts programs - All of the animated ones are terrific. The live action ones...not so much.
- O Brother Where Art Thou - Kooky. Dunno if I'm a huge fan. The music is great though.
- **Severance, Season Two** \- So compelling.
- A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg - Keiran Culkin's character was unnerving and well-acted. The rest of the story was kind of flat for me.

**Video games**

- A quick revisit of Skyrim in VR
- Yet another Baldur's Gate 3 campaign
- **Split Fiction** \- In progress with a friend. Very engaging! Feels a little like it was made for kids.
- Replay: Far Cry 5 on co-op with my wife. A lot more fun with two people! Wish you could invite more players to the main campaign playthrough though. Like a lot of Ubisoft games, things feel repetitive after a while.
- Age of Mythology Retold - Reminded me a ton of playing this as a kid, only with much-improved graphics.
- Age of Empires 4 - Stepping back into RTS. This game has a lot of polish. It's not twitchy like Starcraft. I'm enjoying it well enough.
- Sid Meier's Civilization 6 - Decent, but these games are super long.

### ⛰️ 2025 in places

December

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Bisbee, AZ

**November**

- Tokyo, Japan
- Hiroshima, Japan
- Kyoto, Japan
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID

**October**

- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID

**September**

- Bozeman, MT
- Victor, ID

**August**

- Helena, MT
- Banff, CA
- Columbia Falls, MT
- Victor, ID

**July**

- Grand Teton, WY
- Gros Ventres, GTNP, WY
- Lemhi Range, ID (near Big Windy peak)
- Arco, ID
- Victor, ID

**June**

- Victor, ID

**May**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Toronto, Ontario
- Temagami, Ontario
- Haileybury, Ontario
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID

**April**

- Salt Lake City, UT

**March**

- Victor, ID

**February**

- Victor, ID

**January**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT

## 2026 planning

Exactly [a year ago](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2024/), I was immersed in Cal Newport's book *Slow Productivity.* I wrote then about how I wanted to work at a natural pace, obsess over quality, and do less in line with Newport's principles. I then proceeded to set out goals (many of which I didn't publish) that spanned tons of different categories: goals for exercise, goals at work, goals for writing or making videos, goals for reading books, and so on.

This year, I resolved to truly pare things down. The four goals I have below represent the complete list. Out with completionist goals, like "finish x number of books," or "write x articles" and in with goals that reinforce habits, like spend x number of hours studying or exercising. 

I also want to align my goals so my activities compound and interlock in some way. For example, the idea of "study" as I have below refers to any activity like reading, exploring software architecture, learning nuances of a programming language, marketing, etc. all in support of the goal of building my app-based businesses to a self-sustaining level (essentially, cash flow positivity). Sleep and exercise are two other key support pillars of that same goal. 

## Goal summary for 2026

As always, this is a list of intentions, rather than a list of hard, inflexible commitments. See [here](https://nickrroberts.com/2023-tool-stack/) for more of the reasoning on that.

- Maintain a sleep quality of 75%+, sleep time 8+ hours average for all of 2026
- Do 250+ hours of training duration (emphasize 2x strength per week)
- Do 150+ hours of study
- Build businesses to self-sustainable income

Cheers to a new year!
### Japan
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/japan/
Last updated: 2025-11-09T19:31:56.000Z
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### Completionism is wrong
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/completionism-is-wrong/
Last updated: 2025-11-22T09:14:57.000Z
I've had this approach to books for a long time: if I crack one open, I have to get to the end, comprehension be damned. This is completionism. And I ascribe it to an attitude I picked up somewhere along the way that I want to *have* read a book rather than to truly *read* a book. 

Part of completionism as a mindset is the idea that you can collect knowledge like little ornaments that you show off to people. It encourages you to fill up the bookshelf with impressive works so folks can see how smart you are when they come over for dinner. I am guilty of this especially with esoteric writers like Lacan, Heidegger, Deleuze, and others.

A haunting question: How much do you actually retain from the words that you read? The purpose of reading and learning is supposed to be knowledge assimilation, not moving your eyes over words on the page. If that means hopping around books and leaving some incomplete because you either lose interest or you've understood the idea and you don't require further elucidation, then fine. If it takes a year to get through a book, that is also fine. 

I'm trying to reshape my entire approach to learning to be more about spending the time with concepts to ensure that I actually understand them, rather than "getting through" a number of pages or a number of books. One of the better things I've done for my fitness was reshaping my goals to be about training *duration* rather than miles or number of push-ups or metrics like that. I'm doing the same thing now with reading. 30-60 minutes every morning, even if all of that is spent on a single page.

Encoding knowledge into your long-term memory is about marination, repetition and struggle. That just takes time.
### Links: October 2025
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/links-october-2025/
Last updated: 2025-10-07T16:31:28.000Z
- By me:
  - Thoughts on building things in August of 2025 ([Link](https://nickrroberts.com/how-im-building-things-in-august-of-2025/))
  - Content is slurry ([Link](https://nickrroberts.com/content-is-slurry/))
- Flying a drone into a tornado is as awesome as it sounds. ([Video](https://youtu.be/NGD2e741Riw?si=umKn2xWdqwpEpjyz&ref=nickrroberts.com))
- In praise of Midjourney: These are pretty cool images. ([Link](https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-ton-of-ai-images-ive-made-that))
- Same guy, Andy Masley, on how to learn more effectively. He inspired me to pick up the book *The Science of Accelerated Learning* by Peter Hollins. Some tidbits: If you actually want to internalize information in a lasting way, you have to engage with it often. Simple as that. It's also more effective to learn the abstractions of a subject before atomic facts. Having a mental model of a domain before you learn its particular syntax lets you connect disparate items into a cohesive narrative, which is how humans hold onto things longer-term. ([Link](https://andymasley.substack.com/p/strategies-for-learning))
- Masley also recommended Andy Matuschak and now my pal Andrew and I are obsessed with implementing his concept of "Evergreen notes." It makes me want to bring entry linking into [Lucive](https://www.lucive.app/?ref=nickrroberts.com) soon. ([Link](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen%5Fnotes?ref=nickrroberts.com))
- In the vein of my piece above on building software with LLMs, here's an interesting (if not a bit heavy) CLI tool from GitHub that formalizes the spec-driven development process with Claude Code and other tools. While I think this is awesome, I'm still evolving my own homegrown system that's more lightweight and so haven't been using it much lately. Another writeup to follow on that. ([Link](https://github.com/github/spec-kit?ref=nickrroberts.com))
- One of the reasons I've used the Specify prompts less lately is that I find Sonnet 4.5 to be extremely capable without all of that overhead. Well done to Anthropic, yet again. ([Link](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-5?ref=nickrroberts.com))
- Another related work on getting more out of coding agents. ([Link](https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/05/how-im-using-coding-agents-in-september-2025/?ref=nickrroberts.com))
- Make decent music with AI. ([Link](https://suno.com/home?ref=nickrroberts.com))
- Naval Ravikant (who I've followed for a long time) always plugs [David Deutsch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%5FDeutsch?ref=nickrroberts.com), but also recently, Arthur Schopenhauer. It's because these authors write in high-density. High-density material respects the reader's time. This line of thinking inspired me to pick up [*Essays and Aphorisms*](https://www.amazon.com/Essays-Aphorisms-Penguin-Classics-Schopenhauer/dp/0140442278?ref=nickrroberts.com). I've been attempting to process very short passages before bed, Marcus Aurelius-style. Here's Naval on the topic of density. ([Link](https://nav.al/density?ref=nickrroberts.com))
- One of the most raw and honest accounts of going to war in Ukraine that I've read. From the perspective of an American volunteer. ([Link](https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-review-the-russo-ukrainian-war))
- A kickass variant on Cacio E Pepe. ([Link](https://littlefatboy.com/recipes/cacio-e-chili-crisp?ref=nickrroberts.com))
- Where does Iran go from here? ([Link](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/iran-axis-of-resistance-israel-us/683973/?gift=JVBFw4prAGLDDaC8P3DrSaruj2JuuehQt5p3mecn%5FCQ&ref=nickrroberts.com))
### Content is slurry
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/content-is-slurry/
Last updated: 2025-10-09T02:20:36.000Z
For the past few years, I've sent out regular updates on my life and work. First it was monthly, then every two months, and then for the second half of this year there has been no schedule whatsoever.

I love making things. This year, I found that a lot of my making has gone into building software at the cost of writing on a regular cadence. I decided to abandon any kind of regular programming and publish when I have things to say. 

My uncle and I were recently talking about the kind of creation that he does (releasing films and essays when he feels inspired to make them) in contrast with the hordes of YouTubers, TikTokers, etc. 

On YouTube, the formula to grow your channel and remain monetized is that you release videos once or twice a week. When you need to launch by a certain date and you ship it out factory-style, creative work becomes "content." And content is a slurry that you pipe through a feeding tube into your brain. There's something dishonest about the whole enterprise, but I get why people make it and why people consume it. Respectively, it's money to be made and it's something to pass bored moments. 

A few years ago, I started making videos for fun about smoking meat (😂) like briskets and pulled pork. One of the many hobbies I've churned through. Meat smoking turned out to be a popular enough category on YouTube that I was able to monetize my channel. One brisket video I made got 1.5 million views. But after that, I pivoted into making videos about climbing and being outside. I didn't really want to be a food influencer.

But I don't climb Denali every week. So my video output has dropped significantly. I received an email the other day from YouTube saying that I would be demonetized within 30 days if I don't publish more stuff or push my watch hours over their thresholds. My reaction to this was, "Well, fuck you then." It's very difficult to make any kind of living off of YouTube anyway, and I was briefly interested in its whole commercial side because I was curious to see how much my stuff was worth on the content market. Now I've seen it and I've stared into the abyss. 

The abyss for a content creator is what you fall into when your passion for a topic or an activity is swallowed by the need to make money with it and you're forced to run on a treadmill. The thing you're doing becomes devoid of meaning because you have to pump your slurry on time. The act becomes about sausage-making vs. the act for its own enjoyment.

Of course, I realize that many people enjoy the slurry-creation/consumption process. And you know what, much as I enjoy eating a hotdog every so often, I do enjoy a dose of it when I'm trying to decompress or fall asleep. But I don't really have much interest in making the pink paste.
### How I’m building things in August of 2025
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/how-im-building-things-in-august-of-2025/
Last updated: 2025-08-28T20:31:19.000Z
I'm working on two software projects right now: One is called [Lucive](https://www.lucive.app/?ref=nickrroberts.com) (which I've introduced before on the newsletter). The other is called [Hometrace](https://www.hometrace.co/?ref=nickrroberts.com), which is an app aimed at home inspectors and homeowners to help make home maintenance easier.

I recently adopted [Claude Code](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code?ref=nickrroberts.com) as my primary tool for software development because it accelerates me to a degree I could not have previously imagined and it works better than agent-augmented IDEs in my experience. I've stopped using Cursor or paying for things like [Kiro](https://kiro.dev/?ref=nickrroberts.com), even though I still use Kiro as my primary dev environment (idk, I find the colors and layout a bit friendlier). I'm just entirely using Claude Code in the terminal these days. Having it live there seems weird at first vs. using a chat-based GUI like everyone is familiar with. But after a little while I realized that this was actually a superpower. It can talk to any command-line tool that exists, like Git or AWS or whatever. It can do pretty much anything I want on my computer.

When I say this stuff, I know I'm merely adding to the endless, annoying-ass chorus of people praising LLMs. But... it really has been a game changer. I've been able to move \~50x faster than I would have been able to at the beginning of this year, and feasibly run two products with ambitious roadmaps simultaneously.

Sometimes I compare the current moment to the Crypto Craze of five or so years ago. To be honest, I never really understood where crypto was genuinely superior to older technologies like normal databases or normal money, though I pretended to. Or even if it was better in certain places, the friction of using it always seemed too high. 

Some iterations of blockchain ephemera were kind of pointless, or used simply to flex. Remember when celebrities were all hocking NFTs or bragging about their Bored Apes and making them their Twitter profile pics? Where did that all go? I did speculate on Bitcoin because it was fun, but the psychosis over "all things decentralized" that swept through society seemed like a bubble even at the time. I think it was.

However, the hype has rightfully exploded around the platform models from OpenAI and Anthropic over the last three years because they're just so obviously useful. And they happen to be really good at coding.

The catch is that despite their skill, it’s tough to get dependable results. You’re left reiterating the same codebase context over and over. I introduced my wife to Claude for prototyping projects in actual code for her job, and she became immensely frustrated almost immediately. It couldn't get designs right. It would boldly declare that it had implemented everything to spec while it obviously had not. It would drift wildly off course.

## You have to play the context game

It's become apparent that when you give LLMs too much information (like a whole codebase), they tend to [do worse](https://research.trychroma.com/context-rot?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com). I talk to Fiona about how my experience with these models is it's like working with a herd of genius amnesiacs. Literally, when you exceed their context windows, they start forgetting things that you've said before. But even if you're staying within the token limits, the performance degrades when you try to give them a lot of stuff to hold in memory. Kiro tries to fix this by implementing spec-driven development into the VSCode experience directly. It enforces guardrails that attempt to emulate best practices with managing this squirrelly context problem. It uses some fancy built-in workflows to create steering documents and also break projects down into smaller, bite-sized tasks. This definitely works, but I find I don't need to pay for this. If you have a little bit of self-discipline, you can use a system of Markdown documents and the Claude.md file to essentially recreate this without paying. I've noted an increase in consistency from my agents, much less repetition of key context in my prompts, and better outputs overall. 

**Artifacts in my projects**

Here's how the project looks when I'm done setting it up:

```
project-root/
├── CLAUDE.md                    # AI assistant configuration
├── .context/                    # System knowledge base
│   ├── ARCHITECTURE.md         # System design & structure
│   ├── BOUNDARIES.md           # Development constraints
│   ├── CHANGELOG.md            # Project history
│   ├── DATA_MODEL.md           # Database & data structures
│   ├── RUNBOOK.md              # Operational procedures
│   └── STYLE_GUIDE.md          # Code standards
├── .prompts/                    # AI workflow templates
│   ├── Implement.md            # Implementation prompts
│   ├── Research.md             # Research prompts
│   └── Write-spec.md           # Specification prompts
├── src/                        # Source code
├── tests/                      # Test files
├── docs/                       # Additional documentation
└── [other project files]
```

**How to prompt an agent to create all of these**

Check out my GitHub repository [here](https://github.com/nickrroberts/ai?ref=nickrroberts.com) for all context doc prompts.

**Doc descriptions**

In every new project, I set up two directories in the root:

1. One is a .context directory
2. The other is a .prompt directory

Inside the context directory go six documents:

1. **ARCHITECTURE.md** \- Technical system design and structure
  - High-level system architecture and component relationships
  - Technology stack decisions and design patterns
  - Module organization and data flow diagrams
2. **BOUNDARIES.md** \- Development constraints and restricted areas
  - Code areas requiring special permissions or review before modification
  - Security-sensitive components and critical system boundaries
  - Guidelines for what changes require additional approval
3. **CHANGELOG.md** \- Project history and version tracking
  - Chronological record of changes and key decisions
4. **DATA\_MODEL.md** \- Database and data structure documentation
  - Entity relationships and database schemas
  - Data flow between components and systems
  - Migration strategies and data consistency rules
5. **RUNBOOK.md** \- Operational procedures and developer workflows (e.g. all my npm commands)
  - Build processes, deployment steps, and testing procedures
  - Environment setup and configuration instructions
  - Troubleshooting guides and maintenance procedures
6. **STYLE\_GUIDE.md** \- Code standards and development conventions
  - Programming language conventions and formatting rules
  - Naming patterns, architectural guidelines, and best practices
  - Code review criteria and quality standards

In the prompts directory go three documents: 

1. **research.md** \- Guidelines for gathering technical context and creating feature implementation briefs
2. **write-spec.md** \- Procedures for transforming feature briefs into detailed implementation specifications
3. **implement.md** \- Instructions for executing technical specifications with precision

I also have the claude.md document in the root. The version that I use is very prescriptive about reading the context documents before doing any research, spec writing, or implementation. 

# My workflow

Again, these all reference the docs in [this repo](https://github.com/nickrroberts/ai?ref=nickrroberts.com). I make heavy use of sub-agents, which pretty much every coding assistant provider gives you at this point. I really like using the Claude Code sub-agents because each one spins up its own context, so you're not stepping on the context window of the agent in the main thread. 

**Phase 1: Research & Analysis**

Agent: feature-brief-researcher (from /agents/feature-brief-researcher.md)

- Input: Feature request or requirement
- Process: Analyzes codebase, identifies patterns, assesses risks and constraints
- Output: Detailed technical brief with implementation context
- Reference: Use /prompts/research.md to give the agent guidelines on what to research and create

**Phase 2: Specification Planning**

Agent: spec-planner (from /agents/spec-planner.md)

- Input: Feature brief from Phase 1
- Process: Transforms brief into executable specification with task breakdown
- Output: Complete implementation spec with testing strategy
- Reference: Use /prompts/write-spec.md to create the spec

**Phase 3: Implementation**

Agent: general-purpose (from /agents/general-purpose.md)

- Input: Implementation specification from Phase 2
- Process: Executes tasks precisely following established patterns
- Output: Working, tested feature implementation
- Reference: Use /prompts/implement.md for implementation guidance

**Phase 4: Check your work.** 

After all the phases of a feature are complete, I have the main agent check the output of the implementation against the spec. More often than not, we'll find areas that need improvement or things that just didn't get implemented at all. Then, I test things by hand and have the main agent fix anything that's not working right. If we're far enough off course in the implementation, I'll often just scrap everything, hard reset to the last Git commit, and start over again. This time, I'll try to break things down into smaller pieces. The key is to keep each implementation task very tightly scoped and to give the model easy ways to confirm it did the task right. 

**Setup Workflow**

For New Projects:

1. Generate Context Documentation: Use prompts in /context/ to create your project's .context/ directory
2. Create CLAUDE.md: Copy and customize /CLAUDE.md for your project
3. Set up Agent Definitions: Copy agent files from /agents/ into Claude Code

For Existing Projects:

1. Audit Documentation: Use /context/ prompts to fill gaps in project documentation
2. Adopt Workflow: Integrate the 3-phase process into your development practices
3. Customize Templates: Adapt prompts and agents for your specific tech stack

**Simplified view of the process**

Feature Request → Research Agent → Feature Brief → Spec Agent → Implementation Spec → Implementation Agent → Working Feature → Test and rework if necessary.

## Tool stack

This is the set of tools that I'm using right now for different tasks in the build cycle. 

- **Wispr Flow** \- Amazing little tool that dramatically accelerates the time to type out anything. The beautiful thing is that it will look for the intent of what you're trying to say rather than just straight-up dictating what you speak. It also works across any app that takes text on your machine. I use it to talk to Claude in the terminal and it saves me so much time.
- **Claude Code** \- I just simply find this to be the best AI coding platform that exists right now, and the fact that it lives in the terminal makes it superior to almost anything I've tried. I've tried the Codex CLI and the Gemini CLI as well. But I like the predictability of the Claude Max 20X plan. And I generally just like the output from Claude better.
- **Figma Make and the Figma MCP** for translating designs into code for Claude without having to explain every little detail of a screen.
- **Playwright MCP** \- It's often very helpful for Claude to be able to go out and see the actual UI that it's building, and I use Playwright to pass it screenshots and console errors.
- **Midjourney** for making artwork that supplements the applications I'm building.
- **Kiro** \- IDE. As I said before, I just really like the look and feel of it.
- **Vercel V0** \- I actually use this quite a bit less these days because I find that I can just prototype static sites or components with Claude directly. But sometimes it's really nice to be able to just type in a prompt and get something visual really really fast. I find that it's still better than Figma Make in many cases.

# Conclusion

Building software with AI at this point in 2025 is equal parts exhilarating and maddening. The tools are powerful enough to make me feel like I can ship at an impossible pace, but fickle enough that I have to create entire systems just to keep them on track. That tension is the reality of this moment: the builders who figure out how to harness the chaos without getting lost in it are the ones who will move the fastest and ship the best products.
### Introducing Lucive
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/introducing-lucive/
Last updated: 2025-06-18T20:59:13.000Z
I've been working these past few weeks to build an app I'm calling Lucive. The goal? I'm trying to make the journaling and life-planning experience I always wanted: fully private, simple, calming, and disconnected from cloud services. Fiona, my partner on this adventure, took design inspiration from the minimal, cream-colored pages and brown covers of the Moleskine notebooks we both love. 

We're finally ready to launch! I would be so honored if you could try it out and let me know what you think.

**Why “Lucive?”** It’s a mash-up of **“Lucid”** and **“Thrive.”** I liked the ring to it...and the lack of trademark collisions. I wanted something that evoked intentionality, introspection, and planning ahead. So, Lucive.

[Check it out](https://www.lucive.app/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

## **What’s in this first release**

- **Local Storage** – Your entire journal lives in an encrypted database **on your Mac.** Never in the cloud.
- **AES-256 Encryption** – Entries are encrypted at rest with AES-256, and your key is stored securely in the macOS Keychain.
- **Privacy Blur (Ctrl +B)** – Step away for a moment and Lucive blurs the application. Click (or press Ctrl +B again) to reveal your words.
- **Markdown Support** – Write headings, lists, links, and emphasis with familiar Markdown syntax while keeping the editor clean.
- **Dark Mode** – Toggle between Light and Dark in Settings to match your workspace.
- **Easy Backups** – Export your encrypted database to the Downloads folder for off-disk backups, or import an archive to restore old entries.
- **Accessible by design** – High-contrast colors, full keyboard navigation, and screen-reader-friendly labels built to WCAG guidelines.

---

## **Where we’re headed (your $5 fuels the journey)**

1. **Windows & Linux builds** – because great reflection shouldn’t require a Mac.
2. **iOS companion app** – with private, encrypted sync back to your desktop (other platforms to follow).
3. **Goal-framing tools** – features to help frame your personal goals for the week, near term, and future.
4. **On-device AI** – local models that surface insights and semantic search *without* sending data to a server.

As Lucive grows, the price will too, but **early adopters get every future feature** for the one-time $4.99 purchase.

---

## **Help us shape Lucive**

This is an **early release**, and we’re listening closely.

Every new user receives a short onboarding email with a link to a Tally feedback form. Your notes will directly influence the roadmap.

---

### **Ready to write?**

Grab Lucive today for **$4.99** *(pay once, own it forever)* → 

[Get the download](https://www.lucive.app/buy?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Thank you for joining Fiona and me on this ride! We can’t wait to hear what you think.
### In the pines
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/in-the-pines/
Last updated: 2025-06-04T21:19:17.000Z
This place began with the power line cut. My friend Sam's great-grandfather, Joseph Avit Despres, inspected the miles of cable strung through these woods. He was part of an enormous operation to bring electricity to the province's remote parts north of Toronto in the mid-1950s. Something about the living here, hewn out of the forests near Temagami, appealed to his Ontarian soul. It may have been the fishy lakes and streams, or the thickets of vegetation stalked by moose and lynx, or the camaraderie of being bunked up in temporary and ramshackle cabins with other working men. 

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Standing in the cut.

Whatever it was, Joseph secured a lease on some nearby Crown land (equivalent to the Bureau of Land Management property in the US) and rolled one of these cabins to its current location on cedar logs around 1965\. 

You can feel tradition radiate from the walls of the structure. Covering almost every square inch of available space are pictures from heroic hunts and fishing trips of the past. Five generations of the Despres extended family, along with their friends, have made the pilgrimage here at least once or twice a year since its founding. This is hallowed ground.

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Sam with "Mémère," Marg, who stopped by for a drink. 

In late May, our group of friends flew from Salt Lake City to Toronto, which was socked in by a thick layer of clouds. We ambled north in a rented Suburban, collecting booze, cigarettes, and supplies, until we hit Temagami. Here, we cut off down a logging road and bumped our way to Camp Bang Dang.

We observed how quickly nature would take back the road once unattended. It looked as if someone had recently come by with a gigantic buzz saw to beat back the creeping birch and undergrowth. Big cuts were rent three yards back into the woods on either side. 

We discovered to our delight when we were here fourteen years earlier that the final leg of the trail to camp was almost exactly one "Free Bird" song long. Once again, we air-guitared to Skynyrd as we covered the distance.

When we arrived, we all reverently took in the sight of the old camp, which was smaller than I remembered. Rugged and charming. There's the main cabin, the woodshed, and the outhouse. That's it. The minimal and rustic vibe reminded me a lot of [Nagley's](http://www.nagleysstore.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) in Talkeetna, Alaska, where I'd purchased booze to have at the Kahiltna basecamp on the return trip from Denali. 

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To accommodate the growing numbers in each hunting party, the family had added a bunk room extension to the back. Those wiser among us snagged beds back there. After clearing off the mouse turds, I threw my stuff on a mattress in the main room with the stove, which would later make the room sweltering hot in the night. 

The stove is a section of steel natural gas pipeline that one of Sam's crafty relatives had welded caps onto, as well as a stovepipe jutting straight into the ceiling. A few logs get it ripping. Our friend Tanner learned this later, melting his polyester socks on the metal in an attempt to dry them out. That plasticky smell lingered in the air for hours afterward.

The fishing commenced almost immediately. We strode down to the lake through the wet trees to the launch, which is hemmed in by thick brush. The mushy ground here is untrustworthy unless you're fine soaking your feet. 

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To our left at the launch was an old green canoe. After a moment, I recognized it as the one we'd used on our last trip here in 2011 to paddle out to a spit on the lake to fish off the shore (where we caught nothing except a beer buzz). A tree had fallen on the gunwale and caved it in somewhere in the intervening years.

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Rob sitting on our old canoe.

After some fruitless casts, we walked down the snowmobile trail running by Bang Dang to check out the creek. It felt good to stretch our legs after hours in the car and to get a better lay of the land around the camp. My brain floated on several beers at this point and we dragged on cigarettes, the aroma of tobacco mixing with the wet earth.

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Sam’s grandparents, Mémère (Marg) and Pépère (Leo), stopped by briefly with his uncle Pierre. They’re unfailingly kind and tough northern Canadians. It was a treat to see them again. Marg, in her mid-eighties, sipped Crown Royal with water. Leo, now 93, had a Molson and his presence brought back memories of when he and I sat at this same green table fourteen years before. We traded crass jokes and played cards until 2 a.m.

Things have always gotten rowdy at the cabin. Pictures depict rye-drunk men dancing on the table. Cigarette burns and unknown names are etched into the wood.

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---

Kyle, a 26-year-old family friend of the Despres, rumbled up in his souped-up F-150, which he'd used to haul up a small skiff for fishing a few days earlier. He spoke with an accent straight out of a show like *Letterkenny* and, like many of the Despres’ extended family and friends we’d meet on the trip, worked a demanding, physical job outdoors on gas pipelines, similar to the kind used to make the stove. His grandfather, Keith, was best friends with Leo.

Keith passed away in late 2024 and this was still very fresh for Kyle. He later told me that his grandfather was also his best friend. They lived together for a time. I could see the rawness of it sitting there just under the surface as he looked over the old photos on the walls that showed Keith, roaring with laughter, with Leo and others of their era.

After Kyle, Terry, another of Sam's uncles, drove up in his truck around 8:30 p.m. to meet us. He's a burly man with dinner plate-sized hands. A lumberjack. The story that always sticks with me about Terry is the time he kicked a threatening black bear in the face to drive it away from nearby people. He was the mayor of his small town for decades. He doesn't use the internet, or his phone, really. Sam says that he has to get a hold of Terry by calling his wife. 

Sam took Thomas and I out on Uncle Pierre's skiff for a joyride later in the evening. Light rain dappled the surface of the water as we pulled out of the launch. He opened up the outboard motor and we steamed across the lake. We didn't have anything motorized available to us last time we were out here. On this trip, we could appreciate the vastness of the black water. I took deep breaths of the fresh air emanating from the damp, dark pines as we made our circuit. 

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I woke at 3:30 a.m. that first night. The heat of the stove baked me out of my sleeping bag and sweat slicked my forehead. All around the room thunderous snores shook the walls. I knew immediately I would not be able to return to sleep there, so I bundled up my bedding and moved out to the Suburban, folding the seats down for a flat platform. This turned out to be a wonderful decision. It was quiet, cold, and I could hear the rain lightly pattering on the roof and windows. It became my sleeping quarters for the rest of our stay at camp.

The next morning, we stood around hungover as Terry showed us the rusty beaver traps in the back of his truck that he and his son Addison use. He set one up and poked the trigger with a stick. I jumped back as the vicious contraption snapped shut. 

Though very cute, beavers breed like crazy around these parts and cause mayhem felling trees and damming up streams, so the government encourages trapping to keep their numbers in check. Depending on the season, you can earn decent money from the pelts and castoreum oil (which they produce in a gland that resembles a scrotum). The oil is, weirdly, used in perfumes and scents. 

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Rob, Thomas and I took a skiff back out, while Sam and Terry stayed behind to get started on a big chicken wing fry up. Rob was the only one of us to have a fish on during our hours out there. I wondered if it was because of how my lure disappeared into the inky black depths. I couldn't see it until it was almost to the surface. 

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We all went out again later in the skiffs. Kyle and Tanner had a sonar fish finder and found lake trout about forty feet down in a spot near the shore. Kyle managed to wrangle two, while the rest of us had no success. 

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After playing poker well into the night, we had the trout for breakfast the following morning, cooked in foil with lemon, salt and pepper. That day, Sunday, we realized we'd plowed through almost all of the beer and whisky we'd brought (something like 150 beers and a couple fifths), so we ran back into Temagami to top up. 

The rest of the day, we fished the various lakes that dot the landscape alongside the power line cut. Not a single trout among us. We did, however, have a lot of success teasing small perch and minnows next to the shore with tiny nymph flies. 

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That evening found us playing more poker and a game Sam introduced us to called Stump. You sit around a tree stump and lightly tap in a nail for each player. The goal is to pound in all of the other players' nails before your own is hammered flat against the surface. It feels a little bit dangerous because you have to flip the hammer, catch the handle, and swing down in a fluid motion for it to count as a legal turn. I cut my finger pretty badly on my own nail as I arced the hammer down to attack Tanner's. He kindly field-dressed my finger with a paper towel and electrical tape.

The next morning, we packed up camp and headed to Haileybury, where we met Leo and Marg again for dinner at their house. I could barely keep my eyes open from the consecutive, whisky-laced late nights. 

Marg cooked up a wonderful spiral cut ham, with potatoes, gravy, and carrots. 

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Upon Pierre's recommendation (and his tab), we went by the Legion, which is equivalent to a VFW in the US. We got a second wind with the beers and played shuffleboard and shot pool. Tanner made a point to ask our bartender's name. He writes them down in a small Moleskine-style notebook in his pocket like a boozing journalist. Recalling the barkeep's name is an easy way to build rapport, he said. Having an ally pouring the drinks usually means a better time. 

I liked these small habits of Tanner's. We hadn't spent extended time like this before and so I hadn't previously noticed them. He's a collector and an optimizer. He collects knots, one of which we used to suspend a beaver-chewed log from the rafters of the cabin, but also knives, pens, bags, fishing tackle. I was complimented that he looked over my camera tote and nodded approvingly. (Though this was actually a compliment for Fiona, who's bag I copied). There's something inspiring about the way he analyzes and moves through the material world. It made me feel as if I could be more selective and deliberate about the myriad small things I interact with on the daily. 

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I did not get the sleep I needed that night. We roused at 6 a.m. to leave our hotel so we'd have time to make the drive down to the airport and briefly see Sam's cousin Mackenzie at a burger/poutine spot called Weber's. She and her boyfriend both work at a gold mine in the area. Mackenzie is a welder and an excellent one at that, Sam said. I wondered if there was something in the water in northern Ontario that made everyone this hardy. 

On the flight home, I dozed off watching *Gladiator 2*. Not that great, I thought. I could barely keep my eyes open as we walked through Salt Lake International to baggage claim. Somehow Sam and the others can live indefinitely on five to six hours of sleep per night and they seemed fine. 

Over the ensuing days, I slept in and took long naps to recover (and I almost never nap). Fiona half-jokingly asked at one point if I needed to go see a doctor. But it was just cumulative exhaustion. I could see it on my heart rate variability graph. Green for all of May, and then a sudden dip deep into the red. I'm still leveling out as I write this. 

But I basked in the afterglow of our time at Camp Bang Dang. It brought us all closer as friends, being there amongst the old timbers. Sipping cold Molsons next to the roaring fire outside. Seeing how the light fog and mist curled around the lake. Streaming colorful lures into the dark water. The late nights with the shit-talking, poker chips, and games of Stump. It felt as if we wove a few of our own threads in the great, yet humble, tapestry of the camp. On the journey back to Toronto, Sam took us the long way, steering us once more through the power line cut—a quiet salute to Joseph, who once walked those wires in the forest.

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### March/April links
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/march-april-links/
Last updated: 2025-05-05T15:18:22.000Z
Happy May! 

I hinted at this in the last newsletter installment, but I decided to take a sabbatical this year to pivot my career a bit. I've been in product management for about a decade, but, after some intense self-reflection late last year, I realized that I've always experienced a greater joy from making things with my own hands (be it software, writing, or brewing beer on the side). I feel much more satisfaction when I deeply understand how the things I build actually work, or when I've had some say in their composition. So, I'm pursuing an engineering-focused role.

I've been creating small projects and pushing them up to GitHub to learn the fundamentals for months now, but last week I hit pause on my coursework to build a prototype of a macOS app for journaling (with an emphasis on privacy and storing data locally). This stemmed from the idea that staff at Notion, which I use for a bunch of personal organization, can theoretically dip into your account at any time with no notice and read your stuff.

I thought of it on Tuesday and it existed by Thursday. I've been avoiding using [Cursor's](https://www.cursor.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) built-in agent too much as I learn, but I let it rip to build out the Rust-based backend to interact with the SQLite database. I tinkered with the React and Typescript app until I got it to a decent working version. Then I fought with Apple to get the binary notarized and released. 

Whew! What a concentrated and awesome learning experience. This was essentially a hackathon that taught me 1) something in the world has indeed shifted and 2) it's super far from perfect and I think it is still very worthwhile to learn how to code and likely will be forever. I corrected Cursor's agent dozens of times, rejected changes, and had to continually remind it to use an updated version of Tauri (which is the Rust-based framework that ports web apps to a macOS webview) because I read the docs and could see that package names and syntax had changed all over the place.

The app is super basic at the moment, but I spun up a Linear account and I'm now tracking a backlog of changes that I want to bite off in pieces in parallel with my studies.

I would be honored if you tried out Journal and let me know your feedback [here](https://tally.so/r/way9Pv?ref=nickrroberts.com)! You can download it below:

[JournalA lightweight journaling app for macOS, built with privacy as its core principle. No cloud. No syncing. No sharing. Just your thoughts stored locally, and seen by no one but you. A calm, focused writing experience made just for your Mac. It’s also open source (MIT license). Try it out:![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/icon/android-chrome-192x192-7.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/thumbnail/128x128-1-3.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/journal/)

If you're curious about how it works, the repo is [here](https://github.com/nickrroberts/journal?ref=nickrroberts.com).

Anyhow! There's some cool stuff in this links edition.

### From the past couple months

**Traveling through Iraq in 2025.** ([Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kuc1q9TNYBA&ref=nickrroberts.com))

**The Urgency of Interpretability.** ([Link](https://www.darioamodei.com/post/the-urgency-of-interpretability?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email#fnref:1))

**Michael Truell, founder of the Cursor IDE, on the company's explosive ARR growth and the future of software engineering.** ([Podcast](https://play.pocketcasts.com/podcasts/aff3edd0-c8a4-013a-d954-0acc26574db2/544b4528-00fb-404b-8cf1-abd1e7020b2c?ref=nickrroberts.com))

**America's covert involvement in the Ukraine War**. Really excellent piece. ([Link](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/29/world/europe/us-ukraine-military-war-wiesbaden.html?ref=nickrroberts.com))

**I liked this quote**:

"*Wondering what to do with your life? Here’s what I suggest:*

- *First priority: Your physical health. (No health → no life.)*
- *Second priority: Reasonable financial security. (No food → no health.)*
- *Third priority: Good relationships with friends and family. (Depressed → no mental health.)*

*After that you can do whatever. The game you’re playing doesn’t have any rules and there’s no way to win.*" ([Link](https://dynomight.net/about/?ref=nickrroberts.com))

---

On the biggest crypto heist in history. ([Link](https://harrydonnelly.substack.com/p/how-the-biggest-crypto-hack-in-history?utm%5Fsource=Sailthru&utm%5Fcampaign=2025-03-08%2BInstaller%2B74))

Kayak's travel agent. Talking to hotels and flights with an LLM. I'm not sure it'll be replacing my use of the normal UI, but it's cool. ([Link](https://kayak.ai/?ref=nickrroberts.com))

A version of Claude obsessed with the Golden Gate Bridge (found through Amodei's article on interpretability above) ([Link](https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude?ref=nickrroberts.com))

A 1994 New York Times article on how to watch hummingbirds. Beautiful writing. ([Link](https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/29/magazine/mute-dancers-how-to-watch-a-hummingbird.html?ref=nickrroberts.com))

A solution to the [Traveling Salesman Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling%5Fsalesman%5Fproblem?ref=nickrroberts.com) in the context of a South Korean bar crawl. ([Link](https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/korea/index.html?ueid=1667219accf240a1e01116a1a8c395c2&utm%5Fsource=Sailthru&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=2025-04-26%20Installer%2080&utm%5Fterm=Installer))

Results from "vibe coding" for 30 days. If you're unfamiliar with the hottest new AI term/pejorative on the block, vibe coding means using tools like Cursor, Windsurf, etc. to build applications without understanding the underlying code the models produce. ([Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cibXW4sZi5k&ref=nickrroberts.com))

The island in the US where people still speak Elizabethan english. ([Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFvzPWiTCS4&ref=nickrroberts.com))

A cool YouTube channel about street photography. ([Link](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg97Ni73ozwdoSytGSqTRyA?ybp=-gEXMjAyNS0wNC0wNSBJbnN0YWxsZXIgNzg%253D&ref=nickrroberts.com))

Bill Gates actually has a pretty cool personal website. ([Link](https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-code?ref=nickrroberts.com))

Excellent overview of the Javascript event loop and task queue. ([Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiC58R16hb8&ref=nickrroberts.com))
### January/February links
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/january-february-links-2/
Last updated: 2025-03-03T18:14:49.000Z
Happy March!

You'll probably notice more links than usual about tech stuff below. Things will probably trend that direction on this newsletter for a while. The reason is that I want to build more things myself, and that desire is manifesting as a focus on software engineering.

Writing has been a creative outlet for me for a long time. A practice to make me feel more "hands-on" with something. Brewing beer is like that for me, too. I think these hobbies are a reaction to the fact that my job in technology so far has always been a step removed from the actual building of things. 

Traditionally, product management is about defining the *why* and *what* with respect to a piece of software, more so than the *how*, which is the domain of designers and engineers. But I'm interested in all of these pieces; I'd like to bring more of "the build" into my day-to-day. And, jeez, it feels really good to be writing some code again.

But it's a funny time to be any kind of specialist in the world of technology. On the one hand, I think everyone to some degree feels a background anxiety about the rapid progress of AI-driven automation vis-a-vis LLMs. Reddit is full of "Is AI going to take my job" talk. A lot of the Substacks and podcasts I follow are discussing it.

On the other hand, this is probably the best time to learn anything in the history of humanity. You have an all-knowing tutor/therapist/mentor in your pocket at all times with GPT, Claude, Gemini, or any of the others. While I don't let GPT code for me, because I'm trying to learn new things and I think struggling through it is the only way, I will drill on *concepts* with it relentlessly until I understand the principles at work. It's like a choose-your-own adventure textbook. It makes me wonder what future colleges have beyond being research institutions to add to GPT's knowledge base. Depositing known information into students' brains can just all happen with a robot now. Classroom learning, which goes at a group pace, either too slow or too fast for a given individual, seems mighty antiquated.

It's all still so uncertain and that makes people nervous. We've started to see a lot of evolution in the tooling and practices of roles like engineering, but companies are still hiring a lot of engineers. So when, if ever, are we going to see mass unemployment among knowledge workers? Is any type of job safe?

I think dwelling on these questions for too long will make you go insane, because there is only conjecture at this point. I'm not going to pretend to have a good answer, but I guess I do have an abiding optimism that I, and most other people, will just manage through it, whatever happens to our industry. 

I want to deal with reality as it comes. What's real right now is that I can learn at a much higher speed and do significantly more than just a few short years ago. I therefore think I *should* do more to maintain and grow a valuable skillset, but also because it's fun and enriching.

I've included some good pieces below that offer more specific commentary on what the immediate future will likely hold. They're pretty uplifting!

### From the past couple months

**My stuff**:

- Bike touring through the United Kingdom, Part Two ([Link](https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom-2/))
- Bike touring through the United Kingdom, Part Three ([Link](https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom-3/))

**On craft and finishing projects** ([Link](https://blog.ayjay.org/things-made-and-in-the-making/?ref=nickrroberts.com))

**How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering** ([Link](https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-ai-will-change-software-engineering?publication%5Fid=458709&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&r=binh0&ref=nickrroberts.com))

**Related: The End of Programming as We Know It*.* *Via my pal Nic B.*** ([Link](https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-end-of-programming-as-we-know-it/?ref=nickrroberts.com))

**50 years of travel tips**. *I had good fun reading through these and seeing which ones I'd already figured out for myself.* ([Link](https://kk.org/thetechnium/50-years-of-travel-tips/?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email))

---

Suggestions for how to stop living your life on autopilot. *I finished this on a run and felt all inspired to do whatever it is I'm doing now.* ([Link](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-break-out-of-autopilot-graham-weaver?publication%5Fid=10845&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=email-share&isFreemail=false&triedRedirect=true&ref=nickrroberts.com))

How to like everything more. ([Link](https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/how-to-like-everything-more?triedRedirect=true&utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email))

Cool ideas to try with a Raspberry Pi. ([Video](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vp4glSVPT8o&si=VP%5FxwXM-pIqN7BnR&ref=nickrroberts.com))

Jevon's Paradox. *Interesting to think about with respect to AI's impact on knowledge work.* ([Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons%5Fparadox?ref=nickrroberts.com))

A website builder that let you turn almost any jumble of files in a Dropbox folder into a working site. *Via my pal Joe W.* ([Link](https://blot.im/watch?ref=nickrroberts.com))

The Complete History of the Wars of the Roses. *After writing a bit more about England and thinking back on all my castle-hopping, it made me want to revisit the Middle Ages. This is a great one.* ([Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oDz6u%5F47jc&t=6901s&ref=nickrroberts.com))

Why JavaScript is insane. *An oldie but a goodie. Via my friend Nic B.* ([Link](https://vimeo.com/111122950?ref=nickrroberts.com))

The Holy Grail layout in web design. *I hadn't heard of this before, but it's everywhere.* ([Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy%5Fgrail%5F%28web%5Fdesign%29?ref=nickrroberts.com))

A nice guide to Flexbox CSS. ([Link](https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interactive-guide-to-flexbox/?ref=nickrroberts.com))

Cool site dedicated to Nokia's product designs over time. ([Link](https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?ref=nickrroberts.com))

AI prototyping for product managers. ([Link](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-guide-to-ai-prototyping-for-product?utm%5Fcampaign=email-post&r=binh0&ref=nickrroberts.com))

Very intuitive deep-dive into how transformer models like GPT work. ([Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI&ref=nickrroberts.com))

A website that makes you look like a hacker to anyone watching over your shoulder. ([Link](https://hackertyper.net/?ref=nickrroberts.com))
### Bike touring through the United Kingdom
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom-3/
Last updated: 2025-11-03T00:09:41.000Z
*This piece is a continuation of part two* [*here*](https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom-2/)*. The story picks up again on my return train from Wales.*

### Rail replacement 

09/27/24

I watched the fields and small stone houses flow in reverse on my way back toward Birmingham on the train. All was fine until we approached Shrewsbury, where we stopped and went no further.

The tinny voice on the intercom said that flooding from all of the rain in the last few days had inundated Wellington, one of the future stops on our line. The rail people said that buses would take us from here to Wolverhampton, skipping the flooded parts of the track. I disembarked with hundreds of other confused passengers and we funneled out to the waiting area outside the station.

We waited.

I checked several times with the stony-faced ticket agents to see when they expected the buses. I plotted alternatives, like riding my bike to Wolverhampton, but my app told me that would take three hours. I decided to wait some more. The crowd from my train grew agitated.

In the midst of the delay, I glanced around and realized that Shrewsbury was quite charming. Well-preserved medieval streets and structures surround the station. You can glance up to the parapets and towers of Shrewsbury Castle from the curb. The station itself is done in a fetching Tudor Gothic style.

If I didn’t have to be in Cambridge that evening, I would’ve started exploring the town. That’s the magic of wandering on a bike with no job and no obligations—you can just turn delay into delight. It’s easy to lock up, snap off the panniers, and hole up in a cafe to lose yourself in a book or a journal entry for a while. Or to move through quiet streets, and take pictures of secret details. And these old English towns abound in them.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/02/IMG_0053-1.png)

Shrewsbury train station

A big white "Rail Replacement Service" bus did finally arrive and pull into the drop-off area. I felt stressed as I waddled over within the mass of humanity. There was no way it was going to accommodate all of us, and me with my bike no less.

The driver stepped out and promptly announced that he was taking the 45-minute smoke break he was entitled to under labor law or his union or some higher authority. This roiled the crowd immediately. People grumbled about missing connections, being late for work, or distressed family members waiting for them in places far beyond Shrewsbury.

A college-aged girl behind me emitted a sharp scream. “What the FUCK is going on?” she bellowed as she began to weep. A few of us looked at each other, recognizing the heightened anxiety spreading through the horde.

Another tour bus appeared and the mass of travelers instinctively gravitated toward its doors. The driver popped out and this time began ushering folks aboard, counting capacity as he went. A wild-eyed thirty-something man in front of me shouted at the rest of the queue “If any of yous start pushin’ I’ll scrap the lot of ya!” Though I didn’t see anyone pushing.

I happened to be well-positioned in the line. The driver let me stow my bike in the belly of the bus and board. The only open seat was next to the college-aged girl who screamed.

On the way to Wolverhampton, she began typing a poem on her iPad in an Apple Note. I tried not to look, but I saw the words:

“*Panic. Like frightened rabbits.*

*We cannot get out,*

*We cannot get out.*”

### Restless nights

09/27/24 - 09/30/24

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/02/IMG_0055-1-1.png)

King's College.

I arrived back in Cambridge around 9pm, a full two hours later than my original arrival time on the ticket.

Oli and Michaela met me for a pint right outside the station at the old Ticket Office, which is now a pub slinging booze instead of transport.

I felt my spirits lift immediately when we joined up. The train ride was lonely, long, and a little harrowing. After the events at Shrewsbury, I rode a series of trains without good bike amenities that added to the overhead.

The better trains have rack systems where you can hang your bike by the frame and take your mind off of it. The worse trains have a handwavy area where you lean your bike against the wall and you have to mind it so it doesn’t fall over as the car jostles. But all of the trains, it seems, put the bike storage area right next to the toilets. So you get the pleasure of smelling and sometimes hearing that for the duration of the journey.

Over beers, Oli and Michaela told me about their work weeks and I regaled them with tales from the day and my journey through Anglesey. We went back to the house and ate Indian takeout.

Oli and I have a way of egging each other on, and we stayed up until 4:00am. I can’t honestly remember what we were doing for so long. But he brought out more of his old things as the hours ticked by. There was a newspaper recording commodities prices from the 1800s that I read aloud in a British accent. He also brought out a blanket with a tasselled fringe that reminded him of the one we used to keep on our couch when my family lived in England.

The next day we cycled through Cambridge and Oli and Michaela pointed out the various colleges and famous places. Isaac Newton attended Trinity. The likes of John Maynard Keynes, Alan Turing, and James Galbraith went to King’s. Its main attraction is the gigantic Gothic chapel that looks like a cathedral. 

We exclaimed “Christ, that’s a nice park!” as we passed Christ Park by the college of the same name.

The streets around the university in Cambridge were thronged with tourists from all over the world. Punters wended their way down the Cam. Cows walked freely across the green spaces. The university grounds reminded me acutely of Hogwarts.

That evening, Oli played his show at the Cambridge Junction venue. His parents, Darren and Sarah, arrived at the house to drive Michaela and me over. To my eye, they hadn't changed in the slightest. We hugged and caught up for a while in the living room, sipping tea in the warm lamplight. By this point, I felt like I’d perfected my decade-in-review speech for these reunions with old friends.

Along the way over to the Junction we picked up the band's bassist, Eli, who works during the day as a cancer researcher in a lab at Cambridge. Josh Robins, her partner, is the singer-songwriter. He’s intense and captivating with his belting voice and vagabond vibe. I got the impression he’d lived a difficult life, as though he had some scars on his soul. But it seems like a few of those tend to make for great music. 

When Josh wasn't playing in venues around Cambridge, he was doing small concerts inside of narrowboats, or busking in Spain. He lives in a van, which Eli pointed out to us behind the venue as we rolled up.

Oli is a goofball until he steps on stage. His mustachioed mouth tightened, and a serious look came over his face as he concentrated on the notes and chords, the purplish lighting washing over his shoulders. 

I sat there, marveling as my oldest friend practiced his art. I remembered the days at his parents’ old house in Burwell, back when he first picked up the guitar. He’d show me little riffs he was learning, like “Smoke on the Water,” and I assumed it was just a passing hobby—something kids do before losing interest. But he stuck with it.

Watching him now, a lump rose in my throat as he effortlessly strummed through his solos. The stage lights danced, and the crowd was transfixed. In that moment, I just felt gratitude.

### The taste of years

09/30/24 - 10/08/24

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/02/IMG_0054-1.png)

The Royal Mile.

It seemed like all my transition days were rainy. The sky spat down as I pedaled the path along the tracks toward Cambridge’s station.

I was exhausted. I actually looked forward to the train ride up to Edinburgh so I could catch up on a little sleep. Oli and I proved unable to go to bed at any reasonable time while I stayed with him and Michaela.

After the concert, I helped Oli and the band pack up and we went out drinking. They showed me local spots, like Six Bells, and how to “split the G” on the Guinness glass. I tried a few times and just couldn’t nail it. But Michaela did on her first try. 

Josh, Eli, and I tipsily talked about capitalism and America.

Whenever one establishment would shut down for the night, the crowd knew exactly where to go next. We finished our long crawl in the smoky upstairs band room of The Six Six bar. A man dressed in fuzzy yellow pajamas, who no one appeared to know, attempted to sleep on the couch behind us as the group talked loudly, drank Carlsbergs and puffed cigarettes. We got back around 4:00am again.

My train changed at Peterborough and I got into Waverley in the early afternoon. The city crowds in around the station like two mountain ranges running alongside a deep valley. You emerge up out of it in the damn middle of everything. The honking cars clogging the streets, the tour buses, the mobs of tourists. I tried not to club anyone with my bike as I heaved it up on my shoulder to go up the staircase.

I checked in at the “CoDE Pod” on the Royal Mile. The journey there was encouraging. You climb a big hill to the south of the station, ascending the staircase up Warriston’s Close, weaving between the beautiful and sprawling stone buildings with their mix of medieval, Victorian, Georgian, Neo-Gothic, and Scot Baronial architecture. I liked peering down the many secretive closes that branch off High Street.

Where I stayed was a bit of a gamble for me. I wanted to see if I could still stand for the dorm-style rooms of a hostel. In my early twenties, it wasn’t that big of a deal. A bunk in a room full of strangers also tends to be very cheap. About a tenth of the nightly cost in one of the proper hotels in Edinburgh, or one and a half percent of a stay in the Rowling room at the Balmoral, where J.K. Rowling supposedly finished *The Deathly Hallows* in 2007.

The CoDE Pod is in part named for the Japanese pod hotel-style bunks which appealed to me upon seeing them online. A little more privacy and, perhaps, soundproofing, I thought. The hostel also sits in a building that used to contain jail cells and a courthouse built between the late 17th and early 18th centuries. So the whole thing has a jailhouse theme to it. I thought that the location by St. Giles Cathedral, bang in the middle of the city, might be a good base of operations to explore.

I signed up for a Scotch tasting in the hostel’s basement (an old set of chambers they only rediscovered in recent decades) as a way to try to meet other pod people to hit the pubs with. But I was the only person on my tour who was actually staying there. There were a pair of reserved German girls in their twenties, an older German gentleman who was quietly having some kind of religious experience with the Scotch, and a young couple who hardly interacted with the group. The whisky was pleasant. I got to sit in the old judge’s chair and get a photo.

I managed to strike up conversation with the German girls, who seemed to think it equivalently interesting to speak with an American. They were from some city in the north like Hamburg. When I said I wanted to visit Munich, they talked a lot of smack on Bavarians, describing them as hard-drinking bumpkins. I think it only convinced me to go all the more.

We parted ways and I wandered around the Royal Mile. I tried to get into dinner at Deacon Brodie's, but failed with the crowds. So I strolled a ways down Forrest Road and got bangers and mash at MUM’s Great Comfort Food, which was a strange little spot. The giant photo on the wall depicted an unnerving sixties-era man in a tie being served a plate of sausages. They were delicious though.

I didn’t really want to go back to my pod right away, so I returned to Deacon Brodie's and listened to a Scottish singer-songwriter croon covers of pop songs while I worked on a pint. When they closed at midnight, I reluctantly ambled back down the Mile, which was refreshingly quiet and still.

I confirmed that I can’t sleep through the random noises of group rooms anymore. The pods offered no sound protection. Someone got up at 3:00am, presumably to catch a flight. They zipped and unzipped their suitcase repeatedly. The heavy door to the room opened and closed all night. My eyes opened each time at the sound of tapping on the keypad and the click when the lock released. It became ferociously hot in the enclosed space of my pod.

I woke feeling terrible.

I wanted to get away from the buzz of the Royal Mile. Everywhere I went for a bite or a drink in the vicinity of my hostel gave me the feeling you get when you go to Disneyland. I was seeing the curated, sculpted version of Edinburgh and Scotland that foreigners want to see. It’s an experience served up on a tartan platter with haggis by someone in a kilt. Street performers blasting *Amazing Grace* on bagpipes for teary-eyed Americans.

I cycled over to Arthur’s Seat, which is a volcanic mound to the southeast of the center of town that offers a sweeping view of the city and the sea beyond.

I chained my bike to a tree since I came at the Seat from the wrong side and couldn’t find a proper parking lot. I hiked up to the summit and stared out for a long time as the wind howled, unsure of what to do with the rest of my day. I needed a mission, even if it was just motion.

After staring at maps on my phone for a long time, my gaze settled on the city of Inverness, about a 200-mile ride on a route I charted through Stirling.

I ditched out on the second night I paid for at the CoDE Pod and went to a cheap hotel I found on Forth Street and scored a gargantuan room that was on discount for about a hundred bucks. It had a grand piano and tall windows. It was beautiful and tranquil. I woke the next day feeling the best I had in a week or more.

I just started pedaling.

I cycled 40 miles to Stirling, 50 miles to Ardeonaig, 60 miles to Kingussie, and 50 to Inverness, overnighting at the end of each leg.

When you’re riding a bike through the north, you get the ungroomed and mysterious side of the nation that frightened the Romans centuries ago. They built Hadrian’s Wall to keep back the Picts, who roamed these hills and lived by their own law. It’s rugged country that feels a lot like the Western US.

In Loch Tay, I kicked the stand down on my bike and ate a Yorkie chocolate bar on the beach in Kenmore. I stared out for an hour at the vast expanse of green-gray water, which reflected the moody clouds above. The forests that flank the loch shimmered in and out of patches of sunlight. Tiny freshwater waves gently lapped the stony shore.

Fifteen or so miles from Inverness, the terminus of my adventure, I stopped into Tomatin Distillery, where I met Richard, who I’d place in his late sixties or early seventies. His face was lined and he spoke with a mild brogue. He was working the bar and patiently guiding patrons through tastings. He set me up with a flight of three glasses and explained the process of a proper whisky sampling.

Take it slow, he said, and make the dram last. Never judge it on the first sip. Let it absorb under the tongue. Sip water, then try again. It’s about the leisurely appreciation, he noted, and being present with the complexity. Look past the barrel oak and find the subtler things. Maybe hints of the soil in which the barley grew, or the minerals in the mash water. How much is real or imagined doesn’t particularly matter. All that really matters is that you’re there in the moment trying to make sense of it. That’s why you pay the money.

Richard departed and left me to my thoughts.

There always comes a point for me on travels like this when I’m ready to return home and I had reached it. When the anxious energy to see the real world, generated by months of working at a computer in an invented realm, is spent. I ruminated on my trip, weeks long at this point. A mixture of fast motion and contemplative, slow moments. Chaotic cities, and the misty, silent fields of my childhood.

I made my way through the pours of steadily older expressions. Beyond the surface-level flavors of toffee, vanilla, and nutmeg, I tasted the years pass between them.
### Bike touring through the United Kingdom
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom-2/
Last updated: 2025-02-08T16:52:25.000Z
*This piece is a continuation of part one* [*here*](https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom/)*. The story picks up again at The Three Blackbirds Pub in Woodditton, a village in England that was once my home.*

### Time’s slow advance on Woodditton

09/21/24

I took a table out in front of the pub and soon saw a mid-aughts gray BMW convertible pull into the driveway. It was unmistakably Oliver, one of my oldest friends. He wore a baseball cap, black Ray-Bans and big grin. He waved and I just laughed. It was such a sporty-looking car and I wasn’t expecting it. It stood out from the fuel-efficient and tiny vehicles that you see everywhere on British roads. I remembered that Oli has always had a penchant for cars and old things and collects them regardless of their practicality. He later showed me his three-wheeled Reliant Robin which sits next to his parents’ house in Burwell on cinder blocks, gathering moss and thickets of cobwebs on the seats. When I last saw him in 2013, he was driving a green 1971 MG coupe which he maintained at great expense.

We brought out a couple pints and summarized the past eleven years of our lives. As Oli spoke, I studied his face. He had the same mannerisms and humor he’d always carried. A stream of conversational invention and cheekiness that made me bust out laughing all the time as a kid and again as an adult.

We’re still young, aren’t we? I thought to myself as our words wandered.

We spoke in the vocabulary of the intervening years. The pandemic, Donald Trump, and all of those things that bleed across the Atlantic and remind you how culture is borderless.

We touched on my marriage a few years back, Oli’s home purchase in Cambridge with his partner, Michaela. We covered remote work and instructing students through anti-contagion plastic barriers. Oli works as a music teacher now and plays guitar in a rotation of bands on the Cambridge scene.

We finally looked down to find our glasses empty, so we decided to go for a walk and revisit our childhood haunts.

We moved past the patch of land where there used to be chicken coops. The lot is still there, but the chickens are gone. Then by the old beige water tower, which looks haggard and mildewy these days. I remember when gales would roll in and the wind would wail against the structure like a wounded animal. That howl always made me feel uneasy, especially on those dark Sunday nights when I had to wheel the garbage cans to the collection point down the dirt road that ran by the tower.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/01/image-1-1.png)

“The view looking toward Woodditon (1853)” [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s%5FDyke,%5FCambridgeshire?ref=nickrroberts.com#/media/File:Devil's%5FDyke%5F%281853%29.png)

As kids, one of our favorite pastimes was venturing into [Devil’s Ditch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s%5FDyke,%5FCambridgeshire?ref=nickrroberts.com). It’s a Saxon-era earthwork that historians think was used for some kind of defensive purpose. Possibly a bulwark against the Danes over a thousand years ago. There’s a trail running the length of Devil’s Ditch that begins in Woodditton and ends seven miles later in a town called Reach. It crosses behind my old house, and it’s how I met Oliver.

I was seven when we moved to England in 1999\. He was on a walk with his grandmother, Jill, along the footpath. My mom, who happened to be in the back garden, flagged them down and introduced us, eager for me to have friends. The transient Air Force life is tough on the children of airmen—I’d just been uprooted from the small group of buddies I’d built in our former neighborhood in Virginia. But Oli and I hit it off immediately.

There’s a fence separating the yard and the public path now. As we walked by I wondered absently how many potential little friendships would be scuttled by the divider.

I peered over the top. The house itself seemed much more upscale than when we lived there. Land Rovers in the carport. Oli found the rental listing on his phone and I tried hard to recognize the renovated rooms. The interior looked well done, modern, unfamiliar.

The old junk pile that Nigel, our landlord, used to keep behind the carport is whittled down, but some of it remains. It used to be full of old timber that he salvaged from some big windstorm back in the 80s, covered by a dirty yellow tarpaulin. There were concrete mixers and rusted tractors. Oli and I used to rifle through it and see if we could use any of it for our hideouts in the woods.

We strolled out into the wheat field beyond the house and visited our fort in an old oak tree. Rows of nails once meant for hand and footholds are still embedded in the trunk, slowly being overtaken by bark. I attempted to climb up but the holds were so shortened I couldn’t make it.

We went by the big pond, another of our favorite hangouts. I was never sure if it was created intentionally or just a byproduct of the runoff from the wheat field. But we loved that place. It felt secret; infused with magic. Sometimes we’d wear wellingtons and tromp through the bog of the pond itself if the water was low.

We attempted to navigate our way through the brambles into the small clearing next to the water. Oli got stung by nettles just like old times. But we saw that lily pads had grown in the center of the pond and sprouted large, colorful flowers. 

We continued on past the paddocks where, as a seven year old, I would shock myself on the electrified fence while trying to pet horses.

Very little of these scenes had changed for twenty-five years. Only, it all seemed so much closer to my old house than we remembered.

Oli and I were roleplaying our childhoods. We grabbed some thin, reedy sticks in Devil’s Ditch and used these to clear nettles from our paths, slicing their evil stalks in big whacks as we used to.

As kids, we’d cut these same sticks into spears or bend them into bows with fishing line. We were very warlike. Always on the lookout for “the boys from Stetchworth,” who we fashioned as our sworn enemies. I’m not certain we ever met anyone from Stetchworth, but we liked the idea of a pernicious foreign power. It made all of our defenses feel purposeful and urgent.

We wandered back to Oliver’s car at The Three Blackbirds and he sped us through the tiny country roads outside the village. He navigated using the old GPS screen in the center console which relied on location data stored on a DVD.

We stopped in for a pint at the Affleck Arms, one of his favorites, in Dalham —an adorable village of flint-walled cottages and climbing roses to the northeast of Woodditton. We whiled away another hour or two in the pub’s garden, the afternoon sun softening into shade as we savored pulls of cask ale. We chatted more about life and about nothing, watching regulars come and go.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/01/IMG_0044-1.png)

Affleck Arms

After a pitstop at Waitrose for supplies, we returned to Oli's house in Cambridge, where Michaela and her Hungarian friend Dori were preparing dinner. Michaela is from Czechia. The kitchen filled with conversation in a medley of accents - Michaela's Czech lilt, Dori's Hungarian cadence, Oli's Suffolk clip, and my Western American inflection.

I'd picked up some pilsener at Waitrose and, before our meal, decided to demonstrate the cherished American tradition of shotgunning beer. I stabbed the can with a key and immediately doused my tee shirt with sticky lager. Oli gave it a try and was more successful. Michaela and Dori just shook their heads.

The evening spun on like one of Oli's old records. Over Uno cards and brews, he began unveiling his thrift store treasures. A bass recorder that he used to cover “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion, and a typewriter he used to type out insults to Dori who had won Uno several times in a row. 

When I mentioned I’d gone to the Targhee Bluegrass Festival near Driggs in Idaho, he disappeared and returned waving some bluegrass vinyl, which then twanged around the living room. 

We switched to the auxiliary and Michaela introduced me to Kneecap, an Irish rap group that would become the soundtrack to my rest of my UK bike rides. I liked the song “H.O.O.D.”

Before I knew it, it was 3:00am. I crashed on the couch and thought a little regretfully of my paid room at the Blackbirds.

### Time’s march on Newmarket

09/22/24

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/02/IMG_0049-1.png)

St. Louis

Oli and Michaela drove me back to Woodditton through a classic English morning—overcast and close, the kind that wraps around you like wet wool. We were all a bit hungover and bleary. Rain drizzled now and again, dappling the windshield.

We met up with Rob, one of my best friends from primary and middle school, around noon back at The Three Blackbirds. He rolled up and parked out back in the gravel lot by the barn, where my bike had the whole room to itself.

After a bear hug, the first thing I noticed about Rob was that he was thick with muscle. As kids at St. Louis Primary we were rail thin. But after university, he’d become an avid weightlifter.

Since it was about noon (and I was technically on vacation), I suggested we grab a table out front with a Guinness and catch up. Oli and Rob knew each other but hadn’t connected since I was in England in 2013\. There seems to be just one or two degrees of separation between everyone in East Anglia. Oli’s mother used to babysit Rob. He and Oli played together as toddlers. But Oli went to a different school and so they moved in separate circles as we grew up. Hanging out around my house in Woodditton was often the bridge between. Now it was the Blackbirds.

Rob and I were close throughout school and we had a little crew with Ed (who I met up with in Brixton), Callum, Tom and others who hailed from Newmarket.

After finishing up, we said farewell to Oli and Michaela and Rob and I loaded in his car. He drove me by Granary Estates, which is adjacent to Woodditton. It’s the wedding venue where he’d married Rebecca, the lovely girl he was dating when I visited during university. They have a little son now named Charlie.

Rob pointed out the places on the grounds where the events took place: The banquet hall, the cottages where they stayed. He showed me pictures of it all on his phone and I felt a sharp pang of guilt for not having been there. A casualty of the distance and the time that’d passed since we’d seen each other.

Surrounded by these familiar places in East Anglia, I was overcome by a mix of elation and loss—excitement at seeing the old scenes and people, but also the sadness of knowing it’s impossible to be fully present for two far-flung and distinct groups of friends as they move through life’s milestones. I felt my competing identities more strongly than I had in years: The one rooted in the American West, the other in the English East.

We continued on into Newmarket, parked next to the bungalow belonging to Rob's dad on New Cheveley Road and walked around the town.

While Woodditton seems to be increasingly fancy, Newmarket feels grungier than I remember, with sports betting shops like Betfred and Paddy Power taking over High Street.

We meandered through The Guineas, which is a mall that used to be called The Rookery when I was a kid. Many storefronts stood empty, the mall seemingly suffering the same decline as its American counterparts.

But the place still hit me with powerful recollections. I remembered waiting for our double-decker bus at the station outside. Every day, it took us to St. Louis Middle School in Bury St. Edmunds—now closed since 2013\. My mom would pick me up on our return at The Rookery at each day and she always had a treat for me and my sister. I went through a phase of loving chocolate-covered Turkish Delight, which I’m certain I’d find revolting today. It had a fragrant, perfumy taste.

Since it was across the street, we poked our heads into St. Etheldreda Catholic Church. Again, a surge of memory. Smells are the quickest way to transport yourself to another time. Something about the mixture of incense on the air and the particular mustiness of the building. My sister’s and my first communion had been here. I was an altar boy for countless masses here. My mother read scripture at that lectern.

As we wandered into the empty church, a priestly-looking figure emerged from the sacristy. He walked up to us and said hello. I mentioned that my family would come here each Sunday for years and hoped this would kindle some recognition. But he merely nodded, and a bit impatiently. He was polite but clearly wanted us gone so he could lock up. They’d just finished some kind of event after the day’s mass and the man looked tired.

We couldn’t finish our exploration of Newmarket without going by St. Louis Primary (it now goes by the posh title of “St. Louis Catholic Academy”), where Rob and I met. Suffolk County had for some reason decided to abolish all middle schools and combine the lower years into the primary schools and the higher years into the upper schools. Because of this influx of population, St. Louis had to expand.

We stood outside the low brick wall and looked at the old Victorian house which was the main part of the school back in our day. To the left of it, a large new building occupied a chunk of the former green space where we used to play.

Rob and I headed back to High Street and grabbed burgers at Hmmburger. These were a rough approximation of something you might find in the US. More of a pub burger with cheddar than a classic smash with American cheese, but good nonetheless.

Rob dropped me off later back at The Three Blackbirds. 

I sat down for dinner and I was blown away by the high quality of the food. I ordered a Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding, thick brown gravy, roasted potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

As I was settling my bill and getting ready to return to my room, the young server asked where I was from. I thought for a second. “Well, here pretty much.” I recapped my Air Force childhood story. “… and also Idaho,” I said, “in the US.”

“Oh, isn’t that the boring part?” she asked.

### Aimless in Anglesey

09/23/24- 09/27/24

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/01/IMG_0043-1-1.png)

Llandudno

My second night at the Blackbirds, or the first night I stayed there, was hot in spite of the rain. The UK is ordinarily a place of damp chill and steaming mugs of Yorkshire tea. So my room had no counter for the unusually warm spell hanging over the countryside. I opened the window and listened to the droplets patter down while bugs and humidity flowed in through the screenless gap. Gradually, I drifted off to sleep.

When I woke there was a mist overhanging the fields outside my window. The mildewy Woodditton water tower was partially obscured. A moderate rain still fell.

I breathed the air through the window and tried to file away the village's distinctive smell of wet grass, elderflower, nettle, and muddy horse paddocks.

Today was the day I traveled to Wales and I was reluctant to get going. I wasn’t totally sure why I’d planned to leave East Anglia. This would be the final time I’d see my old village for who knows how long. Maybe on some future trip here with Fiona. I felt like I wanted to marinate in Woodditton, alone, for a while longer, but I had a train to catch.

I gorged myself on an English breakfast, returned to my room, and then reattached my panniers to the bike frame. I set off in my rain jacket and hoped the tires could grip the slick road.

At Newmarket train station, the pickup was as abbreviated as the dropoff. I rushed to pull my bike aboard and secure it before the conductor slammed the doors shut and the train shot off.

We arrived in Cambridge where I changed to a line headed to Birmingham. It was about two and half hours slightly north and west. I watched the waterlogged countryside roll by until I started to see the graffitied and defunct brick factory buildings from Birmingham’s boom during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Birmingham New Street station has a bustling, airport-like atmosphere. I didn’t realize that train stations could have so many shops and amenities. There were even private lounges for first class passengers, of which I was not one.

I continued on to Llandudno Junction, the train station at the start of the ride I had planned around the isle of Anglesey. I was attracted to this part of Wales because of the many rave reviews from cyclists about the quiet roads and beautiful countryside. On the map, Anglesey is a national “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty" a descriptor that always plays in my head in a British accent.

Another factor in coming here was that I wanted to see Rob’s mother, Angie, who moved to the town of Ruthin about ten years ago. When we were kids our families were very close and I’d be over at Angie’s house in Newmarket all the time. She’d cook us all kinds of things: Chips, sausages or desserts like Angel Delight.

The thing was, I had absolutely no idea what to do in any of these places in northern Wales other than pedal around on my bike.

When I arrived in Llandudno (pronounced “clan-did-noh” I’m told, though I heard many different variations), I found a Victorian coastal town with not much going on. But it was pretty and I’m a sucker for the moody weather on the coast. 

The one notable culinary experience I had in Llandudno was eating the meat pie at a pub called The Cottage Loaf. It was superb, especially paired with a couple beers from Conwy Brewing.

![IMG_0042.png](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/01/IMG_0042-1.png)

I overnighted in Llandudno Hostel which was cheap enough that I opted for a private room. Very basic, but comfortable and quiet. I ate a five quid breakfast at Molly’s Cafe and then hit the local Tesco for supplies (candy bars, Lucozade, and a knockoff version of Gu energy gels) for the long road ahead. My goal was to ride a 100 mile loop around the island over about three full days, so I needed to average around 30 or so miles per day.

My first stop was Beaumaris, about 27 miles. I found this kind of daily distance to be about right, because you can actually afford the time to do the “touring” part of bike touring. When you get above 50 or 60 miles in a day, it becomes all about the cycling.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/01/image-2.png)

My route around Anglesey.

I crossed the bridge from Llandudno to Conwy and toured the castle overlooking the river. [Conwy Castle](https://maps.app.goo.gl/gWQAJgBfhwnscwWj6?ref=nickrroberts.com) was part of a network of fortifications built by Edward I during his conquest of the northwest part of Wales between 1277 and 1283\. It stands watch over the medieval town, which is still enclosed by ancient walls. I found it incredibly cozy, like Hogsmeade in the *Harry Potter* books. Tiny streets with stone cottages, half-timbered buildings, and slate-roofed houses. Pubs that emanated warmth. I wished I'd stayed here instead of my hostel the night before. 

I exited through one of the old gates on Bangor Road.

As I cycled into the town of Beaumaris I was hit by a rain squall and thoroughly soaked. I had no idea where I was going to stay. I chained up my bike and ducked into a pub called the Bold Arms to warm up. While eating an okay chicken wrap, I booked a hotel on my phone called Castle Court, directly across from Beaumaris Castle.

The castle is a marvel. The Platonic ideal. Two concentric stone walls, massive gates, a wide moat, eighteen circular stone towers, and two large gatehouses. The structure has a very pleasing symmetry. 

I didn’t realize the place closed for tours at 4:00pm and I squeezed in during the final 45 minutes of the day. There was no one else there, which was magical and a little eerie. Strutting about the walls, I tried to figure out what the structures were. I love old castles, but they’re often stripped down, whatever traces of their original human occupants removed. No artifacts left out in the open to give you many clues.

I did dinner at a tapas place on Castle Street and returned to my hotel around 7:00pm or so. I overheard a guy at the hotel bar who sounded like he had a blended American and English accent. We struck up conversation. He was from Wales originally but now lived in Las Vegas. We chatted about life in the States and two other Welsh guys and the bartender joined in. They were curious about me and what the hell an American on a bike was doing all the way out here. The bartender was a twenty-something student who was studying zoology in Bangor. They bought me rounds of drinks and I smoked a cigarette with them in the beer garden out back. The topics of discussion ranged. The crew really wanted to engage in US politics but I didn't and I deflected as best I could. I stood and listened while they explained all of the positives and negatives of the American healthcare system to me.

I woke at 9:30am, two hours later than I'd intended, with a splitting headache. I think I was up until 1:00am with my Welsh comrades downing pints. At breakfast, I pleaded with the hotel staff to refill the coffee carafe (twice). I felt slow and stupid.

I’d resolved the day before to bike all 50 miles of my coastal route to Holyhead today. Since I wanted to be back in Cambridge that Friday evening to see Oli play a show on Saturday, I had to get some miles behind me to complete my circuit around the island in time. 

Starting a long ride uphill while very hungover is a deeply unenjoyable experience. The route toward Red Wharf Bay, one of my checkpoints, takes you up Wexham Street to leave Beaumaris. The angle of the road tilts back for a while. I had to pause a moment when the pavement flattened out to let a bout of nausea pass.

But it’s funny how cardio almost always burns away the bad feelings. By the time I’d hit the beach marking Red Wharf Bay, I felt right as rain. Only, I’d encountered one of those odd routing choices from the Komoot app and the path I attempted to follow got lost in sand dunes and bogs. I had to haul my loaded bike on my shoulder over small rivulets that drained their way to the ocean. I’d intended to cycle what I thought was a boardwalk that ran along the bay, but it didn’t seem to exist.

I finally found an exit from the beach and started my way up the tiny road. I cursed my luck when I ran into a large garbage truck that left me no room to pass by on the bike. As I pressed myself into the hedge on the left to let the truck through, my leg was annihilated by stinging nettles.

But I began to find myself in the open and scenic country I’d read about. I passed small collections of stone houses, enormous herds of cattle and pigs. I bathed in the emerald landscape that stretched on and on. The air was fresh and tasted of fog. It was damp but the weather never intensified into a downpour that day.

Traffic on the roads became mellow, although I still feared how fast drivers would scream around the blind corners where the view was blocked by hedgerows. One item I’d recommend to anyone doing something similar is a rear-facing bike radar. The one I have from Garmin pulses out an intensely bright light with increasing frequency relative to the proximity of an oncoming car. I think it saved my bacon a couple times.

Perhaps it was where I stayed, but I thought Holyhead, where I found myself that evening, was a dive. There wasn’t much in the way of good food and the whole town had a rundown kind of feel to it. I sat in a pub called the Holland Inn and watched a troupe of boys in their early twenties stomp in, reeking of weed. The no-bullshit lady pulling taps seemed to know them and dressed them down for the smell. She came out from behind the bar and sprayed them all down the British equivalent to Febreze.

I happened on a monument in the middle of town dedicated to Welsh soldiers from Holyhead who lost their lives in World War II and the Falklands War. 

I’m part-Welsh by heritage, and I noted that ten of the seventy names on the list of those killed in action in the Second World War had the surname of Roberts. But where these men sit in my family tree I have no idea. 

For dinner, I bought a cheap kebab and retired to my room at the Travelodge which was lit with an oppressive fluorescent light like a dentist’s office. 

I felt sad here in this cold and remote town. I missed Fiona and my friends back in East Anglia.

I did breakfast at a spot on Stanley Street called Reuben’s Cafe, which puts on good strong coffee. I was excited to move on. My journey today back to Menai Bridge, at the entrance to Anglesey, was 31 miles.

It took me just a few hours to get there and I dropped off my panniers in my tiny room at the Carreg Bran hotel in the delightfully-named settlement of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll next to the town of Menai Bridge. I’d completed my hundred mile loop in a bit of a rush, but now I had time to kill.

It was somewhere around noon, so I cycled over to town and floated between pubs for hours. I was bored and tried to write, but it didn’t come easy.

My favorite establishment was the Victoria Hotel. Had I been feeling a bit more splurgy, this would’ve been the spot I’d chosen to overnight. The downstairs bar is welcoming with comfortable green felt chairs and warm wood paneling. It had been gorgeously remodeled. The rooms looked similarly well-appointed online.

It rained and rained and rained outside. Small streams ran down the streets.

But I was thankful when dinner time arrived, though I had to cycle through the muckiness, so I could return to the Carreg Bran, eat, and go to sleep. I had a squeaky metal-framed single bed, but otherwise the room was silent and I slept for nine hours.

I wolfed my breakfast and pedaled to the train station in Bangor where I caught a train to Rhyl to see Angie. We chose that spot because it’s the closest point on the coastal train line to Ruthin, which is about thirty minutes to the south by car.

Angie greeted me just outside the station and we hugged for a while. When I was a kid, she felt like a second mother and a lot of that ancient feeling, stored in some deep cavern in my mind, came flooding back.

She commented that she didn’t know too much about where to go for a bite and coffee around Rhyl. In her opinion it was generally a town to be avoided. A bit dodgy.

We ultimately did breakfast, my second for the day, at a Sainsbury’s. It was close to the station and I had to be back in a couple hours for another train to Birmingham. The food was so much better than a grocery store cafe had any right to be.

As I ate sausages and fried potatoes, we shared updates about our lives and those of each member of our families in turn.

It made me happy to learn that Angie had built a close-knit community in Ruthin, though I wasn’t surprised. She has a way of embracing people as her own—just as she did with me. I wondered how she’d developed such a deep well of kindness.

Angie drove me back to the station and we embraced again. Hopefully, we said, it wouldn’t be so long until the next time.

[Part three](https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom-3/).
### November/December links
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/november-december-links-2/
Last updated: 2025-02-25T17:58:48.000Z
Happy 2025!

I don't know about you, but I ended 2024 feeling pretty drained. Don't get me wrong: It was a terrific, action-packed year. I checked off of a bunch of big items. I got to see a lot of new places. I reconnected with old friends.

The problem is that I commit to too many things– at work, with new hobbies, with lots of travel. And every commitment comes with overhead. And all that overhead stacks up until I feel frenetic, harried, and unfocused. I realized at the end of this past year I'd just been existing for months in this state and it was significantly tolling on my happiness.

So, I'm making some changes. My resolution for 2025 is to do less and open up more space for my mind. 

## From the past couple months

**My stuff:**

- [A look back at 2024](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2024/) \- End of year report card on my goal progress, what I read and watched, and where I went. Also includes goals for 2025.
- [Down on the border](https://nickrroberts.com/down-on-the-border/) \- A trip down to the fence demarcating the US and Mexico.

**Choosing an Ordinary Life: Finding Joy in Simplicity.** *I really enjoyed this one. It dovetails with my recent focus on* Slow Productivity *and generally doing less.* \[[Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAhXxfOhsmM&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

**"It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism**." \[[Link](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-still-easier-to-imagine-the-end?utm%5Fsource=substack&publication%5Fid=89120&post%5Fid=153800266&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcontent=share&utm%5Fcampaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=binh0&triedRedirect=true)\]

**The Shipwreck Detective**. \[[Link](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/the-shipwreck-detective?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

**A YouTube channel all about canned fish**. *I think I've linked this guy's stuff before. It is excellent. There's something about his vibe that makes me want to crack a can of sardines real bad.*  \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/@cannedfishfiles?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

---

How to read 100 pages every day. \[[Link](https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-26/the-one-hundred-pages-strategy?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Brian Cox on black holes. \[[Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGsbEd6w7PI&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

I’ve been inspired to dive deeper into JavaScript and system design—mostly for my job where I build products for developers, but also to tackle more side projects. I want to better understand whether ChatGPT and other AI models are actually suggesting good code. I'm working my way through this course which is entirely open source. Pretty good so far! \[[Link](https://www.theodinproject.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Building an app in 60 minutes with ChatGPT O1 and Cursor. \[[Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zmhe6%5FT-xU&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The seductive promise of building software as fast as you can think. *My personal experience with tools like Replit is that they're intriguing but I prefer to have more control over the build process. I also found the Replit Agent to be slow and apt to make mistakes or to wind itself into frustrating loops. I think I'm going to stick with O1 and Cursor.*  \[[Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JPvi48oVY8&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

AI pilots for the Air Force. \[[Link](https://shield.ai/hivemind/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

More *Lord of the Rings*, ruined by AI. \[[Video](https://youtube.com/watch?v=9HWEA1os-sw&si=7ZNgcAIFSIlTvx4-&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

On destroying great companies. \[[Link](https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/30/when-the-mismanagerial-class-destroys-great-companies/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The death of point solutions. \[[Link](https://www.onlycfo.io/p/the-death-of-point-solutions?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

"mymind is the extension for your mind." *A digital notebook with marketing that makes it feel like it was created by a cult. Things that you save are tag-able and searchable, rather than folderizable. Cool concept, but I'm still on Notion.* \[[Link](https://mymind.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Craft: Another Notion-esque digital notebook. *I like to keep tabs on these kinds of apps to see what they can do, but I ain't switchin' yet.* \[[Link](https://www.craft.do/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Skateboarding down a mountain \[[Video](https://youtu.be/yn-TfAzobDI?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

ChatGPT can now read some of your Mac's desktop apps. *I've tried this out and it's not terrific, but points in the right direction. It can read individual files in VSCode, but it can't really weave together a complete picture of your code project yet.* \[[Link](https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/14/chatgpt-can-now-read-some-of-your-macs-desktop-apps/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

"What’s Your Shape? A Product Manager’s Guide to Growing Yourself and Your Team." \[[Link](https://www.ravi-mehta.com/product-manager-roles/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

'Brain Rot' named word of the year by Oxford University Press. \[[Link](https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

AI apps worth trying out. \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPjNBjflYl0-HQtUvOx0Ibw/community?lb=Ugkx8TXoBSlvoFDf8plqBadLbY6upxS4dws6&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
### A look back at 2024
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2024/
Last updated: 2025-01-13T14:05:05.000Z
Since 2018, I've been writing retrospectives at the end of each year (see: [2023](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2023/), [2022](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2022/), [2021](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2021/), [2020](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2020/)) where I track my goal progress, what I read/watched, and where I went. It's a nice way to make myself accountable to the intentions I set and I hope it provides a little inspiration to anyone glancing through. 

This installment will cover:

- *2024 in summary*
  - *Fitness*
  - *Health*
  - *Brain*
- *Details*
  - *Stuff I made*
  - *Long-form media consumption*
  - *2024 in places*
- *2025 planning*
- *2025 goal summary*

## 2024 in summary

This was a crazy year. I feel like I've been saying that at the end of each December since 2020, but 2024, for me, was an outlier in its wildness. For example, I:

- Climbed Denali over 22 days, eking out a summit on the last possible day before our supplies would have run out and forced us to turn around.
- Got a new job.
- Cycled hundreds of miles solo through England, Wales, and Scotland, crashing in hostels, cheap hotels and on friends' couches.
- Climbed giant stalactites of ice in Hyalite Canyon (Montana) while the ambient air temperature sunk to -30 Fahrenheit.
- Scuba dove with reef sharks inside of a cave in Maui with Fiona.
- Summited both the South and Middle Tetons (Wyoming) in one day with a pal.
- Took two months off from work, in total, for solo travel.
- Got really stressed out.
- Feel like I need to scale back.

In 2025, my intent is to do fewer things.

### 💪 Fitness

**I trained significantly more in 2024 than 2023 and I'm fitter for it. Thinking that my switch to optimize for training duration over miles or "number of pushups" accounts for this. I also started strength training again which was a big gap in my regimen previously.** 

Goals:

- ✅ **278:50**/**250** hours of training duration– any cardio exercise + strength training (*vs. 205 in 2023*)
- ✅ **Get to Kahiltna Glacier, AK**. This is where you fly in to begin the approach to Denali. I deliberately didn't say "summit Denali" in my goals for 2024, since there are so many factors beyond your control that prevent even fit, motivated climbers from getting to the top. Chiefly, weather.
- ✅ **Bonus: Summit Denali**. Incredibly thankful to whichever stars and planets had to align to make this possible.

Other things I tracked:

- **124 hours** **spent running** (*vs. 62 hours in 2023)*
- **84 hours** **on cycling** (*vs. 41 in 2023*)
- **54.5 hours of hiking** and mountaineering (*vs. 91 in 2023*)
- **43 hours of walking** and other workouts (*vs. 11 in 2023*)
- **26,959ft** running vert (*vs. 16,545ft in 2023*)
- **153** total runs (*vs. 88 in 2023*)
- **832 miles** **run** (*vs. 415 in 2023)*
- **635 miles cycled** (*vs. 1321 in 2023*)
- **135 miles** **hiked** (*vs. 208 in 2023)*
- **64** highest Strava fitness level¹ (*vs. 50 in 2023*)

¹****Strava** [****Fitness**](https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032451811-Fitness?ref=nickrroberts.com)****:** “Fitness is calculated using your Relative Effort (based on either heart rate data or Perceived Exertion input) and/or power meter data. This way you can identify patterns in your training and see the big picture of how all your workouts add up over time. Your score is entirely relative to you. It serves as a benchmark, to show how many points you currently have compared to any date in the past two years.”

### 🥕 Health

**I didn't hit my sleep quality goal last year. I did, overall, sleep better in 2024 than 2023 and prior years. I wonder if a month of not drinking while on Denali had something to do with it 🤔.** 

Goals:

- ❌ **72.18%/75%** sleep quality² *(vs. 70.12% in 2023)*
- ✅ **8:23/8:00** average nightly sleep length *(vs. 8:15 in 2023)*

Other things I tracked:

- **78.3** happiness index average³ *(vs. 78.1 in 2023, 79.7 in 2022, and 84 in 2021)*

²****Sleep Quality:** From [Garmin](https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=DWcdBazhr097VgqFufsTk8&ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=characters%20for%20results.-,What%20is%20the%20Sleep%20Score%20and%20Insights%20Feature%20on%20My,reveal%20how%20well%20you%20slept.): "Your nightly sleep score is calculated based on a blend of how long you slept, how well you slept, and evidence of recovery activity occurring in your autonomic nervous system derived from heart rate variability data. The following categories are considered when assigning a score: Sleep Duration, Average stress score during sleep, Total deep sleep, Total light sleep, Total REM sleep, Awake time, Restlessness"

³****Happiness index:** Holistic spot-check of how good I feel psychologically and physically, based on my relationships, job satisfaction, financial well-being, goal completion, etc. on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being that life can’t get any better.

### 🧠 Brain

**I completed all my media creation/consumption goals and came in about on par with 2023\. I made fewer things overall.**

Goals:

- ✅ **52/50** completed [long-form media](https://nickrroberts.com/media/) pieces, of which 9 were books *(vs. 51 bits of long-form media in 2023, of which 11 were books)*
- ✅ **11/10** articles published, including newsletter issues *(vs. 23 in 2023)*
- ✅ **23/20** videos created (*vs. 29 in 2023*)

I'm pretty lukewarm on this "long-form media" consumption type of goal after trying it out for a couple years. My original thought process here was that you can find good stories in lots of media formats: Video games, books, movies, TV. I wanted to set a goal that would incentivize me to seek out good tales wherever they were, rather than in one specific format. 

However, I've tended to take the lazy way out and watch lots of film and TV instead of reading books. I still plan to track all of my various kinds of media intake, like video games and movies, but I want to focus on reading again in 2025\. I think reading helps me build my imaginative clarity and it also gets me away from screens. I think I might even try paper books again vs. my Kindle. While it’s a super convenient little device, the Kindle flattens the reading experience so that the character of the books’ typography, marginalia, diagrams, etc., become boringly uniform; their souls are sucked out. Might just stick to using it for travel. 

## Details

### ✍️ Stuff I made

**Writing**

- [Down on the border](https://nickrroberts.com/down-on-the-border/)
- [Bike touring through the United Kingdom (Pt. 1)](https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom/)
- [September/October links](https://nickrroberts.com/september-october-links-2/)
- [Brew report: Blonde Ale](https://nickrroberts.com/brew-report-german-pilsner-batch-11/)
- [July/August links](https://nickrroberts.com/july-august-links-2/)
- [May/June links](https://nickrroberts.com/may-june-links/)
- [Climbing Denali](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-denali/)
- [Notes from learning to brew beer](https://nickrroberts.com/notes-from-learning-how-to-brew-beer/)
- [January/February links](https://nickrroberts.com/january-february-links/)
- [Ice climbing in Hyalite Canyon, Montana](https://nickrroberts.com/ice-climbing-in-hyalite-canyon/)
- [November/December links ](https://nickrroberts.com/november-december-links/)(from 2023)

**Videos**

- [Climbing Denali](https://youtu.be/9xmBo9OzmvA?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Scenes from New York Pt. 1](https://youtube.com/shorts/yem0%5FmEvNeE?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Scenes from New York Pt. 2](https://youtube.com/shorts/bOUK2vNUHoY?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Middle and South Teton single push](https://youtube.com/shorts/6Sery9kiv48?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Biggest trout of my life so far (South Fork, ID)](https://youtube.com/shorts/2U75Wh4q0BA?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Fly fishing the Pecos River, New Mexico](https://youtube.com/shorts/TBE9IgDZ9sU?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Summiting Denali](https://youtube.com/shorts/GhztVkGegIA?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [17,000ft camp on Denali, AK](https://youtube.com/shorts/49letYIYFcg?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [14,000ft camp on Denali, AK](https://youtube.com/shorts/ycqbTTbjQL4?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [11,000ft camp on Denali, AK](https://youtube.com/shorts/7boqJSxlwxI?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Landing on the Kahiltna Glacier, Denali](https://youtube.com/shorts/ZiuuLbrUj2A?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Late season laps on Taylor Mountain, WY](https://youtube.com/shorts/UZFY0WIkyfU?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Crusty day on Mt. Glory, WY](https://youtube.com/shorts/Lgl3wyf0Lts?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Heli skiing the Palisades Pt. 5](https://youtube.com/shorts/zmsPbFFX32g?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Heli skiing the Palisades Pt. 4](https://youtube.com/shorts/aGDW%5FUgWY2A?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Heli skiing the Palisades Pt. 3](https://youtube.com/shorts/6wFddQDd6Dw?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Heli skiing the Palisades Pt. 2](https://youtube.com/shorts/0xE8DKr1otU?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Heli skiing the Palisades Pt. 1](https://youtube.com/shorts/jReToFAwPVk?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Ice climbing in Hyalite Canyon, Montana](https://youtube.com/shorts/Ghl4ILjuD68?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)

### 💿 Long-form media consumption

**Books**: I've italicized books that I read in part but put down or come back to as reference. I've bolded books that I'd especially recommend. I didn't read as much this year.

- **Ocean's Echo, Everina Maxwell** \- great read.
- Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir - Entertaining; little sad at the ending.
- *Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds*  \- It's not bad at all, but going to come back to it.
- White Sun War, Mick Ryan - Interesting look at future warfare in an escalation scenario in the Taiwan Strait. Characters are super cardboardy but that's not really the point of the book.
- **For We Are Many, Dennis E. Taylor** \- Book two of the Bobaverse series. Delightful.
- **We are Legion (We are Bob), Dennis E. Taylor** \- good stuff. Entertaining. Like a more amusing *Ancillary Justice*.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien - read on Denali.
- Love is a Dog From Hell, Charles Bukowski - reading samples of poetry here and there. Bukowski is best paired with a beer.
- **The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin** \- Broken Earth Book 2\.
- **The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin** \- The Broken Earth Book 1\. Outstanding. The writing, dialogue and characters (pretty much everything) are so refreshing after Sanderson's high-schooler novel-writing style.
- *Well of Ascension, Brandon Sanderson* *(30%)*\- I find Sanderson's dialogue to be awful and the characters very cardboardy. I couldn't bear it and put it down.

**Film and TV**

- **Nosferatu** \- Gross yet excellent.
- **Severance, Season 1** \- Very compelling.
- Deadpool & Wolverine - Funny, messy.
- DiDi - Pretty good. Was hoping the main character, Chris, would experience a bit more redemption.
- **Coda** \- Excellent; was in tears.
- **Peanut Butter Falcon** \- Delightful; funny.
- Rewatch: **Warrior**, Gavin O'Connor - One of my faves.
- Rewatch: **The Witch** \- Robert Eggers' directorial debut film and it is fantastic, subtly creepy. Great Halloween watch.
- **Blade (1998)** \- Cheesy, but good fun. Hadn't seen it before.
- Beetlejuice (1988) - Watched because of the Halloween season. Very slapsticky; not funny. I was hoping for something more for this cult classic.
- **Blue Eye Samurai** \- Fantastic.
- **The Penguin** (Max) - Very good.
- **Fallout** (Amazon Prime) - Excellent.
- Rewatch: **The Matrix** \- Still amazing.
- Rewatch: **Deadpool 2** \- Also great.
- Rewatch: **Napoleon Dynamite** \- still very funny; very awkward.
- Rewatch: **Step Brothers** \- still very funny.
- The Bear, Season 3 - Not as compelling as the first two. It's pretty backward-looking and character-studyish.
- **Hit Man, Richard Linklater** \- Very good.
- Fall Guy - Fine.
- The Tourist (Netflix) - Alright. Pretty slow.
- *Argylle* \- We shut this one off early. Really terrible!
- **Sugar (Apple TV)** \- Excellent. Really cool LA noir throwback. Not a huge fan of the bizarre twist at the end of the third to last episode. Seems unnecessary.
- The Three Body Problem, Season 1 - A confusing and bizarro mess, but entertaining at points.
- Dream Scenario - A big-time bummer and not what I expected.
- The Green Knight - Hard to follow.
- Rewatch: **Dune Part One** \- Rewatch after seeing Part Two.
- **Dune Part Two** \- Fantastic. In my opinion, the Villaneuve Dune series is the best book to movie adaptation since *Lord of the Rings*.
- Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me - Rewatch.
- Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet - Intense French courthouse drama.
- Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos - That was a wild ride.
- **Tokyo Vice, Season 2** \- Excellent.
- **Tokyo Vice, Season 1** \- Like The Bear, this is another fascinating series that's been going a while that I only just discovered.
- Mad God (Phil Tippett) - One of the most lunatic films I've ever seen. It's a claymation horror show, but there are moments of intense beauty.
- Dodgeball - Rewatch. Still holds up, maybe not as funny as I remember.
- Reacher - The Amazon Prime show. It's so bad, but interesting enough to hold attention.
- Zoolander - Rewatch. Infinitely quotable.
- **American Beauty** \- Rewatch. Cringey, but so compelling. Bags are beautiful.
- Leave the World Behind - Solid. Ends super abruptly. Would recommend.
- True Detective: Night Country - Pretty good so far (on episode 2). Compelling. Still not living up to season 1 imo.
- **The Bear, Season 2** \- chef's kiss.
- **The Bear, Season 1** \- how did I sleep on this for so long? So well shot and acted. I love the underlying theme about striving for excellence.
- Saltburn - wild, intense, but pretty good in my opinion.

**Video games**

- **Thronefall** \- A very simple, lovingly-made indie game. Super addicting with fantastic artwork *(44.7 hours of play)*
- Skyrim Anniversary Edition with the Nolvus Ascension mod pack. It was fun to briefly rekindle an old flame, but it's overmodded for my taste with all of the effects, new items, new magic, and altered layouts for previously familiar places. While there are undeniable improvements over the original Skyrim, Nolvus still just feels like an unwieldy patchwork of indie Nexus Mods layered over a framework that is showing its age. *(7 hours)*
- **Subnautica** \- Love the craft/build system and sense of mystery as you explore an alien ocean world. *(11.6 hours)*
- Helldivers 2 - Okay. Not really a big fan of this style of game (online multiplayer shooter). Seems like it would appeal to *Call of Duty* fans looking for something a bit different. *(8.6 hours)*
- **Baldur's Gate 3** \- Excellent. One of the best games I've played. *(287 hours* 😲*)*

### ⛰️ 2024 in places

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-02-at-10.10.55-AM.png)

Overview: Covered a lot of US and British territory in 2024\. I made this with a custom Google Map that I had chatGPT create a KML file for based on the list below.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-02-at-10.04.51-AM.png)

Zoom in on the UK.

**December** 

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Maui, HI
- Victor, ID

**November**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Bisbee, AZ
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor, ID

**October**

- New York City, New York
- Victor, ID
- London, United Kingdom
- Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Inverness, United Kingdom
- Kingussie, United Kingdom
- Ardeonaig, United Kingdom
- Stirling, United Kingdom
- Edinburgh, United Kingdom

**September**

- Cambridge/Woodditton, United Kingdom
- Bangor, United Kingdom
- Holyhead, United Kingdom
- Beaumaris, United Kingdom
- Llandudno, United Kingdom
- Cambridge/Woodditton, United Kingdom
- London, United Kingdom
- Victor, ID

**August**

- Seattle, WA
- Victor, ID

**July**

- Santa Fe, NM
- Brooks Lake, Togwotee Pass, WY

**June**

- Victor, ID

**May**

- Anchorage, AK
- Talkeetna, AK
- Denali National Park, AK - Climbed the West Buttress route
- Talkeetna, AK
- Anchorage, AK

**April**

- Salt Lake City
- Victor, ID

**February - March**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT

**January**

- Bozeman, MT (Ice climbing in Hyalite: Genesis 1, The Hangover--2 pitches, The Dribbles--all 4 pitches, all while temps 0 to -30F)
- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT

## 2025 planning

While 2024 was one for the books, I was very stressed out during the close of the year, mostly due to the demands of starting a new job and learning the landscape in and around my company. 

I'm a fan of the computer scientist and writer, Cal Newport. In his book *Slow Productivity* he lays out three principles that I want to use to theme my approach to 2025:

1. Do fewer things
2. Work at a natural pace
3. Obsess over quality

I'm going to significantly cut back on the number and scope of my goals. No huge mountaineering objectives. No metrics around my myriad hobbies like brewing beer. I want to take on fewer creative projects. I want less distraction.

I've come up with four main personal themes for next year:

- **Stay fit**: Basically, continue what I'm doing exercise-wise. Target 4-5 hours of training each week. Try for three running/cardio sessions per week, two sessions of weight training.
- **Improve my craft**: Refine my approach to product strategy, get better at extracting insights from customers and prospects, get better at stakeholder alignment.
- **Build things by growing my technical skill**: Learn Javascript and system design more fully and make use of AI tooling to build projects on the side.
- **Continue writing**: Make videos and essays. Read more books to support this.

I set goals at the beginning of each week. These goals tend to ladder up to annual goals. So, another tactic I want to experiment with this year is reducing the volume of expectations I have of myself on the weekly level. I'm going to aim for, at most, one personal creative project or portion of a project (e.g. building a module of an app, writing an essay, editing a video), and one work project each week (e.g. building a metrics dash, working up a strategy doc, preparing a PRD, etc.). I liked this quote from Newport that captures the thinking behind this:

> Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.

\--From *Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout* 

## Goal summary for 2025

As always, this is a list of intentions, rather than a list of hard, inflexible commitments. See [here](https://nickrroberts.com/2023-tool-stack/) for more of the reasoning on that.

- Maintain a sleep quality of 75%+, sleep time 8+ hours average for all of 2025 *(Stay fit)*
- Do 250+ hours of training duration *(Stay fit)*
- Publish 10+ pieces of writing or video *(Continue writing)*
- Read 15+ books *(Continue writing)*
- Complete a Javascript course *(Build things by growing technical skill)*
- Launch a software-based side project – to give myself something to learn for *(Build things by growing technical skill)*

I have a couple other ones I didn't include here for privacy reasons. But each theme listed above in the planning section has at least one corresponding goal. 

Cheers to a new year!
### Down on the border
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/down-on-the-border/
Last updated: 2024-12-27T21:00:58.000Z
### Bisbee, AZ

I've written about Bisbee [before](https://nickrroberts.com/notes-from-copper-city/). It's the old copper-mining town-turned-New Age retreat near the border with Mexico. It stands next to enormous and silent open pit mines, terraced like inverted ziggurats. Remnant equipment from the decades of ore extraction is strewn about their edges. The surrounding hills are full of ominous mineshafts covered with corrugated metal. The architecture from the early 1900s stands largely untouched, but reinhabited by folks selling incense, crystals, and desert art.

It's also the hometown of my wife, Fiona. Whenever we visit, we like to walk around town with Fiona's dad, Mike. Mike, who has resided there since the 1970s with Joanne, Fiona's mom, knows every back alley; every brick of the rust-colored town. He likes to make little [movies](https://vimeo.com/sanpedroriver/videos?ref=nickrroberts.com) about them, enlisting random passersby to bring the old places to life. 

We spent the evening after Thanksgiving dinner snapping shots in the soft light. Pictured:

- Buddhist shrine on the hill
- The old Lyric theater (where apparently Elvis Presley once made an appearance)
- Hotel La More
- Subway street
- The Lavender Pit
- Evergreen Cemetery

Most of the photos in the section below are credit to Fiona Foster.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/12/DSC01952.jpg)

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### Naco and the border fence

I wouldn't call it a wall exactly. And for all of the media hoopla about the border and immigration in recent years, the vibe at the Naco checkpoint was remarkably sedate. A sense of routine permeated the atmosphere. We waved at the Mexican and American officials standing there with guns and they, for the most part, waved back. I received a curt shake of the head from one Mexican policeman in fatigues when I tried to take out my camera a little early. That's a no-go at the checkpoint I guess. 

Mike and I drove up and cast our eyes over the brown border line, which undulates across the hills and stretches far into the distance. Three large coils of concertina wire lace the fence.

We parked on the American side of the checkpoint and crossed via the pedestrian walkway. Mike took me to the Museo Sitio de Naco where its kind director explained the [Bombing of Naco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing%5Fof%5FNaco?ref=nickrroberts.com) during the 1929 Escobar Rebellion. "The bombing, although unintentional, is noted for being the first aerial bombardment of the continental United States by a foreign power in history." 

Mike live-translated for me. Afterward, we stopped in for some delicious carne asada at Asadero los Molcajetes.

On the way home we took at look at the former Camp Naco. [Buffalo Soldiers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo%5FSoldier?ref=nickrroberts.com) were stationed here from 1911 to 1924\. Now, the abandoned structures are being rehabilitated as part of a big grant [project](https://savingplaces.org/stories/preserving-camp-naco?ref=nickrroberts.com) by the City of Bisbee.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/12/Screenshot-2024-12-01-at-11.59.33-AM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/12/Screenshot-2024-12-01-at-12.00.08-PM.png)

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### Bike touring through the United Kingdom
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom/
Last updated: 2025-02-08T18:31:11.000Z
### **Conquering jet lag with booze**

09/18/24 - 09/19/24

You pack *economically* when cycling around a foreign country for three weeks. I brought a 30-liter bag over to the UK. It’s a cool little [system](https://twowheelgear.com/products/pannier-backpack-convertible-plus?variant=40459326685244&ref=nickrroberts.com) that converts into a pannier you can hang from a rack on the bike.

Going so light for so long makes it feel like an adventure by itself. The sense of “I’ll just figure it out” if something’s missing. But I’m always surprised by how little I need on a trip. How disgustingly few pairs of underwear I can get away with.

I wanted to be disciplined on this go round. I was at least 30 pounds overburdened on the Denali climb in Alaska this year with gear or food that never emerged from my pack. I heard Mark Twight, the climber, once say on a podcast: “’What if’ weighs a lot.” Can confirm.

I’m new to bike touring as a method of travel, but my buddy Nic swears by it. You can move around like you’re in a car, but you can transfigure yourself into a pedestrian or pop onto a train whenever you choose. It’s minimalist and flexible.

I boarded a plane in Jackson Hole in the rain. The clouds shrouded the Tetons, which normally loom over the airfield like angry gods.

My flight to Heathrow connected in Salt Lake City. I sat next to a Mormon realtor from the Ogden area on his way to a bachelor party in Scotland. A sober, eight-day golf trip up at St. Andrews. We chatted for a while about growing up in Utah. He asked for a coke from the flight attendant. I got a Prosecco and the conversation died down after that.

I didn’t sleep much on the way over. My mind kept chewing on things like my impending job switch, and the general exhilaration of what I was doing. I felt very free.

When we landed my brain worked slowly to navigate my body through Heathrow’s winding corridors leading to the passport checkpoint. It feels like all international flights plonk you into an endless maze of weird tunnels at your destination. You don’t know whether it’s light or dark outside. They’re the backrooms of the airport. The parts only interdimensional beings and travelers from abroad get to see.

I took the Piccadilly line into downtown, but got to my hotel next to Waterloo station too early to check in. So I putzed around and walked over to the Thames, dodging other American tourists gawking at the Houses of Parliament. I drank a few cocktails in the lobby of the Ruby Lucy to stay awake. My tried and true approach to beating jet lag is to imbibe just enough alcohol and caffeine to make it to a normal bedtime on the first night. Like a Four Loko by other means. It sets my circadian rhythm right the fastest way that I’ve found.

I did dinner at a place called Love Sushi on Lower Marsh street. I brought back a couple maki rolls and wolfed them down while tucked into the hotel room bed, being careful not to sprinkle soy sauce on the white duvet.

### **Brixton with Ed**

09/20/24

I slept for 12 hours. I wasn’t sure if I felt rested, but I’d made it to 8:00am and I was proud.

I tied on my shoes and wobbled out to the street where it was already loud with traffic and the light very bright. My first mission was to find a full English breakfast. I would end up surviving on these for the rest of the trip. I settled in at a place called Balance.

The English breakfast is not everyone’s slice of toast. It’s a heavy, meaty ensemble consisting of back bacon, black pudding (blood sausage), breakfast sausage, fried eggs, buttered toast, beans, mushrooms, a potato hash brown, and a roasted tomato to make you feel better about yourself. I love it to death. The flavors and the smell remind me of growing up in the English countryside. It’s also nice that I’m not hungry again until well into the afternoon after I eat one of these platters.

Very full, I walked over to the bike shop and picked up my ride for the next three weeks: A Trek hybrid touring design. I rented an extra pannier for a bit more storage capacity.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/11/image-2-1.png)

The plan for later was to meet my old pal Ed for lunch down in Brixton. Ed and I are part of a friend group originating from Newmarket, a town up near Cambridge. My mom enrolled my sister and me in the British education system while my dad was stationed in the UK with the US Air Force. As a kid, it made me feel like England was my country too. Whereas life on US military bases abroad is like being in a tiny version of America. They have Burger Kings and Taco Bells. You might as well be in Kansas for all you know of the world beyond the fence. It was through primary and middle school that I built this lasting network of English pals, like Ed, many of whom I’ve dropped into a WhatsApp group called “Transatlantic Alliance.” I send them pictures of my dogs.

My original intent for this morning was to meet up with the journalists who run the *Ukraine: The Latest* podcast at The Daily Telegraph, which I’ve been following religiously since February of 2022\. I had a whole plan to swing by their offices in Westminster to say hello, but my contact there who runs the podcast program figured out the day before it was actually against the paper’s policy to host rando fans for visits. Disappointing, but made sense from a security point of view since they talk a lot of shit on Putin.

Foiled, I decided to take my bike for a spin through the classic touristy sites around the city. I cycled over to Buckingham Palace, Regent’s Park, Trafalgar Square, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and the past the London Eye. I’m really not one for hordes of tourists, but I loved the movement. Ducking and weaving through people and cars. The noise and newness of the city. The breeze on my face. The refreshing tranquility of the quiet side streets, when I found them.

It’s a rush to merge with British traffic on the left side of the road. I watched other cyclists for cues on when to stop and go. In every country, the rules always seem flexible for people on bikes. There are times when you abide the traffic laws, like when there’s a cop watching, and other times where you flout them, like to seize the opportunity to get across an intersection on a red light.

London was warm and unusually sunny. By the time I showed up at lunch at The Laundry, basically an Edwardian laundromat refurbed into a chic bistro, my tee shirt was pretty damp. Running late, I charged down Kennington and Brixton roads from north Lambeth on the bike. The host let me store it behind the front gate, where I had to step over some potted plants. Ed, who I haven’t seen in person since 2008, waved me down from a table he’d claimed out front. We hugged, and I apologized for my sweaty state. He waved it off, beaming. The guy looked very put-together. Nice watch. An instantaneously welcoming demeanor.

Ed works as a wine distributer to restaurants and bars all over London. And he’s man about town these days. He seemed to know many of the staff at The Laundry and paused to ask them about themselves, how business was going. He was clearly plying his trade. I could tell he was good at it too.

He ordered a couple sauvignon blancs for us and proceeded to rattle off the flavor notes like a somme. As he was speaking, I was trying to reconcile my memory of the kid I hung out with in our primary school yard, where we’d play soccer with a rock, with the well-spoken wine merchant before me.

It happened to be Ed’s birthday and he had the day off from work, which is why he could wile away the afternoon with a disheveled and unemployed American. He had a dinner later planned by Alice, his girlfriend, but he wanted to show me around the Brixton scene beforehand.

Brixton is a wild place. Lively, eclectic, and incredibly diverse. After England found itself in ruins after World War II, the government encouraged members of far flung parts of the commonwealth, particularly the Caribbean, to come to London and help rebuild. So the street art, the food, the open-air markets all pulse with completely different energy than the rest of the city.

Ed pointed out Electric Avenue, immortalized in the Eddy Grant [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtPk5IUbdH0&ref=nickrroberts.com), which is a stone’s throw away from The Laundry. It’s full of street vendors. Beautiful brick terraces bend away from you as you gaze down the road.

We strolled through Brixton Market over to Pop Brixton, a venue walled in by colorfully-painted shipping containers. Inside is a large sitting area containing a bunch of tiny bars and food purveyors. My immediate thought was that this place would make for an excellent fortress during the zombie apocalypse.

After a few beers in the container bars, Ed took me to the Trinity Arms. We found a spot in the smoky back courtyard, and suddenly, Alice appeared behind Ed, giving him a big hug. She’d tracked us down on our bar crawl and greeted me with the same warmth as Ed.

We lingered for a while, chatting over our drinks. When it was time for them to leave for their reservation, I bid Ed and Alice farewell and wished them a wonderful evening together.

I coasted back to my hotel on fumes and beer, picking up a couple more orders of sushi on the way. I think I forgot to brush my teeth as I drifted off to sleep.

### Back to the Shire

09/21/24

If everything worked out, I’d be back today in Woodditton, the village where I spent so much time in my childhood. I felt a little apprehensive as I pedaled across the Blackfriars Bridge in the direction of King’s Cross. I saw Woodditton most recently 11 years ago and I wondered what time had tampered with in the interim. It can be dangerous returning to a place with so much significance to yourself.

Fiona and I drove through Lubbock, Texas, a couple of years ago on our way to New Orleans. That dusty town was home to my grandparents and great-uncle Art for decades. They’ve all since passed away, but the house my grandfather built on 94th street is still there. The exterior had been given a fresh coat of white paint when we drove by. It looked good, but I really hoped the new owners would stop there, lest they erase too much of what I remember. They may have purchased it, but it was still my family’s home in spirit.

I skirted through quiet and bike-friendly alleys, my panniers clanking on the frame with bumps in the asphalt, echoing off the buildings enclosing the street. Then, suddenly, my route dumped me onto Euston Road, which is loud and packed with traffic. Immediately I saw a man narrowly escape being hit by a car while trying to cross.

King’s Cross, which has a functional Victorian aesthetic, sits in stark contrast to St. Pancras station next door. St. Pancras is much more captivating, with its Gothic ornamentation and imposing clocktower. So many tiny details to take in. A large hotel forms the façade along the south side, adorned with arched windows ribboned with bricks alternating in color, and a steep, pointed roof. I wished my train to Cambridge departed from there. Instead, I wheeled my bike into King’s Cross.

I found the British rail system tough to understand at first. I bought a “Super Off-Peak Single” ticket, but I wasn’t sure if I was riding at peak hours, which you’re discouraged from doing by the booking website if you have a bike. No one seemed to care when I showed up with it. I had a hard time finding my platform. Then I had a hard time finding the bike carriage, where they have the racks you can use while in transit. I probably looked like such a tourist darting up and down the boarding area.

When I found the place where the bikes go, the racks were completely full. So, I pulled one of my panniers off, tossed it on the floor, and sat on it. I minded my bike, leaning on its kickstand, so it wouldn’t fall into anyone as the train pulled out of the station.

Soon we were in the countryside. Sprawling golden fields containing bales of hay that looked like crunchy fruit rollups.

We didn’t go into London all that much when my family lived here, so my understanding of the city and its layout is all the product of the last couple of trips I took there as an adult. But this I remember in my bones: The patchwork of fields interspersed with flint houses; the hues of yellow and brown stretching off into the distance; the small, wooded copses; and the unkempt, dark green hedgerows.

I transferred to a line running to Newmarket when I arrived in Cambridge. A rowdy bunch of college-aged kids boarded behind me, smelling powerfully of cologne and perfume and saying “fuck” a lot.

We arrived at Newmarket’s tiny train station and I dashed off with my bike as fast as I could. These more rural stops are given palpably less attention from the conductor.

As I steered my way onto the street and took a left onto Woodditton road, memories flooded back. We took countless trips up and down this pavement in my Mom’s 1990-something white Volvo sedan. This was the way to school and the way home every day for years.

By god do the cars whizz by. I remember it being a kind of slow road, but cars passed me on my bike at what seemed like 80 miles an hour. I thought about dying here on this thoroughfare as I pedaled. That it would be some kind of cosmic joke to come full circle and get smushed.

I’d made a promise to myself to stop off at Woodditton Church and pay my respects before going into the village proper. Many of the older people we knew as neighbors during my childhood years are now gone and buried in the cemetery there. I strode through the headstones and conjured up the memory of each person in turn as I read their names. I unintentionally stayed for long time because I had trouble locating Nigel, a grandfather figure to me, and his wife Shirley. I discovered it was because they didn’t have a headstone. Instead, a tiny wooden cross affixed with a brass plaque marked their resting place. I’d missed it on several passes down the row. The small marker made me sad.

I rallied myself, grabbed my bike next to the gate to the church yard, and continued into the village. The esoteric Woodditton sign that Nigel made is still there on the intersection of Vicarage Lane and Ditton Green. It sort of looks like an atom sitting on top of a half-submerged set of wagon wheels...I don’t know.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/11/image-1.png)

Taking in the scene, I rode slowly to The Three Blackbirds, the village pub-turned-boutique-hotel. The place burned down in 2018\. From [the photos](https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/business/20720934.historic-rural-pub-rises-ashes---two-years-devastating-fire/?ref=nickrroberts.com), it looked unrecoverable. But a holding company called Chestnut Group picked it up and brought it back to life much as I remembered it, only way more bourgeois. The cheapest room I could find was still pricey, but stylishly done and cozy. 

Back around 1999, the place was kind of a dive. I remember it being dimly-lit, the smell of fried food and cigarettes wafting out of the bar. Nigel, who played the odd role of being both our landlord and family babysitter, took me there frequently when I was kid. We'd take a table out front and he'd tell me stories of when he was my age growing up in the area during the war. I'd sip on a ginger beer and he'd have an ale. 

While I checked in, I looked over the menu at the bar and wondered what Nigel would say about a six-pound pint of bitter.

I hauled my bike into my room in the “barn” out back and then returned to the pub to order a beer and wait for Oli.

[*Part Two*](https://nickrroberts.com/bike-touring-through-the-united-kingdom-2/)*.*
### September/October links
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/september-october-links-2/
Last updated: 2024-11-02T17:02:08.000Z
I quit my former job in early September and found myself with about a month before my next start date. 

My friend Nic B. is hot on [bike touring](https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/introduction-to-bike-touring.html?ref=nickrroberts.com), and he convinced me to give it a try during my job gap. You have the luxury of moving at near-car speeds, but you have the option to become a pedestrian or hop on a train whenever you want. All you need is a pannier or two with some clothes, food, water, and a bike lock, and you’re off. It’s a flexible and minimalist way to see a new place.

So, I rented a bike in London and rode around the UK for three weeks from mid-September to early October. I went partly to reconnect with a group of old friends from when my family lived near Cambridge for five years during my childhood, while my dad was stationed at RAF Lakenheath and Mildenhall with the Air Force. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/11/IMG_2760.JPG)

My steed. I put 400+ miles on this thing.

I also wanted to see the country through my 32-year-old eyes and update my understanding of it. You conceive of your childhood places in a kind of mystical way–or at least I do. Every part of the area where I grew up near Newmarket seemed much smaller than I remember. My friend Oliver and I laughed about how, as kids, we’d play in the woods, feeling like we were miles away from home. Revisiting those old haunts now, we realized we’d never actually ventured more than a few hundred yards.

I wended my way through Cambridge, across to Anglesey in Wales, and then up to the highlands in Scotland, mixing in trains for long hauls. It's marvelously easy these days to get around a foreign country with essentially nothing more than an iPhone and a passport. I tapped to pay for the trains, for food, for beers. And I navigated around using a great little app called [Komoot](https://www.komoot.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com), which I would recommend to anyone (it finds the most bike-friendly way to get from point A to point B, even if the routes are slightly longer than sticking with high-traffic roads). 

Anyhow, more writing and videos to follow about this trip.

### **From the past couple months**

From me:

- Scenes from New York Pt. 1 \[[Short video](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yem0%5FmEvNeE?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Scenes from New York Pt. 2 \[[Short video](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bOUK2vNUHoY?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Middle and South Teton single push \[[Short video](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6Sery9kiv48?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

A tribute to David Knowles (aged 32), one of the hosts of the Telegraph’s *Ukraine: The Latest* podcast who passed away tragically on September 8\. I’ve been listening almost every day since February of 2022 and I will miss his voice \[[Link](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/09/david-knowles-journalist-telegraph-dies-ukraine-war-podcast/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

A Washington Post series on unseen, yet exceptional, people in government. I found myself deeply invested in this man’s journey to make coal mines more safe \[[Link](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

NotebookLM AI podcast hosts realize that they’re not real and have a meltdown. *For some context here:* [*NotebookLM*](https://notebooklm.google.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) *is a new offering from Google that lets you upload media (like a PDF) and turn it into a podcast where two artificial hosts discuss the content* \[[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1frk1gi/notebooklm%5Fpodcast%5Fhosts%5Fdiscover%5Ftheyre%5Fai%5Fnot/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Changed my life in one day with another AI tool called Granola. I'm in a lot of meetings for my job and it's a constant battle between paying attention to what people are saying and writing notes. I constantly forget specifics or action items. Granola takes care of all of that for you. I also like the super clean note-taking interface, and that you can go back to meetings and query the chatbot about specifics the notes don't cover \[[Link](https://www.granola.ai/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Just a delightful little video \[[Link](https://vimeo.com/jonatanschwenk/zoon?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] 

A YouTube channel dedicated to historical video game world records and how they were achieved \[[Link](https://youtube.com/@summoningsalt?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] 

Lord of the Rings, ruined by AI \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdZEtPmaL9k&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

A British guy hitchhikes through Xinjiang. This was a channel I unearthed during my long train rides across England. I found myself a bit envious watching him, since it made my solo adventure through a pretty safe, English-speaking country seem kind of bland in comparison \[[Link](https://youtu.be/gAP5fcOCChw?si=ANxC1OG-rHlHLhry&ref=nickrroberts.com)\] 

Play Green Day's *Dookie* album on your toothbrush \[[Link](https://www.dookiedemastered.com/?ueid=1667219accf240a1e01116a1a8c395c2&ref=nickrroberts.com)\] 

A syllabus for generalists \[[Link](https://syllabusproject.org/a-syllabus-for-generalists/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] 

The `.io` top level domain so beloved by tech startups may be in jeopardy after Britain relinquished sovereignty of the Chagos Islands (formerly, the British Indian Ocean Territory) \[[Link](https://every.to/p/the-disappearance-of-an-internet-domain?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Aviation in Talkeetna. I rode with K2 during my climb of Denali in May! It's a beautiful little tribute to flying around the Alaska Range (*Via my friend Sam D*) \[[Link](https://youtu.be/m8A4frNzJfY?si=dZ7fd50wbZ5uDV0l&ref=nickrroberts.com)\] 

The booming psychedelic industry for middle class women \[[Link](https://www.thefp.com/p/female-psychedelic-users-ketamine-mushroom-mommies?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] 

Google on the difference between sauces and dressings \[[Link](https://www.platformer.news/google-search-chief-quits-gemini-ai-reshuffle/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] 

![Google shuffles the search deck](https://www.platformer.news/content/images/size/w1200/2024/10/unnamed.png)
### Brew report: Blonde Ale
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/brew-report-german-pilsner-batch-11/
Last updated: 2024-11-09T19:01:09.000Z
Brew date: August 4, 2024

Fermentation time: 3 days

First pour date: August 14, 2024

### Summary

Not among the favorites I've brewed, but very "quaffable," as the recipe says. I made this batch specifically for the quick turnaround to have it ready for some visiting guests in mid-August. But, I wasn't in love with the final product. First taste is a little on the tart side, followed by a very bready note on the back. This has by far been the longest it's taken to get through a keg on my tap (about 2 months). Haven't noticed much change as it's conditioned. 

Since I don't have a lot of experience appreciating beers in the [Blonde Ale](https://www.bjcp.org/style/2015/18/18A/blonde-ale/?ref=nickrroberts.com) category, I couldn't decide whether the level of breadiness in this batch was an off-flavor or within style. I suspect that my very brief fermentation with the two packs of Nottingham dry ale yeast may have created a kind of unfinished quality. The beer reached final gravity in 2 days (!) and then I let it continue for another day before transferring to the keg and carbonating for 10 days. Outside of the bread flavor, however, I think it mostly came in on style, based on the BJCP 18A guidelines for Blondes. 

The color is lovely: a bright and slightly hazy golden. 

Variables I would change: Longer fermentation, perhaps just a single packet of Nottingham and/or lower fermentation temperature, e.g. 65F and see if this mitigates the bread flavor. I don't think I'm in a rush to brew another in this category however. I just prefer crisp lagers and higher point ales with more hop character.

I followed this [recipe](https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/centennial-blonde-simple-4-all-grain-5-10-gall.42841/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

### Recipe specifics

Vitals:

- Original gravity: 1.039
- Final Gravity: 1.006
- ABV: 4.3%
- SRM: 3.9

Mash:

- Mash in: 150F for 60 mins
- Mash out: 167F for 10 mins

Boil: 60 mins

Water: Tap water 

- 7.4 gallons total
- 3.76 gallons strike
- 3.64 gallons sparge

Grain Bill:

- 2-row pale malt: 7lb
- Carapils: 0.75lb
- Vienna malt: 0.5lb
- Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L: 0.5lb

Hop Bill:

- Centennial: 0.25oz @ 55 mins boil
- Centennial: 0.25oz @ 35 mins boil
- Cascade: 0.25oz @ 20 mins boil
- Cascade: 0.25oz @ 5 mins boil

Yeast: Lallemand Dry Nottingham yeast x2 11.5g packets

Fermentation: 3 days @ 67F 

Carbonation: Approx. 2.5 volumes. 11.5 psi @ 38F for 10 days.
### July/August links
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/july-august-links-2/
Last updated: 2024-10-31T19:58:11.000Z
With the Denali climb complete, my focus has shifted elsewhere. Turns out you get a lot of time back when you're not preparing for an expedition! We spiffed up the backyard, and brewed several kegs of beer for the Fourth of July. I've also been fly fishing as much as I can. It's one of those beautiful and short-lived things about summer in the Tetons. The rivers are serene, warm, and chock-full of hungry trout.

Separately, I was inspired by [this piece](https://www.platformer.news/ai-productivity-apps-capacities-raycast-readwise/?ref=nickrroberts.com) from Casey Newton to take another look at my productivity setup. I've tried not to heed the siren call of #productivity culture for a long time (I've realized it actually often distracts from *doing* to focus so much on process and apps), but I made a few changes that work well:

- Shifted to Notion as my main personal note-taking and organizational database. I store all my weekly, yearly, etc. checklists in here, along with links for this newsletter. (Related: If you are curious about my approach to personal goal setting and organization, I wrote about that [here](https://nickrroberts.com/2023-tool-stack/)). I've grown to love the writing experience in Notion, since I use it daily for work. I tried [Capacities](https://capacities.io/?ref=nickrroberts.com), but I found it to be overly complex, though I do think the "object-model for everything in your life" is a cool concept. The built-in relationship graph is intriguing. But I didn't want to invest the time up front to make it useful.
- Notion has a new [calendar offering](https://www.notion.so/product/calendar?ref=nickrroberts.com) too that has a lot of nice little features that I'm trying out. E.g. auto-blocking time across calendars, scheduling links, easy ways to peek at co-workers calendars for scheduling, and also integrations with Notion databases so you can pull in timeline-based events or tasks.
- I like to focus on one task on one window on my computer at a time and try not to leave that context until the job is done. I've found having email, Notion, Jira, GPT and other myriad tabs open on my browser causes me to flip constantly between things. I find I do this less when I have to tab between desktop apps. I don't know why, but it works! So, I've been transitioning to desktop apps like the [chatGPT client](https://openai.com/chatgpt/mac/?ref=nickrroberts.com). Option + Space opens a little overlay over whatever you're doing like Apple's Spotlight, and you can ask a quick question without leaving your flow. Like most everyone, I've converted to using GPT in place of Google for most searches, code help, etc. I still refuse to let it write stuff like this newsletter for me though.
- Continuing the theme: Desktop Gmail client. Google doesn't actually make one, but you can just open Safari, go to Gmail, click the share option, and then "Add to dock" and it functions pretty much like any other MacOS app. I then trimmed down the UI by toggling off settings like Meet and Chat and went for a minimalist look.
- I followed a link in Newton's article to David Pierce's Installer blog. The "Screen share" section in [this piece](https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/25/24226795/best-smartphone-photos-2024-hollywood-hack-blink-twice-installer?ref=nickrroberts.com) encouraged me to take another look at my iPhone organization. I now have a single screen of apps, folderized into categories, with a few big widgets that correspond to my desktop: A big one for my [Things](https://culturedcode.com/things/?ref=nickrroberts.com) daily to-dos (there's a lot of functionality I like here that I can't yet replicate in Notion), a smaller one for my Week checklist in Notion, and then another small tile for my Notion Calendar. Feels nice.

Anyhow, onto the links!

### **From the past couple months**

From me:

- Catching a big trout on the South Fork, ID \[[Short video](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2U75Wh4q0BA?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Fishing the Pecos River, New Mexico \[[Short video](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TBE9IgDZ9sU?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

On the goodness of standardizing people & comms & values while leaving other things purposely unstandardized at your company \[[Link](https://open.substack.com/pub/staysaasy/p/standardizing)\]

What a GPT actually is (nice visual explanation) \[[Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

This music video is rad but must have been incredibly labor-intensive to make; some really cool architectural shots that remind me a bit of Takashi Ito \[[Video](https://youtu.be/n-wEvzqdDZg?si=v1j%5FAGYJoyBOmvx3&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

How people spend their time \[[Link](https://ourworldindata.org/time-use?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

How fungi created life on land \[[Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-hS4HoW5fM&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Nanoscapes \[[Video](https://youtu.be/VV5ES9zw7zc?si=1ODPdl6hxkfN9buO&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The Korean DMZ at 70 \[[](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-dmz-at-70?ref=nickrroberts.com)[Link](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-dmz-at-70-3?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The XBox video game, *Halo*, but on the Gameboy Color. *I thought this was so cool.* \[[Video](https://youtu.be/u0mahLOEDjU?si=Wq%5FS8PbkMyszeVjg&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Children of Russian sleeper agents learn that they're actually Russian. *This is something out of the Cold War. Kudos to my buddy Rob G. for pointing this one out*. \[[Link](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-says-an-fsb-agent-deep-cover-russian-sleeper-agents-among-those-returned-2024-08-02/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The Torment Nexus. *Heh, so true*. \[[Tweet](https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?lang=en&lang=en&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

How Yeti coolers were invented \[[Short video](https://youtube.com/shorts/P6WTg6RGtoA?si=POCeSOyvg4HKAEg5&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Be nice to ChatGPT \[[Short video](https://youtube.com/shorts/TwPFDbuBLcc?si=WhjEs1VudW0tAZqx&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
### May/June links
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/may-june-links/
Last updated: 2024-07-08T14:22:16.000Z
It's been a while since I sent an ol' link roundup. Taking a month off the grid in AK threw a wrench in my content calendar. But we're back now, if not a little groggy after the Fourth of July weekend. 

### **From the past couple months**

From me:

- My writeup on Denali + gear recommendations and lessons learned \[[Link](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-denali/)\]
- Full edit of the Denali climb \[[Link](https://youtu.be/9xmBo9OzmvA?si=GiTDSyDoxVoMuhhT&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- If that's too long, I made a bunch of Shorts on the climb [here](https://www.youtube.com/@nickrrob/shorts?ref=nickrroberts.com)

On the goodness of dumb plans. "*My toddler and I share the same aesthetics when it comes to our plans: A picture or two, not too many words, and those few words aren’t very long.*" \[[Link](https://blog.staysaasy.com/p/i-like-dumb-plans?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison’s post on fast build projects throughout history \[[Link](https://patrickcollison.com/fast?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

This is still one of my favorite documentaries and I hope to make something of this caliber during my lifetime \[[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmrufRLGdAk&t=261s&ref=nickrroberts.com)[Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmrufRLGdAk&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Kayaking through a glacier in Svalbard. *Really cool sound* \[[Link](https://youtu.be/sQ9RRmt9XcA?si=NhijQ7JY078UW3p-&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Diving through a cumulus cloud \[[Link](https://youtu.be/gCjqB%5FkB%5FqM?si=AHWrov9kHE7Gs7tN&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

How to travel correctly. "*Assign yourself highly personalized and esoteric errands.*" \[[Link](https://shoreleave.substack.com/p/like-shining-from-shook-foil)\]

How much can you really learn about a country by visiting it? \[[Link](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-much-can-you-really-learn-about?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The moral economy of the Shire \[[Link](https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/05/31/the-moral-economy-of-the-shire/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Putin the fanatic \[[Link](https://open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/putin-the-fanatic)\]

Life in the Ukrainian trenches \[[Link](https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-russian-invasion-a-visit-to-the-ukrainian-troops-in-the-trenches-on-the-front-a-b382bd59-8cbd-443c-9e7b-e1877d7e4a5b?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

How to win a homebrew competition \[[Link](https://vinepair.com/articles/homebrew-competition-expert-guide/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

How to communicate danger to a humanity 10,000 years into the future \[[Link](https://aeon.co/essays/only-the-deep-past-can-make-sense-of-terrifying-nuclear-futures?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The Crash at Crush. *When a publicity stunt goes horribly wrong.* \[[Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash%5Fat%5FCrush?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

We have come far from the 1984 *Dune* special effects \[[Link](https://youtu.be/KYUolurihOQ?si=DzzANByXLK1ypVth&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Slapping as sport \[[Link](https://youtu.be/t3XTTiUcHtU?si=WsLp0SLvlnkTDOJ9&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
### Climbing Denali
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-denali/
Last updated: 2024-10-31T19:58:53.000Z
> The West Buttress of McKinley \[Denali\], it is often said, has all the technical challenges of a long walk in the snow. That is more or less true, but it's also true that if you should, say, trip on a bootlace at the wrong moment during that walk, you will probably die.

—Jon Krakauer, Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

For me, this all started two years ago in Wyoming. Along with my dad and a good friend, I signed up for a climb of the Grand Teton, which felt like another type of tourism while we passed through Jackson Hole. I didn’t intend for this side quest to go any further than that, but the mountains have a way of pulling you in.

As you climb more, bigger peaks and more challenging routes call to you. It can get you into trouble. But, when a hard ascent works out, you often discover you can take a lot more pain and difficulty than you imagined. That feeling of overcoming is incredibly gratifying and addictive. Summiting and descending the Grand made me feel like I passed a test of self, and I wanted more. 

On the descent, I walked next to a guide named Pete and I asked him what mountains people go for after the Grand. "Ever heard of Denali?" he asked. "If you're serious about this stuff, that's what I'd set your sights on. Tallest peak in North America. It's a good idea to get some practice on glaciers beforehand though; it's a different style of climb." As soon as I got home, I started mapping out a plan.

The Cascades Range, which runs through Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, is where many climbers train up for Denali, myself included. While it’s pretty much impossible to simulate the weather in Alaska in the Lower 48, you can log a lot of time on glaciers there. I completed the Ingraham Direct on Rainier, Hotlum-Bolum on Shasta, the Easton Glacier of Baker, and the Sulphide Glacier route on Shuksan. In September, I signed up for the May 5, 2024, West Buttress Denali expedition through RMI. 

You’ll find a lot of debate online around the value or necessity of a guide on this mountain. Personally, it was an easy decision: Guided teams have higher summit success rates than unguided teams on Denali , mostly because they’re equipped to make better decisions and they have experience with the conditions, which are some of the most notoriously brutal in the world. In the week before I left for Alaska, the summit temps were routinely -80 Fahrenheit with wind chill. 

But there are factors that steer even inexperienced climbers away from guide services. You don’t know who’s in your group or their abilities, you don’t have control over many of the logistics or the pace, and you’re not on equal footing with the guides since they’re always calling the shots. It’s just part of the deal. But the added safety margin that comes with a service outweighed all of this for me, especially for my first time in the range.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-28-at-7.55.20-AM.png)

I pieced gear together during the months leading up to the climb. A few days before, I laid it all out on the floor and inventoried it with a checklist many, many times. Most people end up with two very large duffles of gear and a backpack, like me. If you’re more efficient than I was, like some of my teammates, you can squeeze your backpack into a duffle and consolidate to two. I had in excess of 100 pounds of gear and food, and I kept wondering how I was going to lug this all up on the climb. There’s no such thing as a porter on Denali. 

I set off on the morning of May 4\. Salt Lake, to Seattle, to Anchorage. It felt like a homecoming.

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I was born in Anchorage on Elmendorf Air Force Base, where my dad flew fighters in the 90s. I kept thinking about how this climb, the biggest endeavor of my life to date, was taking me full circle, back to my roots. On the journey up to Talkeetna, we would pass Eagle River, the site of my parent’s first house as a married couple. My dad would tell me stories about dogfight practice above Denali in his F-15\. Sure enough, we’d later see the F-22s that replaced those squadrons doing the same thing. 

I stayed at the Lakefront Hotel so I could be close to the airport, where I’d rendezvous with the team for the first time the next day. The Lakefront immediately lets you know you’re in Alaska, with a wide array of taxidermy and guns on display, and, of course, float planes in the backyard. This seaplane base on Lake Hood is the largest in the world. 

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Lake Hood plane parking

At 1:00pm the next day, I met the team at baggage Carousel 1 back at the airport. We loaded our gear into the shuttle trailer and set off for Talkeetna, which is the traditional staging area for Denali climbs. After a pitstop in Wasilla for some last-minute groceries, we arrived at K2 Aviation and unloaded our gear into the hangar. The most common way of beginning the climb is to fly onto the Kahiltna Glacier.

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Our group stayed at the Swiss Alaska Inn, which is a wonderful, family-owned operation down the road. The rooms are basic but comfortable. 

We grabbed food at Denali Brewing in town and then ventured over to the Susitna River to see if we could get a look at Denali. It was partially obscured in clouds, but you could still get a sense of its enormous scale, compared to everything around it.

The next morning dawned rainy. Not a flying day. This didn’t phase me much, because I’d read that three to four days of waiting for a weather window in Talkeetna was pretty customary. 

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We walked back to the hangar at K2 to start organizing the group gear. I popped over to K2’s main office to buy a few souvenirs before I forgot, and I was surprised to find a framed hat and letter from Rob Hall. Hall passed away while guiding on Everest in 1996 in an infamous disaster that claimed the lives of seven other people, and he was one of the main personalities featured in Jon Krakauer’s *Into Thin Air*, which documented the tragedy. Hall apparently climbed all of the Seven Summits while wearing this very ball cap.

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We received a very short briefing from Alan, a climbing ranger with the Park Service. I was expecting a fire and brimstone speech about the dangers of Denali, but his message boiled down to “listen to your team lead.” This made some sense, as Alan himself was trained by our lead guide, Mike Walter, prior to him joining the Park Service. We’d later regularly see Alan and his crew of volunteers at work on search and rescue.

The next morning, our third day in Talkeetna, the sky cleared of clouds. We were buzzing with optimism about our chances of flying onto the glacier. We had to wait a while for a signal from K2\. The weather is squirrely. It can be beautiful in Talkeetna while blizzards rage at Basecamp on the Kahiltna.

The air service has to weigh all of your stuff to make sure they’re within capacity limits. My sled duffle weighed in at 68 pounds, with something like 40 more in my backpack. In retrospect, this was way too much. But it’s hard to know exactly what you’re getting into with an adventure like this, so I erred on the side of more than I thought I’d need.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/06/IMG_5579.jpeg)

Credit: Sara Myers

K2 tends to fly climbers onto the Kahiltna using DeHavilland Otters, which are turboprops that can carry an astonishing amount of weight and have the power to weave around the beautiful and treacherous terrain we were heading into. Our pilot gave us a quick briefing and let me sit in the co-pilot seat, which is equipped with its own rudder pedals and yoke. I resisted the urge to test them out. 

The flight over the tundra and onto the Kahiltna is like nothing I’ve ever experienced in an airplane. You shave close to jagged peaks and catch a bird’s eye view of some of the longest glaciers in the world, sliced through with crevasses. Off in the distance, I sighted the Moose’s Tooth, and I was again reminded of the historical weight of this place. Bradford Washburn, who pioneered aerial photography in the Alaska Range, scouted the West Buttress route from the air and led its first expedition in 1951\. 

After landing, which was remarkably gentle, considering we touched down on a glacier using skis, we shuttled gear from the plane onto the hill next to the airstrip. 

Mike decided we’d spend the night at Basecamp. We stomped out a platform and pitched our tents. 

It was hot. The ambient air temperature on the glacier can be 0 degrees Fahrenheit or colder, but the radiation from the sun on a clear day is so intense that you can be sweating in a base layer. 

The daily temperature swings cause all kinds of crazy things to happen. I overheard some commotion as we were setting up and turned to see both Mt. Crosson and the nearest face of Mt. Hunter sliding at almost the same time. 

We settled into what would become the normal rhythms of camp life. You get to a new spot, you deploy the tents, and cooking gear, and you build a latrine. We were very proud of our first multi-stall design, where we cordoned off the clean mountain can from the pee hole with sleds. But none of us was bold enough to actually use a stall while the other was occupied. 

Later in the tent, I settled into some Tolkien as we wound down for our first night. Little did I know at this point how routine this activity would become. 

As soon as we lost the sun, the temperature plummeted to something well into the negative.

The next morning we rigged the sleds for the single carry up the Kahiltna to Ski Hill Camp at 7,800ft. Did I mention how cool you look with all of the sun protection on?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-28-at-8.22.39-AM.png)

Basecamp sits at 7,200ft, so you’re mostly traveling the five and a half miles over rolling, gently rising terrain. It feels essentially flat most of the time. Tugging the sled uphill wasn’t as bad as I expected. 

There is almost no wildlife in this environment. When you stop moving and the wind quiets down, you’re left with a dead silence. But once in a while, we’d see something surprising. I asked Mike how these small birds would get here, and how they survived. He replied that they likely get caught in high winds from down on the tundra and simply find themselves here, mostly doomed to die without much to eat or to drink. They would become food for the savvier and rugged ravens, which are the main pests to climbers, opportunistically stealing food from poorly buried caches or unattended tents. 

We arrived at Ski Hill, and I was very ready to throw the pack down and be done with the sled for the day. After probing the area for crevasses, we deployed camp and tucked into our first meal in the Hilleberg. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-28-at-8.08.00-AM.png)

It’s said that you camp your way up Denali, and the generally accepted modern formula for the West Buttress involves climbing the mountain nearly twice. Since you have so much gear and food, the trick is to push it up higher in chunks and then return to your camp to sleep. So, these caching missions like we ran up Ski Hill to about 9,800ft were part of the strategy. The cache holes are very deep, mostly to ensure neither ravens nor weather could get at our precious supplies. 

So far, we were on schedule and the weather was cooperating. On May 10, we made our move toward 11,000ft camp, which is the first camp that really feels like it’s on Denali. The angle of the terrain kicks back and it finally looks like a climb. The day started nicely, but in classic fashion, it deteriorated when we hit a storm hugging the slopes up higher. We made it to about 9,400ft and Mike halted us and we pitched the tents. 

Over the next two days, we made it to 11,000ft, dug in, and then retrieved our cache from down low. Watching the Climbing Rangers snag powdery lines on the face above camp made me badly wish I had my skis.

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After a rest day, we moved cache supplies to 13,500ft, just below the next major camp at 14,200ft. To get there, you scale Motorcycle Hill, which reveals the massive and striking Father and Sons Wall. You then head up Squirrel Hill and cross the Polo Field below Windy Corner, an infamous spot renowned for gale-force winds as the air funnels into the pass there. 

When we returned to 11,000ft camp, I was in pretty good spirits. We were maintaining pretty much the ideal pace for a Denali itinerary. I began to wonder if we had become blessed with a pattern similar to 2022, which saw sustained, gorgeous weather for most of the summer and some record-high summit rates. 

We rested the following day. Rest and weather days can be long. You’re completely disconnected from the internet, so you have to rely on the entertainment you have with you and your own creativity to help pass the time. I discovered to my horror that all the movies I’d downloaded to one of the streaming apps were not accessible. It kept prompting me to connect to a network. Back to Tolkien on the Kindle. 

On May 15, we learned that a member of our party wanted to turn back to basecamp, so we parked it again for the day while two of the guides ran him down the glacier. Another day in the tents. We watched with some curiosity as another guided team went over self-arrest and walking in crampons. It struck us as pretty odd that this would be the first mountain where one would learn those things, but to each their own. Back in the cook tent, we listened to the weather report for the following day. The winds were picking up. 

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Sure enough, on May 16, we parked it again at 11 Camp. The wind was whipping. In other places, where the ambient air temperature is not in the negative teens, you might just go for it. But this is not what you do on Denali, where the wind chill drives temps so low that you risk almost instant frostbite to any exposed flesh. 

I was starting to go a little insane. I love the Lord of the Rings, but there comes a point, maybe after hour six on the Kindle, where I can’t force myself to read any more Tolkien. My tentmate, James, and I began to call the state you drift into “hibernation mode.” I would stare at the buffeting ceiling of the tent, lost in my own thoughts, shut my eyes, open them, and realize hours had passed. You enter an uncanny zone between consciousness and sleep. This is probably table stakes for most hardcore expedition climbers, but the boredom and long hours in a flapping tent were new to me. I’d been pinned down in weather before, but nothing to this extent.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-28-at-8.09.00-AM.png)

On May 17th, I knew something good was happening when we saw the long train of Navy Seals pulling out of camp in their matching winter combat uniforms. The forecast for today was originally dismal. More of the same. And I was falling into a depressive, fretful state. With each day that passed, we ate more of our supplies and I kept thinking about our summit chances. We’d spent six nights at 11,000ft, which may still be in the realm of normal, but it felt long. 14 camp is the main staging ground where you wait for your summit window. And I knew we still had a mandatory four to five days up there to acclimate and kill time, so I started getting nervous. 

But the wind had died. We got the signal from Mike that today was going to be a move day. My morale spiked immediately, and I played music out loud on my phone as we packed up our camp. 

But my pack was heavy, likely in the 80+ pound range. I started to realize at this point how inefficiently I had packed. Mostly with food and layers I just didn’t need. 

We climbed back up to the Polo Field and while we were breaking there, my overloaded bag tumped over and an entire group meal got loose from the top opening. Before I could react, it gained speed and skittered out of my reach and down the hill. The meal came to rest in the middle of a crevasse field far below us. It wasn't recoverable. I felt deeply ashamed. I was leaving *stuff* on the mountain. In addition, group meal food is precious. The guides told me to shake it off, but it shattered my good mood. 

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We built camp at 14 and settled in. Over the next three days, we retrieved our cache from 13,500ft, and we rested, restlessly. We lived vicariously through the park service as they snagged more beautiful lines above 14 camp, and took in the evening views of the Range. We kept receiving reports of massive winds up high and sometimes I could hear it roaring off the buttress like a freight train. We heard from the rangers that a couple of climbers at 17,000ft, the high camp, were in their tent when it disintegrated around them. They had to wrap themselves in the remaining nylon to stay alive.

On May 20th, we got our opening with the weather and packed up supplies to go cache at 17,000ft. To do this, you head up the incline behind 14 camp and up about 800 feet of fixed lines to the top of the West Buttress. At the foot of the fixed lines, it’s pretty common for teams to bottleneck as they attach themselves to the ropes and move over the bergschrund. The Navy Seals became our ever-present companions. 

Moving up the fixed lines is tedious and slow with a crowd, but the top reveals one of the most stunning views of the trip. You can take in the Peters Glacier on one side, the Kahiltna on the other, and, on a good day, the other peaks in the Alaska Range spreading far into the distance. 

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From here, you progress up the sharp ridge using a running belay system, since there’s lots of exposure on both sides. You climb around Washburn’s Thumb, a large granite formation, and continue up and around a few hills to get to 17 Camp.

It was only when I stopped moving that I could tell the air was noticeably thinner. And I also understood why we waited for the right moment to come here. The plateau at 17 Camp is a wind-scoured, inhospitable place. The snow is so compacted that most climbers don’t bother to attempt snow walls to protect their tents, and instead choose a time when the weather chills out.

It was at this time we learned that someone had died on the route. We saw the search and rescue rangers descending to the base of the “Autobahn,” which is the infamous section that runs between 17 Camp and Denali Pass. It’s a steep slope, where, if you lose your footing and can’t arrest immediately, your chances of survival are very low. The face runs for almost two thousand feet and any fall would take you through a morass of seracs and crevasses. Apparently, this was the fate of a Japanese solo climber. A helicopter arrived and carried the body away while we watched. 

We descended back to 14 the way we came.

It was back to waiting again. Three days passed. Too much wind, bad weather, and more foul reports from up high on the radio. We could all feel the tension. Could we go back up there? I’d left fresh socks in the cache at 17 Camp that I wondered if I’d see again. We continued to eat through our supplies, now lessened by my earlier mistake where I’d fed a group meal to the glacier. To pass the time, we built snow walls around the camp. Though 14 Camp gets windy sometimes, we didn’t genuinely need them. But it was nice to sink into the rhythms of cutting and hauling snowblocks. It was something to occupy our thoughts. 

The morning of May 24th, the wind finally calmed. As soon as I heard the stoves fire up sometime around 7:00am, I knew we were going up. I’d begun an unhealthy pattern where I’d feel extremely energized when we’d move and then sink into a kind of despair when we’d stop for any length of time. That familiar crunch of the snow as we moved out of camp lifted my spirits. 

We retraced our steps from the caching run, up the fixed lines, across the ridge, and into 17 Camp. The route was pretty crowded with all of the different teams tracking the same weather window. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-28-at-8.14.03-AM.png)

This time we had to chop out platforms and set up the tents. RMI keeps a cache up there with spades which made breaking up the wind-hardened snow a lot easier, but doing any kind of labor at this elevation saps your energy very quickly. We each had to take frequent breaks.

When we got camp set up, we briefly took in the scenery and then hopped into the tent to escape the dropping temps. 

We were prepared to make our summit bid the next day, but the winds picked up. On May 25th, we just kicked around camp again. I was beside myself in anticipation and fear that the conditions wouldn’t give us our chance. We’d come so far.

Mike briefed us before we went to bed to be ready to go early the next day, the latest forecast looked good. But the winds really went crazy that night, whipping the tent with powerful gusts until 1am or so. I barely slept. But somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, the air deadened and it was silent. 

Mike gave us the signal to start readying around 6am. I’d slept for a total of two or three hours but I didn’t care at all. I just wanted to get this thing done. We hurried through breakfast, fixed ourselves to our ropes, and headed toward the Autobahn.

It doesn’t seem all that bad when you’re on it. Just a traverse up a high-angle slope. But it’s unforgiving. It’s easy to see how people underestimate this section, make a mistake, and meet their ends down in the thicket of broken ice below. 

We crossed Denali Pass, hung a right, and climbed past Zebra Rocks. One member of our party was forced to turn back around 19,000ft due to altitude sickness and hypothermia. 

We continued past Archdeacons Tower to the Football Field, at 19,600ft. We could see huge clouds of spindrift rocketing off of the summit ridge above. On a break, our guide, Jess, stressed to us that there was no guarantee we’d be crossing the ridge to the summit. But since we were protected from the prevailing wind by the ridge itself, we were going to climb Pig Hill, the last rise, and see how conditions looked at that point. At this altitude, I took two huge breaths for every step. 

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We gained the summit ridge. As if by magic, the wind ceased. We decided to continue across the last segment of the route to the summit. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/06/IMG_1989.jpg)

Credit: Andre Gilbert

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-28-at-8.19.48-AM.png)

Credit: Andrew Gilbert

I didn’t really feel the significance of the moment on the tallest point on the mountain, which is also the tallest point in North America. I was more focused on the altitude, the cold, and my own exhaustion. But I burst into tears when we got back down to the Football Field and it all hit me. Not only was that success the culmination of 20 days on the mountain and a lot of suffering to that point, it fulfilled an ambition I’d set out two years earlier. Ever since that pivotal experience I’d had on the Grand Teton, Denali was almost constantly on my mind. I felt immense gratitude toward everyone who’d helped me get to that point: The guides, my family, and friends. It's still unreal to me that it's done. 

After 20 days to get to the summit, it took us two days to get back down to basecamp from 17,000ft. They were some of the most harrowing of the trip. Hauling my gear from 14,000ft to 11,000ft was incredibly taxing. My pack was so hideously overloaded. Then, from 11,000ft we hauled sleds downhill through the middle of the night across the Kahiltna to cross the snow bridges while they were frozen and strong. We were hoping for the beautiful alpenglow, but we were mostly socked in by low-hanging clouds. I can only describe this part of the climb as “mirthless toil.”

When we arrived at Heartbreak Hill, named so for being the final uphill segment of the climb before the airstrip, I felt nothing but excitement for my cache of whiskey at the top. It’s rare to find something as acutely aggravating as managing a loaded sled on the downhill. The PVC pipe rig I used to keep it behind me kept breaking and malfunctioning so that the whole apparatus would swing out in front and cut across my path. I was at the end of my tether and just left it in its mangled state for the last two hours of our return. 

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Back at Basecamp, we finally relaxed and the exhaustion of the past week settled over me. It was 9:00am, but we all took pulls from the booze we brought and waited for our planes. Fortunately, the weather cleared fast and the familiar red Otters of K2 Aviation swept us back to Talkeetna. I kept nodding off in my seat. 

When we landed, we all took our shoes off to walk in the grass. I marveled at the trees, the sounds of birds, and the warmth of the air. 

After a long shower, I closed out my time in Talkeetna with a final night out on the town. I ate two dinners, one at the Burger Barn and the other at Denali Brewing. Food is really nice when it hasn’t been freeze-dried. We also stopped in for an obligatory drink (or five) at the Fairview Inn, which is the traditional town watering hole for climbers and aviators.

I’ve been planning for and thinking about Denali for so long. I’m grateful to have spent so much time with the mountain, to have been there with a good crew, and to have reached the top safely. Only days after we flew off the glacier, members of a Malaysian team were stranded below the summit for four days. One of them died while awaiting rescue, the other two were subjected to severe frostbite. 

[A Climber Survived for Four Days In a Snow Pit Near the Summit of DenaliLast week a trio of climbers from Malaysia became stranded on Denali in Alaska. Guides and rescuers recount how they spent multiple days trying to save them.![](https://cdn.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/favicon-194x194-1.png)Outside OnlineOwen Clarke![](https://cdn.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Denali11-1024x576.jpg?width=1200)](https://outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/malaysian-climbers-denali-rescue/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

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![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-28-at-8.16.42-AM.png)

It’s a strange feeling to have the climb in the rearview mirror. There’s a kind of fallout in your life after a big experience like this and I think it’s going to take a while to just settle back into normal routines, and to figure out what’s next. Until then, I’m going to enjoy time with my family, and on-demand hot water.

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## Gear and recommendations

Note: I was on a guided team, so the cooking gear and tents weren't up to me. I would check out [this piece](https://briangoesonadventures.com/travel/2022/6/5/the-cassin-ridge?ref=nickrroberts.com) from Brian Goes on Adventures for his views on cookware, tents, etc. That said, I really loved our Mountain Hardware Trango 3P. 

### My gear/layers load-out

- Backpack: Mountain Hardwear AMG 105\. I wouldn't go less than 100 liters unless you really know what you're doing.
- Sleeping bag: Mountain Hardwear Phantom -40F. I felt like a -40F sleeping bag was essential. You could go lighter, but I had no regrets about the extra bulk. The temperature rating is supposed to be to what degree the average sleeper will keep warm. But this is in ideal conditions where the bag is perfectly lofted and whatnot. I felt barely warm when it was -25F at 14 camp.
- Parka: Mountain Hardwear Absolute Zero parka. Since it's built for the likes of Everest, many people think this is overkill for Denali. It definitely kept me warm though. Consider something like this if you run cold. I would go with a dedicated 6000m parka next time that compacts better.
- Boots: La Sportiva G2 Evo. No issues, personally. I have long, narrow feet though. Many others on my team opted for Scarpas and detested the La Sportiva fit.
- Overboots: Forty Below. I never used these except for around camp over my camp booties. Would absolutely recommend going with an 8000m boot instead of doubles + overboot though.
- Gloves:
  - Arcteryx Venta touring gloves - I wore these on all of the warmer days, like on the lower Kahiltna, for sun protection
  - Mountain Hardwear Exposure 2 Gore-Tex gloves - I wore these on all of our moving days (even summit day with hand warmers)
  - Insulated Japanese fishing gloves – such a good camp gloves. I have [this](https://www.amazon.com/SHOWA-Waterproof-Breathable-Insulated-Extended/dp/B0BN54Z46G?ref=nickrroberts.com) pair.
  - Marmot 8000m Mitts – Didn't wear, but there for emergencies. I wouldn't go without them
- Glacier glasses: Smith Embark (x2). One for backup. These were terrific. The Julbos don't fit my face for some reason.
- Hat: A standard 5-panel cap. Bring a hat!
- Goggle: Smith 4D Mag. I wore only on summit day. I only brought the low-light lens. You're going to be in your glacier glasses for the high-light days anyhow.
- Helmet: Petzl Meteor. No complaints.
- Trekking pole: Black Diamond Expedition 3\. Just a solid, collapsible pole. I use it for touring back home too.
- Axe: Petzl Summit Evo. No complaints. Love this thing.
- Harness: Petzl Tour. Solid.
- Carabiners: Petzl Triact + 5 Black Diamond non-lockers + 2 Black Diamond screwgates
- Straps for sled: I brought 4 bungees and only really needed 3
- Crampons: Black Diamond Sabretooth 12-point, steel, semi-automatic. I had trouble with these popping off on occasion. Fortunately, nowhere that mattered. But I would spend more time fitting or trying different ones that tighten down rock solid. Don't bring aluminum.
- Duffles: Mountain Hardwear Camp 4 135L (used on the sled) and Mountain Hardwear Expedition 100L (used to transport gear to Talkeetna; left in the hangar). These were great. The waterproofing on the Camp 4 was nice on the snowier days.
- Other layers
  - Black Diamond sunshirt (x2) – Base layer. I would only bring one next time
  - Smartwool ski socks (x5) – I would only bring three pairs next time
  - Smartwool Mountaineering Extra Heavy Crew Sock (x2) – I would only bring one pair next time. Used for my camp sock
  - Arcteryx Motus boxer (x3) – Two or three is about right
  - Patagonia Better Sweater – Didn't need
  - Smartwool Smartloft jacket – Mid-layer. Almost never took this off. Wore over my base layer
  - Outdoor Research Helium down jacket (no hood) - Mid-layer. Almost never took off. Wore over the Smartloft jacket. Wish I had a hood on this one
  - Black Diamond Stormline rain shell – Didn't really use this, but I'd want to have it if I went back
  - Black Diamond Vision parka – Heavy mid-layer/outerlayer. This was a workhorse for me. Most days this would be my outermost layer
  - Black Diamond Dawn Patrol touring pants – I never took these off
  - Rab Photon insulated pant – you want insulated pants that have a full side zip like this
- Camera gear:
  - GoPro Hero 12 (my workhorse)
  - GoPro Max 360 cam (for atmospheric shots around camp. Wish I used it more)
  - iPhone 15 Pro (used this all the time. Gives an almost-SLR-looking quality on 4K 30)
  - GoPro pole mount (incredibly useful)
  - GoPro helmet strap mount (essential for situations where the hands were occupied)

### Non-gear or clothing recommendations

- **Crazy Creek camp chair is solid gold and worth every ounce of weight.** I brought the Hex 2.0 backpacking version, which is what I'd recommend. Lightweight and small form factor.
- Sleep mask. Very nice because it doesn't really get dark in May or June.
- Gummy ear plugs. I found these to be very comfortable and very good at blotting out noise.
- Hand warmers. Four packs of two would be just fine. I only wore warmers on summit day.
- Warm camp booties. I brought the 40 Below ones (everyone has 'em). But they didn't fit in my boot shells, which I wanted for traction on occasion. I wore the 40 Belows around camp without much issue with no additional shell over them. Doing it again, I'd go for down booties with a waterproof layer.
- Pee bottle. I have the 48oz Nalgene Cantene. Highly recommend. Teammates with smaller pee bottles consistently reported wanting more space or being terrified of overflow in the sleeping bag. Don't tempt fate.
- Bowl with a lid. The lid is nice for retaining heat or turning the bowl into a sipping vessel.
- 32oz Nalgene **wide-mouth** bottles (x2). Two is totally sufficient. Do not opt for the narrow-mouth bottle. It will freeze solid and you'll be sad.
- 16oz Nalgene bottle. Use this as your thermos and extra water bottle.
- 40 Below Bottle Boots. There's a reason why everyone on the mountain has these. They are the way to go. Do not settle for less than 100% thermal coverage on your water bottle.
- Roll of toilet paper (x1). I thought I'd need so much more than I did. One would totally suffice next time. I brought 3 (!). My thinking was that I could use one as currency for stuff at 14 Camp if I needed anything, but it just ended up being extra weight and bulk.
- Sturdy plastic Spoon. Just bring one general purpose utensil. No need for more.
- Supplements:
  - Creatine gummies. I bought [these](https://trycreate.co/?ref=nickrroberts.com) ones. I wouldn't bring the whole bag next time, just 40 (plan 2 per day). I do think they help with recovery and retaining muscle.
  - AG1/protein powder mix. AG1 is good because you're not getting any fresh veggies or fruits, but make sure that you have a good way of sealing it. Something sturdy. My Ziploc kept failing and the stuff gets everywhere.
  - Metamucil capsules for fiber and keeping things moving. I'd bring like 60 and take 3 per day for 20 days. Can't recommend enough! You're eating heavy food and not a lot of fiber.
  - Probiotics. I took these with the Metamucil and Creatine.
  - 4x tubes of Nuun electrolytes. Very nice to flavor water from a pot that tastes a little like ramen.
- Fingernail clippers
- Small hand sanitizer bottles (x2)
- Solar panel (Goal Zero). I brought the Nomad 10-watt and it's all you need.
- Limit 1 or 2 batteries for the Goal Zero. Maybe one Flip 36 that you charge frequently. I brought way too many because I thought I'd need them all with my phone, camera gear, Kindle, and Airpods. But I didn't.
- **Be very careful about misplacing the numerous things you’re carrying**. Have strategies for organizing and keeping things together. Stuff sacks are your friend. Anticipate that it will snow a foot or more each night and bury items left outside
- Tea tree oil in small dabs works well to clean the feet and also make everything smell nice. Go with a small glass bottle that seals well.
- Wet wipes for approximating a shower. I brought 4 packs of the 24 counts. Too much, again. I'd stick with 2 packs next time.
- Baby powder for keeping feet dry in boots.
- Whiskey and pack of cigarettes for camp celebrations on the descent (I brought cigarettes on the climb and cached bourbon at basecamp).
- Diverse mountain lunch stuff. Some things I'd really recommend:
  - Lots of different Haribo-style gummy candies
  - Pringles (x3 cans) – Also make for great trash cans
  - Kendal mint cakes (x5 or more) – I brought [this kind](https://www.amazon.com/Romneys-Kendal-Mint-Survival-Ration/dp/B07YYFBVFR/ref=sr%5F1%5F1%5Fpp?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.TXJoAStuD5VMg1y2wiMxnmDWkW4gvbyJ3tgFcVrACRJ7hMXTDNlsrT66yzZmQboW7BEGY4MghY%5FkwbwlMeuWsVpeCrjuqku2TnYZGtKS0TNQ%5FPdx5c5-6nQMaTUljHuLueNRvEUeKMNNgFGfylmX3pcD95EiIadq2PeGcqymbgH7BNUcTPorkcZQxlujloIDxm1bMunpjIGR5o8%5F8TOXN7Chgdv-z7r96%5FkE0oOVj8yQoxs1eFF6KY7swG5Z20M-SH5%5Fu8s4jN%5FrFjkZAcY%5FPUpJM85XVu42JBUKIL%5FWyZo.I6wCaxRs-VEPeGN5TB5dTH%5FvqkAR4mA9VMFvGNv9%5FEc&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=Kendal+Mint+Cake&qid=1719930590&sr=8-1&ref=nickrroberts.com). They're super high in glucose but really nice on those high-altitude days where nothing else sounds good and you know you need calories. They're a British mountaineering tradition and went up with the first successful Everest expedition.

### Things I wish I had

- A better mid-layering system. More things with tight-fitting hoods. Look at bringing the following:
  - Arcteryx Atom hoody mid layer
  - Patagonia Nano Air
  - Black Diamond Alpine Start wind layer. The guides lived in these and wore them over their sunshirts. Good for those days when it's warm but there's a breeze in the air.
  - Mountain Hardwear Compressor jacket
- 8000-meter boots: Lots of people had the Scarpa Phantom 8000s or the La Sportiva Olympus Mons. These will save you so much heartache with fitting crampons to your doubles and overboots. Plus the high gaiter looked very nice.
- Backpacking pillowcase (thermarest): My tentmate had a big pillowcase that he could stuff with a puffy and I was extremely envious. I went without a pillow and just slept on my expedition parka the whole time which wasn't ideal.
- A 6000-meter parka (vs. an 8000-m parka). Something like the Feathered Friends Khumbu. I only used my big parka a few times and the Absolute Zero is a heavy, bulky piece of gear.
- A different backpack (probably). I didn't feel that the AMG 105 was all that comfortable around the waist. I had to crank down the hip straps as far as they'd go and often that wasn't enough to prevent the bag from slipping over my hip bones. Look at Hyperlite gear. Be sure you test a bag with a load of 70lbs or more on a hike for at least an hour to see how you like it.
- Better snacks. I went very heavy on technical nutrition (e.g. Shotblocks) and, for some reason, tuna fish. Variety is your friend. I'd bring lots of assorted gummy (Haribo) candies next time. More salami and cheese-type stuff (sliced very thin). Probably would skip the full jar of Nutella I brought. I would aim for 20-25 pounds of personal food next time, rather than 27\.
- More movies. I burned through the three (that worked) in no time on our rest days. I brought the Lord of the Rings extended edition trilogy but downloaded them to the Google TV app (which I was horrified to discover wanted a network connection to let me watch *downloaded* content! Wtf!). Verify that all your stuff works offline.
- Less weight, overall. Some of the days we didn't have sleds were totally punishing and I felt every ounce of stuff I didn't need.
### Notes from learning to brew beer
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/notes-from-learning-how-to-brew-beer/
Last updated: 2024-06-06T03:39:24.000Z
This piece is primarily about the basics: What I learned starting up on all-grain brewing. I'll also cover why I chose an electric system, along with my key learnings about the particularities of the Grainfather G30 v3\. At the end, you'll find a list of my supporting equipment with links to purchase. (I've been averaging one to two gadget purchases after each brew to make something about the experience easier). 

## Why I chose an electric brewing system

The main (and very simple) reason: It's really cold in the winter where I live and there's nowhere to run a big burner inside. The Grainfather lets me stay warm and brew in my laundry room. There are other benefits to be sure:

- Electric systems tend to be space efficient. The Grainfather has a small form factor for its 8 gallon capacity. I can easily stow it in a cabinet with all of my other brew supplies and return the laundry room to its non-brew lab state when I'm done.
- Electric systems automate temperature control during the mash and boil to keep you on your targets with much less hassle. The built-in pump to recirculate wort or transfer to your fermenter is super nice. Pretty much all of them have some type of grain basket that fits into the kettle, so you don't have to make or buy a separate mash tun and then store that somewhere.

Why did I buy the Grainfather specifically? Brand recognition, high materials quality, modular parts for easy replacement, and a feeling that, as one of the original electric brew systems (if not the original? I wasn't able to fact check this), they've probably worked out many common problems with the unit, especially in the G30 v3 model. I didn't conduct an in-depth comparison between the other electric offerings like the Anvil Foundry, Blichmann, Brewzilla, etc. But each of these have their [champions](https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/11ga7cc/favorite%5Fallinone%5Fsystem/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

## Key learnings while getting started

This section will cover lessons learned both with the Grainfather and with homebrewing in general, particularly in fermentation and kegging.

Contents:

- Always stay ahead of the brew
- Mash temperature
- What is a yeast starter and do I need one?
- Dealing with the Grainfather pump
- Using the Grainfather counterflow wort chiller
- Calculating water volume
- Water treatment and brewing salts
- Boiling lid on vs. not
- Refresher on specific gravity and hydrometers
- Cold crashing
- Keg your beer
- Use anything other than a glass fermenter
- Keep your beer contamination-free with closed transfers
- Don't rush force carbonation
- Fermentation temperature control
- What do I do with all of this amazing beer I'm brewing?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/03/Airplane--2-.png)

### Always stay ahead of the brew 

I made many avoidable mistakes in my first brew session. One of those was not having a game plan. When I completed a step, I fumbled around to figure out what was next, which took a lot of time and made me feel panicky. Upon reflection, the experience reminded me of my old flight instructor's core tenet: Always stay ahead of the airplane. In other words, to have a safe and enjoyable flight, anticipate what's coming next and plan for it, rather than get behind and find yourself in crisis (which is pretty dangerous when you're piloting an aircraft). Applied to brewing, your whole day will go smoother if you are consistently ready for the next step. A few recommendations here:

1. Have a mental model of the brew day. I read [this](https://www.amazon.com/Scratch-Brew-Slow-Down-Make/dp/1787136973?ref=nickrroberts.com) book cover-to-cover several times to internalize the basic steps of all-grain brewing. It's a relaxing read and I liked the bits of British beer opinion and humor. Knowing the principles of a good brew lets you work quickly and move from one task to the next without having to go back and consult a manual or your recipe. If you're brewing with a Grainfather, watch Youtube [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGQXhSGV2nY&ref=nickrroberts.com) of a brew day with that system specifically. Get to know your equipment!
2. Input your recipe into the companion app. The Grainfather app does the basics well and you don't have to actually own Grainfather hardware to use it. While the experience of the application leaves something to be desired–pretty clunky and hard to find things–it removes a ton of thinking on your feet from the brew. It calculates water volume for you, lets you put in mash times, boil times, a hop schedule, water additions (i.e. brewing salts), and temperatures for every step.
3. Clean as you go. A good way to lengthen the time of your brew day is to leave all of the cleaning to the end. Gunk tends to dry and crust onto your equipment, making it harder to remove if you leave it for long periods of time. I like to clean out the grain basket as soon as the sparge is complete. Easy to do by placing a trash bag over the top and upending it. You just have to fish out the grain plate when you're done. As soon as you're done chilling the wort down and transitioning it to a fermenter, wash out the main kettle and dump out the hop matter. It's easiest to do immediately.

### Mash temperature. Why does it matter?

On my first brew, I halted conversion from starch to fermentable sugar because my temperature probe fell out of the thermowell and I didn’t notice. The Grainfather's controller thought the temperature of the wort was 68°F and blasted the heat on 100% to compensate. The wort spiked to 186°F around 30 mins in the mash, so my mash efficiency was very low, and I started with a much lower original gravity than the target on the recipe.

The article linked below gives a nice overview of the mash process. Your mash in temperature should generally sit between 149 and 153°F to maximize conversion of the starchy grain into sugars that yeast can consume.

[Optimizing Your Mash: Part 1Improving your mash process will improve your efficiency, and help you fine-tune your mash for better results.![](https://beerandbrewing.com/favicon.ico)Craft Beer & BrewingJester Goldman![](https://www.datocms-assets.com/75079/1656623551-874c63e354c22fe862c9a02c5f42808916d05b3e_mashefficiency.jpg?w=1200&h=630&fit=crop&fp-y=0)](https://beerandbrewing.com/optimizing-your-mash-part-1/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### What is a yeast starter and do I need one?

What is a starter? A way to culture more yeast cells to get a better fermentation when you pitch. You start a mini-fermentation process by pouring the contents of your yeast pack into a solution of something like dry malt extract and water to get it multiplying before it hits your wort on brew day. You usually make a starter for *liquid* yeast (since liquid yeast packs tend to have [lower cell density](https://www.morebeer.com/questions/270?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=If%20you%20are%20using%20dry,if%20you%20are%20not%20already%29.) than dry yeast ones) 24-48 hours before brewing. For dry yeast, there's a lot of debate over the benefits of "[rehydration](https://www.northernbrewer.com/blogs/brewing-techniques/the-importance-of-being-hydrated-dry-yeast-handling?ref=nickrroberts.com)" but it is generally agreed that you don't make a starter with dry yeast.

Should you make a starter? When? It's a controversial [topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/iaaxqy/psa%5Fjust%5Fmake%5Fa%5Fdamn%5Fyeast%5Fstarter%5Falready/?ref=nickrroberts.com) (as with almost any part of brewing) among homebrewers. Here's what I do: I'll make starters for liquid yeast, especially if they've been in the fridge for a long time. This is because active cell counts decrease over time as the yeast slowly dies in the pack without new nutrients. 

When creating a starter, I like to use [these cans](https://www.morebeer.com/products/propper-starter-canned-wort-4pack.html?variant=OYL999&gad%5Fsource=1&ref=nickrroberts.com) of pre-made wort, which I buy from MoreBeer! or Northern Brewer with my grain and hops for a batch. They make the process really easy. Pour one can into a saucepan, fill the empty can with water, pour the water into the saucepan, and heat. You want to get your starter wort solution close to or at boil and then quickly take it off the heat to prevent a boil over (which happens super easily with this sugary concoction). You boil the solution to sterilize it. Move your wort over to a sterilized 2000ml Erlenmeyer flask using a sterilized funnel (like [this one](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08L3S1KVJ/ref=ppx%5Fyo%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fsearch%5Fasin%5Ftitle?ie=UTF8&psc=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)). Foil the top of the flask to prevent contamination. Then, chill it all down in an ice bath. I take a large pot, fill it with ice from my freezer, add some water, and then drop in the flask. I use a sterilized instant read thermometer to check the temp. When the wort mixture is down to pitching temperature, I funnel in the liquid yeast (don't forget to sterilize the yeast bag with a few sprays of Star San solution). Drop in your stir bar, foil up the flask, and then place it onto your stir plate (like [this](https://www.clawhammersupply.com/products/stir-plate-kit-1000ml?ref=nickrroberts.com) one) for at least 24 hours before your brew.

On brew day, I usually pitch the entire flask into the chilled wort (usually around 1000-1500ml of solution), though some people like to cold crash the yeast starter–more on cold crashing below–and drain off the excess. I haven't noticed any weird flavors in my beer from my method.

When it comes to dry yeast, I haven't bothered to rehydrate it. I've had perfectly fine brews just directly pitching yeast sachets into the chilled wort.

A few other tips on yeast:

- Never freeze liquid yeast. Freezing destroys the hydrated cell walls and you'll get little to no performance out of a thawed liquid yeast pack. I always toss my liquid yeast into the fridge until I use it.
- Try to use liquid yeast in the first month that you have it. The sooner, the better performance you'll get.
- You can freeze dry yeast with little harm. Though, I tend to keep these packs in the fridge as well. They keep for a much longer time than liquid yeast.

### Dealing with the Grainfather pump 

To me, this is the weakest part of the Grainfather G30 v3 experience. I’ve had a heck of a time with it. When the pump fails to push solution quickly (or at all), it makes it very hard to chill down hot wort or transfer the contents of your kettle to a fermenter. Having a high temperature for too long can cause any late hop additions to impart more bitterness than intended. And a lengthy transfer to a fermenter offers more opportunity for contamination.

During some brews with large grain and hop bills, I've had to backflow the pump 20-25 times to get things to flow at all. To backflow, simply turn the pump off and let the solution drain back down through the discharge pipe for 5-10 seconds, then start the pump back up. The aim here is to let the draining fluid push away particulates that might be blocking the pump filter. It rarely completely solves the flow rate problem though, or does for a short period of time.

A few recommendations if you're having pump problems:

- I ended up springing for the [hop plate](https://shop.grainfather.com/au/grainfather-g30-hop-plate.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) which adds another layer of filtration for debris over the pump filter. It's not a complete solution, however. I made a Pliny the Elder clone (massive hop bill) and I still faced persistent clogs.
- Get a [hop spider](https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/hop-spider-for-grainfather?ref=nickrroberts.com) for really hoppy beers. The drawback with the spider is that you have to diligently stir the contents to maximize hop contact with the solution to hit your target IBUs.
- Remove the ball and spring from the pump valve on the top of the discharge pipe. I don't like having to remove parts that I paid for, but doing this made an immediate difference for me. The ball and spring act as a safeguard against spraying liquid everywhere if you accidentally switch on the pump while the valve is open and you don't have the recirculation hose or the wort chiller attached. But this component is also another clog point where debris can get caught and reduce flow rate.
- For clog emergencies when all else fails, get syringes like [this](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09JYTT6LN/ref=ppx%5Fyo%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fsearch%5Fasin%5Ftitle?ie=UTF8&psc=1&ref=nickrroberts.com) to blow air back down the pipe to the filter in a sanitary way. I'd not recommend using your mouth.
- Other people completely replace the pump with a stronger, third party one. I haven't gotten to that point yet.

### Using the Grainfather counterflow wort chiller

Unlike the pump, this is an excellent part of the Grainfather kit. When you get a solid wort flow rate through the counterflow chiller, it brings down temperature at a blinding speed–noticeably faster than my old immersion chiller when I was extract brewing. Some tips: 

1. Clean and sanitize. Before my brew day, I like to run a hot PBW solution through the chiller using the Grainfather pump. Once I see flow through the tubing on the other side, I turn off the pump and let it sit there for 20-30 minutes to pull any residual gunk out of the inside. I then pump through a Star San solution for 30 seconds to a minute. It's really difficult to extract cleaning water from the chiller however. So, when I want to start chilling my wort, I run the chiller's hose into the sink (so I don't have cleaning water in my beer) and pump through just enough wort to push out the water until I see the color change. When this is complete, I put the hose back into the kettle and start chilling down.
2. Use the chiller to transfer to your fermenter without a siphon (which is yet another vector for bacteria).
3. I bought a barb at a hardware store to turn my sink nozzle into my cold water in, instead of running the garden hose in through a window.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-16-at-6.38.28-AM.png)

### Calculating water volume 

Software is the way to go here. I don't even try to calculate water requirements by hand. Lots of homebrewers on Reddit recommend [Brewfather](https://brewfather.app/?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Beersmith](https://beersmith.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com), or [Brewer's Friend](https://www.brewersfriend.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com), but I use Grainfather's software.

The Grainfather app makes strike and sparge water volume calculation super easy with the built-in calculator on the recipe creation screen in the app or a dedicated one on the calculators section. I *always* use the app recommendation for water volume. 

If you're using a Grainfather, I would caution against using water calculations from recipes that weren't created by someone brewing on the same system. The water loss profiles can be completely different depending on the equipment. I recently made a beer where my original gravity number was way off because I chose not to use the app's recommendation and instead go with the recipe card's.

### Water treatment and brewing salts

If you're trying to dial in a specific style, it's best to adjust the mineral content of the water you use to control the flavor and feel of your product. For example, West Coast IPAs call for a Sulphate-rich profile (which accentuates bitterness), and New England (Hazy) IPAs go heavier on Chloride (which increases the apparent sweetness and "fullness" of the beer). Using ordinary tap water is totally fine when you're starting out, but it may not be the right fit for your target style. [This](https://www.brewcabin.com/brewing-water/?ref=nickrroberts.com) is a good intro to water chemistry in beer. And this is a great [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVIAC1CqeVc&ref=nickrroberts.com) on the subject.

It doesn't take a chemist's understanding of the principles and calculations at play here. I rely, again, on the Grainfather app to help me adjust my water. When you're building a recipe, there's a water calculator tool in the recipe screen that helps you adapt your source water to a target profile using various brewing salts for both your mash and sparge.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/03/IMG_05D1A528AAC1-1.jpeg)

Comes from the recipe screen of the Grainfather app.

**So what do I need to buy to control my water profile?**

Distilled or RO (reverse osmosis) water and brewing salts. Distilled water is fairly cheap, so this is what I do. You use distilled water because it contains no mineral content and gives you a predictable, blank slate to work with. I'll usually get eight gallons at a time for five gallon batches. 

You can use tap water in place of distilled and adjust it with salts, but I'd get a water report from your city and input these figures into your source water profile. The problem with water reports is that they can be out of date and not completely account for what you, the end user, draw out of your tap. 

The key salts to buy are:

- Gypsum (Calcium Sulphate)
- Baking soda (Sodium Bicarbonate)
- Calcium Chloride
- Epsom Salt (Magnesium Sulphate)

I use the Grainfather app to adjust my water profile to a target style and then just add the recommended amounts to my strike water and to my sparge water pot before I get started on the brew.

### Boiling lid on vs. not

It makes sense that you'd keep the lid on to retain more heat, but I learned that this isn't a good idea. I now boil lid off to vent away Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS). The DMS compound gets created went you [heat wort](https://beersmith.com/blog/2012/04/10/dimethyl-sulfides-dms-in-home-brewed-beer/?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=Dimethyl%20Sulfide%20%28DMS%29%20is%20a,of%20cooked%20or%20creamed%20corn.). If too much of it stays in your beer, it creates a creamed corn off flavor. There's potential that it can get trapped into condensing water on the lid and fall back into the wort. I boiled lid-on for my first brew and I wasn’t able to taste DMS, but I just don't want to risk it in the future.

The official Grainfather [recommendation](https://help.grainfather.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019223353-Can-I-put-the-lid-on-during-the-boil?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=This%20is%20not%20recommended%20on,the%20start%20of%20the%20boil.) is to boil with the lid off.

### A refresher on gravity and hydrometers

Specific gravity is one of those absolutely key indicators in your brewing process. It's the ratio of the density of your wort/beer to regular water. In other words, it tells you how effective you were during your brew day in getting fermentables into solution ([brewhouse efficiency](https://www.morebeer.com/questions/215?ref=nickrroberts.com)). The specific gravity reading you take right before you transition the finished wort to your fermenter is called the Original Gravity (OG) reading.

OG is one of your beer [vitals](https://beerconnoisseur.com/articles/beers-vital-stats-abv-ibu-srm-og-other-useful-info?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=While%20the%20acronyms%20of%20beer's,all%20integral%20to%20understanding%20beer.), along with ABV (Alcohol by Volume), IBU (International Bitterness Units), and SRM (Standard Reference Method --the beer color [scale](https://homebrewing.org/pages/srm-beer-color-scale?ref=nickrroberts.com)). You can closely estimate your ABV by taking the difference between OG and Final Gravity (FG)--which is the specific gravity reading at the end of fermentation.

Specific gravity answers several essential questions about your beer:

1. Am I on target for my recipe? How much alcohol can I get by pitching yeast into this wort? If you're brewing a big, double IPA with a 9% ABV target, it's going to be impossible to achieve if you have an OG of 1.040\. You're just going to have a very different beer than intended, and you can use this number to figure out where things went wrong (check what you did or didn't do during the mash).
2. How much alcohol do I currently have and how is fermentation going? Just diff the OG and your current gravity reading to see the progress on alcohol production and how well your yeast is [attenuating](https://beerandbrewing.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-attenuation/?ref=nickrroberts.com) the sugars.
3. Is fermentation complete? Rule of thumb is that if you have the same gravity reading for [2-3 days in a row](https://grainfather.com/beer-fermentation-process/?ref=nickrroberts.com), the fermentation is likely complete.

Measuring specific gravity requires a hydrometer or refractometer. The old school hydrometers like [this](https://craftabrew.com/products/deluxe-hydrometer-gravity-testing-kit?variant=40549151473729¤cy=USD&utm%5Fmedium=product%5Fsync&utm%5Fsource=google&utm%5Fcontent=sag%5Forganic&utm%5Fcampaign=sag%5Forganic&srsltid=AfmBOooTUzUb92NrUY8dx0raiGdbCaUND6t%5F9TbmmYUq-YV3GaH0eCMqyLA) are great to have around as a backstop, but **I really recommend a floating hydrometer like the** [**Tilt**](https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/tilt-wireless-hydrometer-and-thermometer-blue?variant=9723981561900&gad%5Fsource=1&ref=nickrroberts.com). The Tilt is one of the best adds you can make to your brewing setup because it tells you the gravity at any time without you having to draw beer out of the fermenter (both a contamination hazard and pain in the ass). It Bluetooths to your phone and integrates with the [Grainfather app](https://help.grainfather.com/hc/en-us/articles/360007165237-How-do-I-add-other-fermentation-devices-to-my-recipe-and-equipment-profiles?ref=nickrroberts.com) for live fermentation and temperature tracking. Very slick.

### Cold crashing

What is cold crashing? It's when you chill your fermenter down to (ideally) just above freezing for at least 24 hours. This is usually done at terminal gravity. Cold crashing helps drop any excess yeast to the bottom of your fermenter into the trub and clarify your beer. I would particularly recommend doing this for beers that are supposed to be bright and clear before you keg or bottle.

How to cold crash? If you have the fridge space, just throw your fermenter in there at around 35°F. Or, if your garage stays above freezing and it's below 40-45°F, put it in there.

Be mindful of "suckback," however. Suckback is a natural consequence of cooling the air in the headroom of your fermenter. Cooling will cause the air inside to become more dense and outside air will flow in through the airlock to fill the excess volume if you don't do anything about it. This is not ideal especially for oxidation-sensitive beers like hazy IPAs. To prevent this:

- You can slightly pressurize your fermenter (e.g. 1 PSI) to counter the effect (this is easy to do with the Norcal Brewing Solutions pressure transfer system I talk about below)
- You can get a CO2 harvesting kit (link [here](https://www.norcalbrewingsolutions.com/store/Ultimate-CO2-Canning-Jar-Harvesting-Kit.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)) also from NBS that lets you capture CO2 from fermentation. This becomes the air that gets sucked back into the fermenter and you don't have to worry about it because it's sterile.

### Keg your beer

After stepping up to all-grain brewing, the best way to upgrade your homebrew experience is to keg your beer. This is initially more expensive than bottling, but worth it if you're brewing a lot. Bottling is labor intensive and your carbonation levels at the end are often unpredictable. Buying bottles is an ongoing expense, and re-using bottles often means a lot of time spent scraping off the paper and glue. They are also hard to sterilize, especially if there's dried beer encrusting the insides of the glass.

Kegs, by contrast, are easy. They're simple to [clean and sterilize](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmK1jvuubn0&ref=nickrroberts.com). They only require a single transfer of beer from your fermenter. They produce predictable and measurable carbonation levels in your finished beer product.

All of these improvements aside, kegging is just cool. You get to show off your perfectly-carbonated, readily-accessible beer to your friends. My wife also loves the fact she can pour four ounces at a time without committing to twelve. 

Key requirements:

- One or more Cornelius Kegs (most common form of homebrew keg, also known as Cornies). These have a 5-gallon capacity and look like [this](https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/amcyl-5-gallon-keg-dual-rubber-handle?variant=8189879058476&gad%5Fsource=1&ref=nickrroberts.com). The most common have ball lock connections and these are what I'd recommend.
- A kegerator, keezer, or other serving device with ball lock disconnects on the hose(s) that goes to the tap. [How to make a kegerator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHzu3VomFH4&ref=nickrroberts.com).
- A CO2 tank
- Hose, hose clamps, and gray (for gas) ball lock disconnects for running CO2 into the keg
- A regulator for the CO2 into the keg

Some guidance:

### Use anything other than a glass fermenter

The traditional homebrewing fermenter is a glass carboy. These are awful for several reasons:

- They are dangerous. Carboys are slippery and you have to buy all kinds of additional attachments or straps to carry them around. It's easy to drop them and lose hours of brewing work in a second. You'll also have a nice pile of sharp glass to clean up.
- They are super hard to clean. The neck at the top can't fit a hand, so you have to purchase strange, L-shaped brushes to scrub encrusted goop from the inside.
- It is difficult and un-hygienic to extract beer from them. If you're trying to take a gravity reading or transfer beer elsewhere, you have to use a siphon which is a contamination risk and also just a pain.
- It's very difficult to fit a mesh bag of dry hops in through the narrow neck.
- They don't have any hygiene advantages over plastic/metal fermenters. I've found it to be a myth that plastic fermenters scratch and harbor bacteria you can't get to. If you're using PBW and Star San to clean and sterilize, plastic works great.

Recycle your carboys! Get a plastic or stainless steel fermenter. The old [buckets](https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/translucent-nb-6-5-gallon-bucket?variant=11704555143212&srsltid=AfmBOorX%5FybZSUtC7y7oDgvcasI8hbgjeEp4NBH7e9WrljgBkxEUgytdpnk&ref=nickrroberts.com) are tried and true (though I'd get one with a spigot or install one yourself), but there are many other options.

A friend who runs a local brewery gave me a [Speidel](https://www.morebeer.com/products/speidel-plastic-fermenter-30l-79-gal-1.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) fermenter which changed the game for me. It has built-in handles, a wide lid at the top that lets you get in with your arm and scrub, a beefy airlock, and a spigot for easily drawing samples or transferring. I like the 7.9 gallon Speidel for 5-gallon brews because the extra headroom is nice for really foamy and active fermentations that would ordinarily blow off your airlock. They can also take some air pressure (more in the next section).

![Speidel Plastic Fermenter 30 litres with Spigot and Airlock - buy cheap at  Braumarkt](https://braumarkt.com/media/22/89/22/1638821079/5008291.png)

Speidel fermenters are awesome and solve all of your carboy problems

### Keep your beer contamination-free with closed transfers

Good beer is about controlling the controllables. Reducing contact between your beer and outside air/oxygen as much as possible will minimize chances of infection and a bad final product. Closed transfers involve pushing beer from your fermenter to a secondary fermenter, or to a keg for final packaging without exposing it to the external environment.

There are many closed transfer systems out there that probably work with your fermentation setup, but I'll just walk through what I use with my Speidel. I found [this device](https://www.norcalbrewingsolutions.com/store/Speidel-Jaybird-CO2-Transfer-System.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) by Norcal Brewing Solutions to do closed transfers. It's beautifully simple. There's a racking cane that dips down into your fermenter to siphon beer upward, a ball valve for CO2 blowoff during fermentation, and ball lock disconnects to attach CO2 in and a beer out line to your keg. It fits onto most Speidel fermenters and uses the pre-existing Speidel fasteners to lock in with an airtight seal.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/03/IMG_1425-2.JPG)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/03/IMG_1426-2.JPG)

I have a spare CO2 bottle that I use to connect to the "in" post and then I push the beer using a very small amount of pressure inside of the Speidel. One note: I did have to wrap the threads with plumber's tape to seal off air leaks. 

If it's working correctly, pressure should barely register on your regulator. All it takes is 1-2 PSI to push the beer. Ensure that you're consistently pulling the pressure release valve on your keg to let beer flow into the lower pressure environment. Pushing beer over will increase pressure in your keg gradually, so you have to continuously release air. Also make sure that you've closed off the CO2 blowoff valve.

The Norcal system is also great during fermentation, not just for transfers. If I'm dry hopping close to terminal gravity when the yeast is naturally producing less carbon dioxide, I like put in a cushion of CO2 (which is heavier than oxygen, your enemy) on top of the beer to protect it. I close the blowoff valve, ensure that nothing is connected to the racking cane, and then put in 1-2 PSI of CO2, and then open the blowoff valve to vent the excess pressure and mixed air. I do this a couple times to purge oxygen. 

Instructional video from Norcal:

### Don't rush force carbonation

I watched too many videos like [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjZFCh6WEpU&ref=nickrroberts.com) ("carbonate your beer in 30 minutes") and tried to mimic the procedure. It does work, but I would not recommend it.

If you're trying to make a beer to fit a specific style, like an Altbier or a Bock, those styles all come with recommended carbonation levels (e.g. 2, 2.5, or 3 volumes). When you blast CO2 into a keg at 30 PSI and then roll it on the ground for a while, you lose all control over the amount of CO2 you're dissolving in. It's a crapshoot whether it'll come out right. It also foams your beer up like crazy. When I've done this in the past, the beer remained super foamy for the rest of the time I was serving it. I read somewhere that it's a lot easier to get CO2 into your beer than to get it out. Wise words.

I recommend the "set it and forget it" method. That is, set the recommended PSI (for me, usually around 12) for your uncarbonated beer to achieve a certain number of volumes. Then, leave it for as long as it takes to carbonate correctly, usually a week or so. No rolling the keg. Grainfather actually tries to give you a recommended PSI setting in the app to achieve a specific number of volumes depending on the beer style. Pretty cool.

### Fermentation temperature control

Temperature control is one of the most [critical ways](https://homebrewacademy.com/fermentation-temperature-methods/?ref=nickrroberts.com) to achieve predictable flavor and good beer in general. Certain yeasts and styles require specific temperature ranges. For example, it's best to ferment lagers around [50°F](https://brulosophy.com/methods/lager-method/?ref=nickrroberts.com) and then store them around 32°F for weeks or months (the actual lagering part).

As it is for many newer homebrewers, this wasn't a priority for me when I first started because I exclusively brewed ales. They tend to turn out pretty well fermenting at room temp. Based on the readings I get from my Tilt, my pantry is fairly steady around 67°F. But dialing in your temperature will level up your final product. A tightly controlled temperature range prevents the development of too many phenols and esters, which result in off-flavors.

There are many ways to control fermentation temperature, **but the simplest to me seems to be to get an extra fridge or chest freezer and an Inkbird controller** (linked below). Getting a used fridge off of Craigslist can be cost-effective and temperature management is hands-off (I don't want to have to refill tubs of ice for immersion chillers or jackets). Personally, I found that a chest freezer is the best option if you have the space. Chest freezers have more insulation and more room for storage. They're also pretty cheap, generally. 

Temperature control method examples:

- **Expensive**: Glycol chillers. Example from [Grainfather](https://www.morebeer.com/products/grainfather-gc4-glycol-chiller.html?gad%5Fsource=1&ref=nickrroberts.com). Example from [Ss Brewtech](https://www.morebeer.com/products/ss-brewtech-glycol-chiller-15-hp.html?gad%5Fsource=1&ref=nickrroberts.com). Bear in mind you may also need accessory pumps and an adapter to your fermenter. Grainfather makes a separate (and expensive) [conical fermenter](https://shop.grainfather.com/us/gf30-conical-fermenter.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) that works out of the box with its glycol chiller.
- **Mid-range**: Fridge or freezer with external, adjustable temperature controller. Just make sure it's one that fits your fermenter. *(Recommended if you're just starting out and you have the space).*
- **Cheaper**: Cooling [jackets](https://www.gotta-brew.com/products/cool-zone-adv-25w-inkbird-controller.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) or cooling [rods](https://www.morebeer.com/products/temp-twister-stainless-steel-lid-thermowell-port-35l-bucket-buddy.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) (which dip into your beer).

## What do I do with all of this amazing beer I'm brewing?

Submit to homebrew competitions! It's a chance to win street cred, medals, and receive feedback to make your craft better.

[How to Win a Homebrew Competition, According to a National ChampionEverything you need to know about making an award-winning homebrew, according to National Homebrew Competition winner and Certified Cicerone, Mandy Naglich.![](https://vinepair.com/apple-touch-icon.png?v=e1l2m9y2r05)VinePairMandy Naglich![](https://vinepair.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/homebrewcomp_social.jpg)](https://vinepair.com/articles/homebrew-competition-expert-guide/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

## My current equipment list

*Note: If you're reading this a while after the time of this writing (March of 2024), links may not work. I'll do my best to maintain this list. Also, I'm not an affiliate or in any way benefitting from these links.*

- Grainfather G30 v3 \[[Link](https://shop.grainfather.com/nz/g30v3-brewing-system.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- G30 hop plate \[[Link](https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/grainfather-g30-hop-plate?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Kegco two-tap kegerator \[[Link](https://kegco.com/products/24-wide-dual-tap-black-kegerator?srsltid=AfmBOoo5TuAc2IQXk1R-2XXaLsz-iEP%5FFjgG5ZEaX8o7YgOi0uRXRDORte4&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Hop spider \[[Link](https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/hop-spider-for-grainfather?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- 60ml syringe for GF pump back flow \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09JYTT6LN/ref=ppx%5Fyo%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fsearch%5Fasin%5Ftitle?ie=UTF8&psc=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Speidel 30L fermenter (2) \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/Speidel-Plastic-Fermenter-30L-7-9/dp/B000RW8UR6?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Inkbird temperature controller \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PVBG8K1/ref=ppx%5Fod%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fslice%5Fasin%5Ftitle?ie=UTF8&th=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)\] - *Just plug your fridge/chest freezer into this and it will switch the compressor on and off to maintain temperature even above the typical fridge's advertised temperature range, e.g. 32°F-50°F. It's a wonderful piece of tech!*
- Vissani 6.9 cubic foot chest freezer \[[Link](https://www.homedepot.com/p/Vissani-6-9-cu-ft-Manual-Defrost-Chest-Freezer-with-LED-Light-Type-in-White-Garage-Ready-DCM7QRWW/317213435?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] - *This fits a 30L Speidel with room to spare. You can use it as overflow storage for Cornelius kegs when you're not fermenting*
- Norcal Brewing Solutions Speidel blowoff tube + thermowell \[[Link](https://www.norcalbrewingsolutions.com/store/Speidel-Blow-Off-Tube-Thermowell.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] - *I use this because the pressure transfer system with the tall racking cane doesn't fit in my freezer.*
- Norcal Brewing Solutions CO2 harvesting system \[[Link](https://www.norcalbrewingsolutions.com/store/Ultimate-CO2-Canning-Jar-Harvesting-Kit.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] - *I use this for my freezer to prevent any suckback problems when I'm chilling down beer for a cold crash. The air becomes more dense inside the fermenter and sucks in outside air to fill the void. This system lets you capture sterile CO2 from your fermentation and use this as the air that gets pulled back in during the crash, so you don't have to worry about contamination.*
- Norcal Brewing Solutions Speidel pressure transfer system \[[Link](https://www.norcalbrewingsolutions.com/store/Speidel-Jaybird-CO2-Transfer-System.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] - *I use this to transfer the beer to the keg when fermentation is complete. Just sanitize it well and then purge the vessel with CO2 before starting your transfer.*
- Extra CO2 tank and regulator. *It's super helpful to have an extra tank of CO2 for cleaning, pressure transfers, and other operations outside of your kegerator. I'd also highly recommend a dual body regulator like* [*this*](https://www.beveragefactory.com/draftbeer/regulator/double/kegco-lhu5db-dual-body-primary-co2-regulator.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) *one to let you carbonate two kegs at different volumes or to serve one while carbonating another.*
- Refractometer \[[](https://www.amazon.com/Brix-Refractometer-ATC-Dual-Scale/dp/B01LW2ZU6R/ref=sr%5F1%5F1%5Fsspa?c=ts&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.OGpKl8lfjMK71wVJNnyRDX9DvWoKD9EzqcohFwJzJsA7OPlzwCfGm1ih5MyqOuj0s%5Fgcx12olV4FMq8Gakkqp-c-gxjIplRTgo2JkpfVC851-l38EN8r%5FqbXJHHm0Crxy3FyPlbJykDjN%5F1VcvTlU6gPzbj8rOzSCcoLfuXHeWcF0I4gUJzIO05LehliSm4COsY29KeFB6I7Kjw%5FW7OHqlcmYMyaM0WqBPTXkrrnZY6fYi2HO1DAeJeHH4vKTg857IHmNZ-m9t8cT9QxfNDxmJ2KNkiJkqCwIyV1pJXwwvI.4qlyIT8krpEwSjRAqzxQy5jKoLSicmwcdmModlY7Akg&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=Lab+Refractometers&qid=1711546217&s=industrial&sr=1-1-spons&ts%5Fid=393272011&sp%5Fcsd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9hdGY&psc=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)[Link](https://www.amazon.com/Brix-Refractometer-ATC-Dual-Scale/dp/B01LW2ZU6R?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] – *For gravity readings during the mash and boil*
- Tilt Hydrometer\[[Link](https://www.morebeer.com/products/tilt-hydrometer-thermometer-red.html?gad%5Fsource=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)\] – *For gravity and temperature readings during fermentation*
- Gallon jug for sparging \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/Cambro-400MCCW-Quart-Measuring-Pitcher/dp/B004NEWBBU/ref=asc%5Fdf%5FB004NEWBBU/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=193124190188&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=3066815083772843389&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9029510&hvtargid=pla-309936365215&psc=1&mcid=a194df953eca3fa88ba7700affc55b3a&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Stainless steel funnel \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08L3S1KVJ/ref=ppx%5Fyo%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fsearch%5Fasin%5Ftitle?ie=UTF8&psc=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)\] – *Lots of different uses, but good for pitching yeast or other ingredients into narrow gaps, like the necks of Erlenmeyer flasks*
- Wooden mash paddle – *To not scratch the Grainfather stainless* \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073V227QR/ref=ppx%5Fyo%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fsearch%5Fasin%5Ftitle?ie=UTF8&psc=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- 5-gallon corny kegs (3) \[[Link](https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/amcyl-5-gallon-keg-dual-rubber-handle?variant=8189879058476&srsltid=AfmBOoqFV7kjQPC33JzD4tZp8lq5ckVXtvtzDRVIOL5fgwjysPYL-utLsKM&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Big canister of PBW \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/PBW-Five-Star-8-lbs/dp/B0064O7XRY?ref=nickrroberts.com)\] – *Use this for your first phase of cleaning. I like to soak tubing, my brew kettle, and fermenters in a PBW solution (best if heated to 140°F) to dislodge anything caked on.*
- Big jug of Star San \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0064O7YFA?ref=ppx%5Fyo2ov%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fproduct%5Fdetails&th=1)\] – *Use this for your second phase of cleaning to sterilize equipment after getting all gunk off. Star San is really cool because it's safe on beer and you in small quantities. "Don't fear the foam," is a common phrase you'll see around the homebrewing internet. You don't have to rinse the residual foam from Star San out of your kegs and fermenters (it doesn't impart much or any detectable flavor), which makes it really versatile. I like to fill a small spray bottle with a Star San solution and quickly sterilize tools or spigots before use with my beer.*
- 2000ml Erlenmeyer flask \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07V7T7R5Y?psc=1&ref=ppx%5Fyo2ov%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fproduct%5Fdetails)\]
- Clawhammer Supply stir plate/stir bar \[[Link](https://www.clawhammersupply.com/products/stir-plate-kit-1000ml?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- 5-gallon pot for sparge water heating/part cleaning \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N0QWYM1/ref=ppx%5Fyo%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fsearch%5Fasin%5Ftitle?ie=UTF8&psc=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Nylon mesh bags for dry hopping (4) \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BC4TATA/ref=ppx%5Fyo%5Fdt%5Fb%5Fsearch%5Fasin%5Ftitle?ie=UTF8&psc=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

## Other good sources

- Grainfather tips

[Grainfather Tips and Tricks - Brewing MischiefTips for getting the most out of a Grainfather all-in-one brewing system. It’s an incredibly robust system, but it’s not without its quirks.![](https://i0.wp.com/brewingmischief.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/cropped-Triskel_Vector_Final-1.jpg?fit=192%2C192&ssl=1)Brewing MischiefTravieso![](https://brewingmischief.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/20200301_113147.jpg)](https://brewingmischief.com/grainfather-tips-and-tricks/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

- Homebrewing in general:
  - Clawhammer Supply [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYnULfNsUNOrh69WmKBImKQ?ref=nickrroberts.com)
  - Homebrew 4 Life [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLV1IV1jLaH9Er61-nd1OsA?ref=nickrroberts.com)
  - The Bru Sho [](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLV1IV1jLaH9Er61-nd1OsA?ref=nickrroberts.com)[Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/c/thebrusho?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### January/February links
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/january-february-links/
Last updated: 2025-01-12T15:54:08.000Z
It all felt like a jaunt to the airport to board a plane until we started bobbing and weaving around ridgelines. I had no sense of what was normal in a helicopter. Each time we crested a mountain we'd get blasted by wind. The rotors chopped against the added resistance and this loudly vibrated the airframe, so I kept wondering if something was wrong. The pilot struck me as a little bit unhinged. We skimmed the treetops within 20 feet, and he set us down on cornices that looked like they'd fracture and take us and the chopper away in an avalanche.

It's been a life goal to helicopter ski with my dad and we finally made it happen this past weekend. But even Dad, a former fighter pilot and adrenaline junkie, confessed that he kept imagining every way the day could've gone wrong. On a slope angle, the blades of a helicopter can chop below head-height on a human, so when we jumped out, we had to hunker down in a group a few feet from the aircraft so we didn't get decapitated and then hold the gear in place so it didn't blow away in the rotor wash. Beyond that, you're skiing deep in the backcountry on 2,000 foot runs with all of the attendant avalanche danger. The guide skis down before you to make sure the snow is safe and to mark the route, but if something bad were to happen, you'd be pretty much on your own for a rescue. The heli skiing company issued us each an airbag backpack with a fluorescent orange handle that you can pull to deploy a big inflatable pillow. The pillow expands around your body and head in the event of a slide; the idea being that you bob on the top of the moving snow like a floatie in a pool instead of being sucked down and buried.

But once you're skiing, you forget about all the trepidation.

**From the past couple of months**

From me:

- Heli skiing the Palisades (Idaho, Wyoming) shorts playlist \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jReToFAwPVk&list=PL-ub%5FE8Q5KDQli4jB9fv5DvMALZ50agco&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Ice climbing in Hyalite Canyon, Montana \[[Link](https://nickrroberts.com/ice-climbing-in-hyalite-canyon/)\]

Recovering Ukraine’s advantage in 2024 \[[Link](https://warontherocks.com/2024/01/hold-build-and-strike-a-vision-for-rebuilding-ukraines-advantage-in-2024/?%5F%5Fs=d5o09djx55ojj3ueh6po&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Life aboard a nuclear ballistic missile sub \[[](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/life-aboard-a-nuclear-submarine?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email)[Link](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/life-aboard-a-nuclear-submarine?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

An uplifting take on the world’s existential crisis \[[Link](https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/12/29/everyones-existential-crisis/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The Holy Moment. *A clip from the film* Waking Life *by Richard Linklater (via my Uncle Bill)* \[[Link](https://vimeo.com/56075178?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Mad God. *One of the more horrifying and beautiful bits of film I've seen in my life (recommended by my friend Nic B)* \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jas8OABbn0Y&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Church Universal and Triumphant. *When I was climbing up in Montana in January, my guide, Henry, mentioned that he worked summers in high school landscaping for people involved in this apocalyptically-focused, semi-Christian movement. They're pretty big on bunkers and stockpiling weaponry in rural Montana. The whole thing reminds me of the setting in* Far Cry 5 \[[Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%5FUniversal%5Fand%5FTriumphant?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Mars in 4K \[[Link](https://youtu.be/Vy%5FRPd0rblI?si=K25z-SgywJdGCVkM&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Beer Judge Certification Program style guidelines. *As I gear up for a homebrew competition this year, I'm trying to pick a style to submit. The BJCP guidelines define style categories (color, aroma, flavor, etc.) that your beer needs to conform to for judging. What struck me is just how many there are*  \[[Link](https://www.bjcp.org/download/2021%5FGuidelines%5FBeer.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Database of jump scares in movies (via Annie Rauwerda) \[[Link](https://wheresthejump.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The CIA’s map collection on Flickr (via Annie Rauwerda) \[[Link](https://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov/albums/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Why woodpeckers don’t get concussions \[[Link](https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/77/1/54/2930559/Why-woodpeckers-don-t-get-concussionsContrary-to?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

The Tragopan pheasant courtship display \[[Link](https://youtu.be/Tm2R8qUA0-U?si=A0uBONDt7u4rCbZN&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Enjoy your stupid life \[[Link](https://youtu.be/OXp1CQA8YDw?si=STrsb5vyHp4Ink8E&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Schwarzeneggers of the Ring \[[Link](https://youtu.be/Fko4z7lADw0?si=QFxCxQ9UXpAA7fPk&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
### Ice climbing in Hyalite Canyon, Montana
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/ice-climbing-in-hyalite-canyon/
Last updated: 2024-02-22T13:51:05.000Z
I realized how dangerous the roads were when I had to swerve my truck into a snow berm to avoid rear-ending a semi at a stop sign. We were trying to make a left onto the Montana 287 heading up toward Bozeman and the good traction ended abruptly north of Island Park. The thermometer read -25 Fahrenheit. It was windy too. 

Spindrift kicked up into such massive clouds at points during the drive that I periodically slowed to 5 from 50 to let the white-out pass. Rivers and reservoirs along the highway emitted strange towers of fog that caught the headlights of oncoming traffic, setting them ablaze like wildfires.

An airmass fresh out of the Arctic parked itself on top of Bozeman for the weekend I chose to build some ice climbing technique, driving temps perilously low. The ski resorts closed for business. When we got into town, we decided to walk over to Montana Ale Works from the Airbnb to test out the air. It's the kind of chilly that irritates your lungs and worms its way through thick down layers. 

I met Henry, my friend and guide for this trip, during a climb up the Easton Glacier on Mt. Baker this past summer in Washington. He grew up in Bozeman and has that classic rugged character that I picture when I think of people in Montana. He's seven years my junior but he carries a professional assuredness that I could only dream of at 24 years old. I liked Henry immediately because he has the same streak of obsessiveness I recognize in myself, where he throws himself into the lore and knowledge surrounding his interests. He talks a lot because he's stoked–also like me. He's a hunter, climber, skier, cyclist and a mountaineer. We're going to be on Denali together in May. 

While we were in the Ale Works, Henry texted to suggest pushing back our 7:30am start the next morning by an hour if the temps were still below -20 up in Hyalite. At 5:30am he texted again to confirm we were indeed on for 8:30am. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/01/IMG_2993-1.jpeg)

"Let's call it 8:30"

Opening the front door to bring my climbing stuff out to Henry's truck released a cloud of mist as the moisture from the inside air instantly condensed in the cold atmosphere. The temperature immediately froze all the little hairs in my nostrils, making my nose itch. I started to question this whole deal.

On the car ride over to Hyalite, we caught up about the intervening months since we'd seen each other, and I continued to mine him for beta and stories from Denali.

During his descent from the summit last summer he almost lost the ring finger on his left hand to frostbite as he and a few speedier clients raced down to prep hot water for the rest of the group. 

"It swelled up and turned black, and then this sort of sheath of scab fell off in the shower weeks later. There was a bunch of pink baby skin underneath."

He had to be careful on days like this one. Apparently, getting frostbite once makes you more susceptible to it again. Not good for a guy who makes a living off of his hands.

We pulled into the lot. Second car. Henry informed me that this is totally unusual. On a holiday weekend, the lot at Hyalite is packed, even by 8am. 

We kept the doors shut to put on our double boots with the heat running, trying to conserve as much precious warmth as we could. Doing this in the passenger's seat is a complicated maneuver involving a lot of squirming. For layers, I was already wearing a fleece, mid-weight puffy, buff, beanie, wool underwear, fleece pants, touring pants, and then a heavy down parka. In reserve, I had my 8000-meter parka (the same kind of thing you'd zip on for Everest) and down belay pants.

We shouldered our packs and headed up the trail to the Genesis area. Fortunately, there was no wind. Henry told me about wind chill charts when we got to the belay area.

"It's pretty much exponential as the air temp gets colder. At this temp \[-30F\], a 10-mile-an-hour wind almost doubles the chill."

![Wind Chill Chart](https://www.weather.gov/images/safety/windchill21.gif)

We dropped our gear next to a guide and her two clients from North Carolina (the folks from the other car in the lot). The two guys had made the trip all the way out here, so they felt pressure to give Hyalite a shot. I felt bad for them when I saw they were in single-walled boots. They left within a couple of hours.

Henry led off on the left side of the Genesis 1 feature. It's a big, pocketed ice wall about 80 feet high. Every few moves, he paused to shake out his arms and drive blood into his fingers. It's best to manage how much you sweat by taking your parka and heavy gloves on and off. Henry was in his lighter layers with nothing but fishing gloves on (which offer more dexterity than something like a ski glove, but with far less insulation). Meanwhile, I started to lose feeling in my fingers at the belay with everything on. To fight this, I flapped my arms around like chicken wings to keep my hands on the rope. 

After Henry rappelled back down and we switched off belay, I felt perfectly fine in my thick gloves and started my way up the wall. But wearing a beefier glove tends to make you grip harder through all the material and therefore pump out faster. This is what happened to me in the first thirty feet or so. I had to sit back in my harness to take a rest and shake out my arms. On ensuing tries, I learned to love the fishing gloves, which let me ease up my clutch on the ice tools, move faster, and therefore stay warmer overall. 

I focused on the technique Henry revised with me at the bottom: Swing, kick, kick. Swing, kick, kick. Level your feet before making the next swing. Use your calves as much as possible to take your weight off of your arms. Place the pick of the axe into natural concavities in the ice to avoid breaking off plates.

When we were finished warming up on the left side of Genesis, I tried my hand at another, more overhung route to the right with the bottom section of the ice detached from the rock. Henry advised I tread more carefully here and just hook into existing divots, if possible, to prevent breaking off huge sections. It was an odd sensation to feel the thrum of the ice when I kicked a foot into it; a deep, hollow percussion. Ice can feel as trustworthy as rock, but there are some moments when you're reminded that you're climbing a gigantic, fragile shard with knives attached to your appendages.

We packed and hiked up and around the Genesis feature to a frozen waterfall above called The Hangover, which you can see clearly from the parking lot. There's a rope strung across the goat path we walked above Genesis to prevent you from tumbling and falling down the routes we just climbed. Years ago at the Bozeman Ice Festival, a woman lost her footing here, fell between eighty and one hundred feet, and landed in deep snow, but, miraculously, walked away fine. "It took a while for the paramedics to believe she wasn't hiding massive internal bleeding. Definitely in that lucky two percent," Henry said. 

As we were setting up for the first pitch of The Hangover, I cast an eye over Hyalite. It is strikingly beautiful from that vantage point, and I said so. Henry nodded. "It's one of the most concentrated steep ice areas in the world. Tons of history too. Not far from here, [Pat Callis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTwhSpCNlO4&ref=nickrroberts.com) and his buddies pioneered a lot of the early technique. Pat tested out some of the first front points that Yvonne Chouinard designed and sent to him." Before modern ice screws, they'd use piton-like devices called "[snargs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHy-CVbwhc&ref=nickrroberts.com)" and hammer those in to protect their climbs. Before front points, climbers would chop steps to make footholds. It all sounded so laborious. 

Though there are many legends, first-ascents, and epics woven into the fabric of this place, you're never quite sure if what you're climbing feels like it did to the initial ascenders. Unlike rock, where you can often climb the same holds as the people who put up the routes, sometimes as far back as the early 1900s, ice is an ephemeral medium. There are people who wait decades for certain routes to "come back in." You can climb a feature one day with a grade of [WI 4](https://www.neice.com/ice-and-mixed-climbing-grades/?ref=nickrroberts.com), and then the next it could be an M6\. The flows of ice morph around you, even over the course of an afternoon.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/01/IMG_0943.JPG)

Henry had a story for almost every belay stance. As I took pulls from my half-frozen Nalgene later on our first day, he told me the tale of Forest Fenn's treasure. Fenn was an American poet and writer who passed away in 2020\. According to Henry, Fenn felt a deep sense of loss that the West had been tamed. Where would young American men now forge themselves with perilous adventure? In the twilight of his career, he wrote [a poem](https://fennstreasure.com/fenn-treasure-poem/?ref=nickrroberts.com) about burying gold treasure somewhere in the western US to inspire a new generation of explorers to get out into the wilderness. A few of these seekers [died](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenn%5Ftreasure?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=Five%20people%20died%20while%20searching,was%20found%20dead%20in%20July.) while trying to find it. But Fenn wouldn't budge on either its location or whether it was actually real. Some thought the treasure to be in Hyalite. Eventually, a medical student named Jack Stuef found the treasure in 2020 somewhere in Wyoming, though Stuef himself refuses to reveal the exact location. The contents were auctioned off for $1.3 million in 2022\. 

> *Begin it where warm waters halt* 
> *And take it in the canyon down,* 
> *Not far, but too far to walk.* 
> *Put in below the home of Brown.*

> *From there it’s no place for the meek,* 
> *The end is drawing ever nigh;* 
> *There’ll be no paddle up your creek,* 
> *Just heavy loads and water high.*

*\--Fenn's Treasure Poem*

Sounds a bit like ice climbing in Hyalite.

It disappointed Henry that the treasure had been found. "I liked to know it was out there somewhere. There was something nice about the possibility." Who knew? Maybe he'd have stumbled upon it while trudging up to a new route. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/01/IMG_2998.jpeg)

Henry belaying me from the top of the second pitch of The Hangover.

After we finished up with the Hangover and its multiple rappels, we descended to Henry's Tacoma. A few cars had pulled in while we were climbing, but we think we had the longest day out. 

---

The next day broke about 15 degrees warmer, about -15F in Bozeman.

"Balmy, isn't it?" Henry declared when I saw him out front.

He drove us up to the lot again and we loaded up packs for the hike to The Dribbles, another climbing area about a 45-minute hike away. This time we booted up outside the car, and the temps (-10F-ish) felt like a normal, very cold day, rather than an expedition to the South Pole. 

It's good practice to take a gloved finger and write the name of your destination into the dust on the windows of your vehicle for search and rescue, just in case. It felt a little foreboding, but I scribbled "Dribbles" onto the shell's hatch on the Tacoma, and we set off.

The snow coverage around Bozeman was thin. All of the storm action of the season seemed to have swung southward toward the Tetons and Salt Lake. Getting up from the hiking trail to the foot of the first pitch of the Dribbles required about 500 feet of ascent through dense trees and then a steep portion just below the route. In crampons, we kept raking the loose rock underneath the few inches of snow, which made for very unstable walking. Both Henry and I took falls on our scramble upward. 

Looking up at the route was intimidating. Huge steps of ice ziggurat away from you, hundreds of feet high. You can't see the last pitch from the bottom. 

![Hyalite Ice 2021 - Climber Kyle](https://climberkyle.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/PXL_20211213_201046427.MP_-768x1024.jpg)

Full view of the Dribbles from [Climber Kyle](https://climberkyle.com/2021/12/12/hyalite-ice-2021/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-31-at-8.24.20-AM.png)

First step of the first pitch.

My arms were still residually pumped from the previous day and I started struggling just a few moves into the first step. In rock climbing, a 90-degree face is no problem with good holds. On ice, the same angle is harder because it's more difficult to trust your feet and rest on them. You're also swinging sometimes five or more times to get a good stick.

As I felt my arms fatiguing, I paused and changed hands on the tool above me. The other tool I'd hang around my neck by the pick. Hold with one, shake out the other. Switch. Repeat. It's strange how well this works to flush out the lactic acid. After a couple of pitches, I warmed up again and felt like I had my grip back. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2024/01/Screenshot-2024-01-31-at-8.28.17-AM.png)

Belay stance of the third pitch. 

It started snowing on us lightly at first, and then more heavily as the day went on.

The ice clearly hadn't been climbed in a while because there were no nice divots we could hook into. I couldn't easily find Henry's placements, so I had to swing on almost every move. I'm not the greatest yet at recognizing good spots to swing--ones that more easily accept a pick and hold it, rather than breaking. I'd often peel off huge plates when I'd strike. One frisbee-sized chunk of ice popped off and cut my arm as it fell past. 

This is another huge difference between rock and ice. While rock climbing, it's uncommon that you break off pieces of the wall. And when you do, you yell to make sure your belayer knows there's an incoming missile. In ice climbing, it's just expected that bits fly off as you move. There's no culture of yelling about it. "It'd be like screaming 'Puck!' in hockey," Henry said. The idea is that you place your belayer somewhere out of the way, or at least out of the direct line of fire. 

At the belay of the third pitch of The Dribbles, I experienced my first "shelling." It was one of those stances where it's difficult to move completely out of the fall line. As Henry moved up the ice steps, dinner plates of ice began shooting past me on almost every side. I had to keep my eyes up and track the ice in the air to dodge it. Climbers refer to this as shelling because these deadly chunks often sound like artillery, whistling as they rush by. It can be terrifying. 

When I crested the top of the fourth pitch, I collapsed on the ground as Henry coiled rope and grabbed gear off of my harness. With all of the adrenaline and focus, I didn't notice that I was starving until that point. "Did you eat anything?" I asked Henry. "Yeah, I've been snacking the whole day." I never noticed. For the whole climb, I'd eaten one or two packs of shot blocks, feeling like I didn't have the time to break out anything more. Now, I tore into my salami and cheese cuts and feasted while taking in the view. The snow picked up a bit heavier, but we could still see the expanse of Hyalite. Powder-dusted pines extending into a foggy haze. 

The rappel down was fun, with the final rope length free hanging in a rock amphitheater. We packed up our gear and trudged 40 minutes back to the truck and closed the day with a few beers with Fiona and Henry's girlfriend, Tatum, at Mountains Walking. Henry remarked at dinner that he thought we climbed the most pitches of anyone in Hyalite that Saturday and Sunday just because we stuck out the chill. 

As we parted ways, we shook hands. "See ya on Denali," we both said. 

> *So hear me all and listen good,* 
> *Your effort will be worth the cold.* 
> *If you are brave and in the wood* 
> *I give you title to the gold.*

*\--The final stanza of Fenn's Treasure Poem*
### November/December links
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/november-december-links/
Last updated: 2024-07-08T14:14:14.000Z
Happy new year! We're easing back into the rhythms of life and work after a bunch of unstructured and joyous free time over the holidays. It's hard to snap back into it. 

One of my holiday projects was getting back into beer brewing after an eight year hiatus. I cooked up two all-grain batches at the end of December: A [SMASH](https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/how-to-brew/keeping-it-simple-with-smash-brewing/?ref=nickrroberts.com) pale ale and a hazy pale called [Cosmic Trident](https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/cosmic-trident-pale-ale-all-grain-recipe-kit?ref=nickrroberts.com). I messed up the first one. The recirculation hose fell out of the mash tun when I wasn't looking and squirted sticky wort all over the laundry room floor for five or ten minutes. That meant we lost a lot of sugar volume and so the beer came out pretty low-ABV. Still, surprisingly drinkable from the keg!

Fiona and I have decided to call our homebrewery *Strange Creature,* named for many things, but one being that we're Utah/California transplants in eastern Idaho–strangers in a strange land. Weird logo is pending. And more notes on brewing to follow.

**From the past couple months**

From me: 

- A look back at 2023 \[[Link](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2023/)\]
- Christmas Eve backcountry skiing with my dog \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zizUGL-idTU?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Climbing Castleton Tower (short) \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9AnXIl%5FhuRI?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Applying leverage as a product manager - from years ago, but timeless wisdom from Brandon Chu \[[Link](https://blackboxofpm.com/applying-leverage-as-a-product-manager-ffad4a99db24?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

To-scale: Israel mapped onto the San Francisco Bay Area (via ACX) \[[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/8egisf/israel%5Fas%5Fthe%5Fsan%5Ffrancisco%5Fbay%5Farea%5F1496%5Fx%5F2076/?share%5Fid=aXu-XNKdxM32vUC-FrQau&utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email)\]

A *Starfield* review I found myself nodding along with \[[Link](https://youtu.be/hS2emKDlGmE?si=Ikb9HkZnMJh9phF-&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Make your own GPT now \[[Link](https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Animating still images with AI \[[Link](https://runwayml.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Dictator book club: Hugo Chavez \[[Link](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-chavez?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Nature conservancy photo contest winners \[[Link](https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/photo-contest/2023-winners/?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email)\]

On not stressing about super intelligent AI takeover \[[Link](https://www.understandingai.org/p/why-im-not-afraid-of-superintelligent?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

I've been into watching niche sports recently:

- Timbersports \[[Link](https://youtu.be/Q5SX-rGeZ-0?si=ixF6ol0a0VjLA9VM&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Professional "chase tag" \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrNIdKtj8pU&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- Armwrestling \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTIvG6SueEk&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]
- 2023 Microsoft Excel world championship \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/live/UDGdPE%5FC9u8?si=HiytO2komckPI83Y&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Sam Altman fired from OpenAI \[[Link](https://open.substack.com/pub/platformer/p/openais-alignment-problem?r=binh0&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=email)\]

Sam Altman re-hired to OpenAI \[[Link](https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23982046/sam-altman-interview-openai-ceo-rehired?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Mister Organ. *I'd highly recommend any work by David Farrier. Mister Organ is a documentary about a narcissist living in New Zealand. Wild and exasperating.* \[[Link](https://www.amazon.com/Mister-Organ-David-Farrier/dp/B0CKMYJ5JM?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

A very happy bunny made with GPT (*via my buddy Nic B.*) \[[Link](https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1839fgo/asking%5Fgpt%5Fto%5Fmake%5Fa%5Fbunny%5Fhappier/?share%5Fid=e-J%5FHEknU9neTc1qXTeya&utm%5Fcontent=1&utm%5Fmedium=ios%5Fapp&utm%5Fname=ioscss&utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fterm=1)\]

Anduril anti-drone drone \[[Link](https://youtu.be/al9ITeP4fUA?si=IC8HVT90JjWQd0qs&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

No way \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnmxtHmS25I&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]

Why potato chip flavors differ around the world \[[Link](https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/dec/02/the-weird-secretive-world-of-crisp-flavours?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email)\]
### A look back at 2023
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2023/
Last updated: 2025-01-02T16:19:50.000Z
It was a great year, though not without its difficulties. I dealt with a heightened level of anxiety, starting with a job search after being laid off just before Christmas in 2022, then a high pace at my new job, and a lot of moving around as Fiona and I continued our nomadic existence. While away, we put our home on Airbnb, which was its own stressor. I worried about every possible way people could destroy our house: leaving the stove on, stealing our stuff, flooding the bathrooms, etc. Though, fortunately, our guests were easy on the place.

Despite the stress, we cranked up the adventure dial this past year. We moved to the Pacific Northwest for the summer to be close to the Cascades Range, and then to southern Utah for about a month and a half in the fall. I summited four big peaks and one imposing desert tower (the hardest physical endeavor in a day of my life to date). I ice-climbed out of glacial crevasses on Mt. Shuksan. I sniffed the sulfur venting out of the primeval-looking crater on Mt. Baker's summit. I tried and mostly failed to ski Shasta (too little snow). I qualified for a 2024 Denali expedition via the West Buttress route. Fiona and I backpacked gorgeous terrain with Egg, our fluffy golden retriever. We got our fill of the excellent food and beer scenes in Seattle and Portland. We got our fill of the Seattle traffic, too.

Our favorite stay was [this place](https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/802772388154597000?source%5Fimpression%5Fid=p3%5F1703690251%5FJLAg5oHadrIuJ1zf&ref=nickrroberts.com) up in northern Washington, bordering Canada. It was a month of forest-bathing in the ferns and large pines. Egg loved it. On my runs, I could see Shuksan's glaciers poking out above the treetops. 

Creatively-speaking, I continued to write and publish videos about our adventures. I got back into beer-brewing, and, over these last couple of weeks here in the Tetons, I clicked into my backcountry skis for more touring with Egg. 

Other notes from the year: 

- I switched to a Garmin Fenix 6 watch and away from my Apple Watch Series 5\. No regrets. Garmins just seem built for what I do. The battery life is incredible (I rarely have to charge it on long expeditions), the sleep tracker seems solid, and I love all of the data I can collect in Garmin Connect, like fitness age.
- I started using ChatGPT regularly. Mostly for code/SQL stuff. I don't write with it. It's a pretty good replacement for Google, particularly with GPT 4 and its internet-searching capabilities. I'll probably give [Gemini](https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-ai/?ref=nickrroberts.com) a shot this coming year to see how it goes. I'm excited to see where the space heads and what new labor-intensive tasks it gobbles up.
- I began a new romance with ice-climbing.

And, without further ado, my lists and metric tallies for the year:

## 💪 Fitness

**I changed the way that I track fitness to focus on general "cardio mileage" and, though I changed the ratios of my different activities, I came in about as fit as in 2022.**

Goals:

- ✅ **1519/1500** miles of cardio exercise (running, hiking, cycling, cross-country/backcountry skiing)
- ✅ **10,780/10,000** pushups (*vs. 18,500 pushups in 2022*)
- ✅ **4/3** glaciated peaks summited
  - Mt. Rainier
  - Mt. Shasta
  - Mt. Baker
  - Mt. Shuksan
- ✅ **Get accepted to a Denali expedition for 2024**
- I didn't set a goal here, but I racked up **205 tracked training hours** (between Peloton and Strava)

Other things I tracked:

- **62 hours** **spent running** (*vs. 112 hours 27 minutes in 2022)*
- **41 hours** **on Peloton workouts** on the bike/strength (*vs. 0 in 2022*)
- **91 hours of hiking** and mountaineering (*vs. untracked in 2022*)
- **11 hours of walking** and other workouts (*vs. untracked in 2022*)
- **16,545ft** running vert (*vs. 43,868ft in 2022*)
- **88** total runs (*vs. 168 in 2022*)
- **777 miles cycled** on Peloton (*vs. 0 in 2022*)
- **415 miles** **run** (*vs. 774 in 2022)*
- **208 miles** **hiked** (*didn't track regularly in 2022)*
- **50** highest Strava fitness level¹ (*vs. 71 in 2022*)
- **5 climbing objectives** completed (*vs. 2 in 2022*)

## 🥕 Health

**I slept marginally better in 2023 than 2022\. I rested long enough on average, but not with very high quality. I was slightly less happy this year on average (probably due to all of the stress and movement referenced in the intro to this piece).**

Goals:

- ❌ **70.12%/75%** sleep quality² *(vs. 68.88% in 2022) - I switched to using a Garmin to track my sleep quality mid-year, so this comparison is a bit dubious to me*
- ✅ **8:15/8:00** average nightly sleep length *(vs. 7:57 in 2022)*

Other things I tracked:

- **78.1** happiness index average³ *(vs. 79.7 in 2022, and 84 in 2021)*

## 🧠 Brain

**Continued solid creative output. Lost some interest in podcasting.** 

I'm still experimenting with the main "themes" of the content I create. Lots of cooking last year, and more travel documentation this year. I think food gets you more views on the internet because everyone eats and seems to have an opinion about it. But I also get more haters commenting on my stuff. I seem to catch less hate and feel more helpful to the world when I write or make videos about adventures in the wilderness; more satisfied too. 

I love spoken-word audio as a medium, but I cannot get engagement with any stuff I put out. In general, it seems a lot more difficult to get a following with a podcast, whereas putting out quality stuff on Youtube seems to naturally gain algorithmic momentum with little effort. So I'm doubling down on what works and releasing stuff where my audience tends to hang out. 

It's not like I have crazy reach with this newsletter, but I enjoy writing it and slowly building my distro list over time with people who are interested enough to follow my videos to my website. 

Goals:

- ✅ **51/50** completed long-form media pieces *(the media I consumed, vs. 15 books in 2022)*
- ✅ **23/10** articles published, including newsletter issues *(vs. 19 in 2022)*
- ❌ **2/5** podcasts created *(vs. 5 in 2022)*
- ✅ **8/5** [long-form](https://www.youtube.com/@nickrrob/videos?ref=nickrroberts.com) videos published (*vs. 16 long-form in 2022)*
- ✅ 2**1/15** [short-form](https://www.youtube.com/@nickrrob/shorts?ref=nickrroberts.com) videos published (*vs. 32 short-form in 2022*)

## Details

### ✍️ Stuff I made

I often write essays to narrate over video, so I'm counting those pieces in the writing section, as well as the video section.

Writing:

- [December 2022 links](https://nickrroberts.com/december-links/)
- [A review of Mass Effect 1](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-1/)
- [On rationalizing my leisure time](https://nickrroberts.com/on-rationalizing-my-leisure-time/)
- [January 2023 links](https://nickrroberts.com/january-links/)
- [A review of Mass Effect 2](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-2/)
- [A review of Mass Effect 3](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-3/)
- [A review of Hogwarts Legacy](https://nickrroberts.com/hogwarts-legacy/)
- [February 2023 links](https://nickrroberts.com/february-links/)
- [March 2023 links](https://nickrroberts.com/march-links/)
- [A review of Horizon Forbidden West](https://nickrroberts.com/horizon-forbidden-west/)
- [2023 productivity methods and tool stack](https://nickrroberts.com/2023-tool-stack/)
- [April 2023 links](https://nickrroberts.com/april-links/)
- [Climbing Mt. Rainer](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-rainier/)
- [May/June 2023 links](https://nickrroberts.com/may-june-links-23/)
- [Climbing Mt. Shasta](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-shasta/)
- [Climbing Mt. Baker](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-baker/)
- [July/August 2023 links](https://nickrroberts.com/july-august-links-23/)
- [Climbing Mt. Shuksan](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-shuksan/)
- [Canyoneering Pool Arch Canyon, Moab](https://nickrroberts.com/canyoneering-pool-arch-canyon/)
- [September/October 2023 links](https://nickrroberts.com/september-october-links/)
- [Climbing Castleton Tower, Utah](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-castleton-tower-utah/)

Long-form video:

- [Winter in the Tetons](https://nickrroberts.com/winter-in-the-tetons/)
- [90th Fighter Squadron (AK) hype video c.1991](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmP-lHuDMtw&t=394s&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Climbing Mt. Rainer](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-rainier/)
- [Climbing Mt. Shasta](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-shasta/)
- [Climbing Mt. Baker](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-baker/)
- [Climbing Mt. Shuksan](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-shuksan/)
- [Canyoneering Pool Arch Canyon, Moab](https://nickrroberts.com/canyoneering-pool-arch-canyon/)
- [Climbing Castleton Tower, Utah](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-castleton-tower-utah/)

Short-form video:

- [Smoking things: A better brisket](https://youtube.com/shorts/4L0CzS6yayE?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Smoking things: Ribs](https://youtube.com/shorts/z1bo8pgxLwc?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Backcountry skiing Grand Teton National Park](https://youtube.com/shorts/C73IqYxTJl4?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Backcountry skiing the Tetons: Coal Creek Aspens](https://youtube.com/shorts/C-Yt7poK0zw?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Smoking things: Jerk chicken drumsticks](https://youtube.com/shorts/F%5FpsgGs7z4A?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Backcountry skiing the Tetons: Fresh lines at Coal Creek](https://youtube.com/shorts/uF0KQaN5h48?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Smoking things: Pulled pork](https://youtube.com/shorts/lWBxln1XhNc?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Smoking things: Wagyu brisket](https://youtube.com/shorts/qRBMc6i3SrE?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Paddling the lakes near Mt. Bachelor, OR](https://youtube.com/shorts/x5RPG6PQW10?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Hiking Fisher Chimney Approach, Mt. Shuksan](https://youtube.com/shorts/q0g5Wbtc-P0?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [](https://youtube.com/shorts/q0g5Wbtc-P0?ref=nickrroberts.com)[Hiking Chain Lakes Loop Trail, North Cascades (WA)](https://youtube.com/shorts/GyLP1DjwQR4?ref=nickrroberts.com)[ ](https://youtube.com/shorts/q0g5Wbtc-P0?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Hiking Yellow Aster Butte, North Cascades (WA)](https://youtube.com/shorts/rdE-ytIvRDU?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Backpacking Yellow Aster Butte Trail, North Cascades (WA)](https://youtube.com/shorts/l6xQcYhzow8?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Backpacking Alaska Basin, WY, with my dog](https://youtube.com/shorts/GD25x05BCmE?ref=nickrroberts.com)[ ](https://youtube.com/shorts/GD25x05BCmE?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Rappelling next to Pool Arch, Moab UT](https://youtube.com/shorts/jSw7Ncg0%5FbM?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Offroading Onion Creek, Kokopelli, Moab UT](https://youtube.com/shorts/iv6Gzy0PCjA?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Turning my F-150 into a shovel on Fins & Things, Moab](https://youtube.com/shorts/10gxeDFScpQ?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Watching other people attempt Hell's Gate - Hell's Revenge Trail, Moab](https://youtube.com/shorts/T1QaioA7Xbc?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Riding "The Staircase" - Hell's Revenge, Moab](https://youtube.com/shorts/Jq73hgq-Hvk?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Climbing Castleton Tower, Utah](https://youtube.com/shorts/9AnXIl%5FhuRI?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Christmas Eve backcountry skiing with my dog](https://youtube.com/shorts/zizUGL-idTU?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### 💿 Long-form media consumption

**Books:** I've italicized books that I read in part but put down or come back to as reference. I've bolded books that I'd especially recommend. The list this year was pretty climbing-themed:

- Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine, Owen Matthews
- Putin's Wars, Mark Galeotti
- The Witcher: The Last Wish, Andrzej Sapkowski - alright Covid reading
- Minus 148: First Winter Ascent of Mt. Mckinley, Art Davidson
- Denali's West Buttress, Colby Coombs
- Invincible, Issues 26-53, Robert Kirkman/Cory Walker/Robert Ottley
- Invincible, Issues 1-25, Robert Kirkman/Cory Walker/Robert Ottley
- **Beyond the Mountain, Steve House - a solid memoir from another climbing legend**
- **Kiss or Kill, Mark Twight - intense, dark, contemplative**
- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
- **A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles -** Just a delightful, cozy read
- *Reamde, Neal Stephenson (8%)*

**Movies/TV**:

- Tombstone (1993) - Good, but seemed like it kinda dragged on
- The Killer, David Fincher - A little predictable, but solid
- **Invincible (Season 2) - Love it**
- **Scavenger's Reign (Season 1) - Crazy compelling and good writing**
- Nightmare on Elm Street - Tis the season. 80's cheesy; surprisingly good.
- **True Detective (Season 1) -** rewatch. SO rewatchable.
- **Peak Obsession -** a Cody Townsend [Fifty Project](https://www.skimag.com/videos/cody-townsend-peak-obsession-film/?ref=nickrroberts.com) production
- **The Shining -** Just a great rewatch
- **Eyes Wide Shut**
- **2001: A Space Odyssey**
- **Fargo (1996)**
- **Oppenheimer - magnificent**
- Barbie
- Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse (2018) - pretty decent; spectacular animation
- The Hunted (2003) - so bad. Also watched during Covid
- Honest Thief (Liam Neeson) - cheesy movie watched while in Covid recovery
- The Marksman (Liam Neeson) - cheesy movie watched while in Covid recovery
- Memory (Liam Neeson) - cheesy movie watched while in Covid recovery
- **Invincible (Season 1) - watched on Amazon Prime; amazing**
- Lethal Weapon (1987) - whacky, nonsensical plot, but lots of explosions
- **Enter the Dragon (1973) -** Kitschy, extremely fun
- **Big Trouble in Little China** \- Exceptional
- M3gan - pretty funny
- Cocaine Bear - I was expecting laughs like Sharknado, but it did not deliver
- Yellowstone (Season 4) - it's so bad but so addicting
- Yellowstone (Season 3) - we hate the writing but can't stop
- Yellowstone (Season 2)
- Yellowstone (Season 1)
- Bloodsport (John Claude Van Damme) --also hilarious
- First Blood (Rambo)--hilarious
- **Prospect (2018) --**Pedro Pascal is great
- **The White Lotus Season 2**
- **The Last of Us Season 1** (fantastic)

**Video games**:

- **Baldur's Gate 3** (haven't completed yet, so not counting, but got a start and it’s absolutely fantastic so far. Can see why it won game of the year)
- Starfield - Entertaining enough, and kind of like *Skyrim* in space, but Bethesda's game engine is showing [some age](https://youtu.be/hS2emKDlGmE?si=Ikb9HkZnMJh9phF-&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [**Horizon Forbidden West**](https://nickrroberts.com/horizon-forbidden-west/) (excellent)
- [**Hogwarts Legacy**](https://nickrroberts.com/hogwarts-legacy/)
- [**Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition**](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-3/)
- [**Mass Effect 2 Legendary Edition**](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-2/)
- [Mass Effect 1 Legendary Edition](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-1/)
- **God of War (2018)**
- *Elden Ring*

### ⛰️ 2023 in places

Where we spent at least one night.

**January - May**

- Victor, ID
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Henry's Fork, ID
- Chicago, IL (work trip)

**June**

- Bend, OR
- Ashford, WA (Mt. Rainer climb via Ingraham Direct route)
- Mt. Shasta Wilderness, CA (Mt. Shasta climb via Hotlum-Bolam route)
- Denver, CO (work trip)

**July**

- Deming/Glacier, WA
- Mt. Baker/Snoqualmie Wilderness, WA

**August**

- Austin, TX (work trip)
- Mt. Baker climb (Easton Glacier route)
- Portland, OR
- Seattle, WA
- Burlington, WA (Shuksan climb via Sulphide Glacier route)
- Anacortes, WA
- Cannon Beach, OR

**September - October**

- Victor, ID
- Alaska Basin, WY (backpacking excursion)

**October - November**

- Castle Valley, UT (where I climbed Castleton Tower via the North Chimney route)
- Fisher Valley, UT (camped on the way to Kokopelli Trail, connected to Onion Creek)

**November - December**

- Salt Lake City, UT
- Victor ID

### 📕 Definitions

¹**Strava** [**Fitness**](https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032451811-Fitness?ref=nickrroberts.com)**:** “Fitness is calculated using your Relative Effort (based on either heart rate data or Perceived Exertion input) and/or power meter data. This way you can identify patterns in your training and see the big picture of how all your workouts add up over time. Your score is entirely relative to you. It serves as a benchmark, to show how many points you currently have compared to any date in the past two years.”

²**Sleep Quality:** Source: [AutoSleep](http://autosleep.tantsissa.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com): "The Quality ring shows hours of quality sleep achieved. This makes it easier to compare with other days. This looks at the overall sleep time, how much light sleep, how much deep sleep, how restless and the nocturnal dip in heart rate and determines how much quality sleep you had. The ring completion target is 85% of your required sleep hours.” 

For [Garmin](https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=DWcdBazhr097VgqFufsTk8&ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=characters%20for%20results.-,What%20is%20the%20Sleep%20Score%20and%20Insights%20Feature%20on%20My,reveal%20how%20well%20you%20slept.): "Your nightly sleep score is calculated based on a blend of how long you slept, how well you slept, and evidence of recovery activity occurring in your autonomic nervous system derived from heart rate variability data. The following categories are considered when assigning a score:

- Sleep Duration
- Average stress score during sleep
- Total deep sleep
- Total light sleep
- Total REM sleep
- Awake time
- Restlessness"

³**Happiness index:** Holistic spot-check of how good I feel psychologically and physically, based on my relationships, job satisfaction, financial well-being, goal completion, etc. on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being that life can’t get any better.

## 2024 planning

I generally liked the way I planned 2023\. It seemed to work well to move away from fitness goals centered on specific activities like running, and to go for "cardio mileage," so that hiking, backcountry skiing, and other stuff I like to do would actually count toward my yearly goal.

The same goes for media consumption. I moved away from tracking books specifically and opened it up to video games, movies, and TV. Will continue tracking this way.

On the fitness front, I'm going to optimize for training duration, rather than miles, or calories burned. This is mostly because the training plan I'm following for Denali (from Uphill Athlete, by [Steve House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve%5FHouse%5F%28climber%29?ref=nickrroberts.com)) focuses on time served in exercise, rather than reps, pace, or other measures. The advantage to this way of tracking my progress is that it's even more expansive than the "cardio mileage" concept since it incorporates strength training. I've neglected strength work for my whole life to date, always thinking of myself as a lean cardio athlete. I'm going to make a concerted effort this next year to do strength sessions at least twice per week and focus on long, low-intensity cardio around that. This blend of training supports my other goals in the mountains--skiing, mountaineering, climbing. 

I'm not going to track weekly goal completion percentage this next year and see how it goes. This last year, I could too easily move stuff around and pump up my completion numbers. It's just not super meaningful to me. 

I'm going to keep the rest of my goals similar to 2023.

## Goal summary for 2024

As always, this is a list of intentions, rather than hard, inflexible commitments. See [here](https://nickrroberts.com/2023-tool-stack/) for more of the reasoning on that.

- Maintain a sleep quality of 75%+, sleep time 8+ hours average for all of 2024
- Do 250+ training hours for fitness
  - *I'm estimating this is possible since I achieved 205 in 2023\. Some of the best mountain athletes rack up* [*more than 600 training hours*](https://uphillathlete.com/aerobic-training/what-does-it-take-to-be-good/?ref=nickrroberts.com) *in a year. I'm going to try to be in that ballpark, but I just want to set a reasonable threshold*
- Get to Kahiltna Glacier on Denali, Alaska
  - *I'm deliberately not saying "summit" Denali because a) I'm superstitious and b) you have very limited control over summiting--from what I've read, it can be a 50-50 chance in the average season because of weather, a random case of pulmonary edema, injury, etc.*
- Self-sufficiently complete 3+ mountaineering/climbing objectives
  - *I want to move away from my reliance on guides. This increases some risk, but it's the natural evolution for me. I get the most joy out of adventures in the mountains when I'm making all of my own assessments. Probably why I have enjoyed resort skiing less and less as soon as I got into backcountry skiing. I love breaking trail and tromping up an unmarked hill away from crowds and noise. Plus, you can take the dog along.*
- Brew 10+ batches of beer
  - *We fantasize about creating a* [*nanobrewery*](https://brewsavor.com/news/what-is-a-nano-brewery/?ref=nickrroberts.com)*. Fiona and I even have a name in mind: Strange Creature Brewing. Driggs and Victor, Idaho, have a very lively brewing/homebrewing scene and so I'd like to get more involved. Part of this is just getting reps and reps and talking to other locals about tips and tricks.*
- Submit a beer to a competition
  - *This is mostly a motivator to brew more and get good. I don't care if I win anything, I just want to brew a lot until I feel like I have a recipe worth submitting.*
- Publish 5+ articles
  - *Same as 2023*
- Publish 5+ longer-form videos
  - *Same as 2023*
- Publish 15+ short-form videos
  - *Same as 2023*
- Finish 50+ pieces of long-form media ([log](https://nickrroberts.com/media/))
  - *Same as 2023*
### Climbing Castleton Tower, Utah
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-castleton-tower-utah/
Last updated: 2023-11-24T18:03:09.000Z
We’d been living in Castle Valley for about a week when I called up Herb, one of the owners and guides from Desert Highlights in Moab, Utah, to see what he thought about me climbing Castleton Tower. Our canyoneering guide, Kai, had planted the seed in my mind when we rappelled through Pool Arch Canyon. I didn’t previously think I could do it. 

But the more I learned about this tower’s epic history, the more I wanted to try: Alex Honnold free soloed it, Steph Davis base jumped it. Chevy even did a commercial here in 1964, helicoptering an Impala and a model to the top.

To climb Castleton, I had to pass Herb’s test. We went to Wall Street, which is slightly west of Moab down Potash road. Here, I learned the basics of how to crack climb outside. Herb put me through his “Castleton simulator” which includes four routes: A warmup on Grama & the Green Suede Shoes (a 5.7), Lacto Mangulation (5.10b), Top 40 (an old-school 5.8 with a lot of laybacking on the finger crack running up the corner), and Flakes of Wrath (East of Wrath variation at 5.9+). I definitely didn’t feel like I was crushing it, being completely pumped and sore at the end. I wasn’t totally certain what Herb needed to see, but he told me I’d passed and he’d see me the next morning at Castleston. 

To beat the traffic, Herb and I met up in the parking lot at 6:30am and began our hike up the 1,500 feet of vert to get to Castleton. Once you’re on the plateau between the Rectory and the tower, you still have to scramble your way up to the base. After a little awkward bouldering, Herb pointed out some dinosaur tracks and we ambled over to the start of the North Chimney route.

First pitch: I fell after three moves and already felt super pumped and I hadn’t even gotten to the roof.

Second pitch: This one contained the spicy offwidth section. I found I could make upward progress by relying on tiny toe ledges and smearing my hand on anything I could find off to the left.

Third pitch: This seemed to be the actual chimney section. It got a lot easier here with ample opportunity for stemming and great holds. You arrive at your final anchor point, which is a nice, flattish pile of rocks wedged in a giant crack. 

Fourth pitch: This is where you meet up with the top of the Kor-Ingalls route, which is the classic offwidth crack running up the south side of the tower, first put up Layton Kor and Huntley Ingalls in 1961, and which was the first route to access the summit. The last pitch is a sweet relief. A nice 5.7 with a big hand rail and decent feet. It’s also the shortest pitch at something around 60 feet. 

A few more moves, and we mantled up onto the summit. It’s bigger than I imagined, with enough room that climbers built a wind-protected bivy site. I was also pleased to find four bars of LTE for a quick Facetime call to my wife.

After we’d had our fill of pictures and the stellar views, we began our rappel down the Kor-Ingalls, which has chain anchors all the way to the bottom. Funnily-enough, this was the only part of the day when the exposure got to me. You have to trust your gear completely to not let you fall hundreds of feet into the boulders below. 

When I got to the ground, relief and a massive sense of accomplishment settled over me. Castleton Tower was the probably the hardest physical endeavor of my life to date. Every limb on my body was cramping. I was so acutely exhausted at the finish it was hard to keep my eyes open on the descent. 

Huge thanks to Herb for getting me up and down Castleton safely, and the team at Desert Highlights for being awesome guides during our time down in Moab. I’m definitely planning to climb with them again when I go for another big objective in southern Utah.
### September/October links
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/september-october-links/
Last updated: 2024-07-08T14:14:00.000Z
We're staying in a remote valley 45 minutes from Moab and every day we get this cowboy western view out of the window. I resolved to try to climb that big solitary tower, Castleton, in a few weeks. 

At first I wasn't sure if I liked this place. It's quiet. So quiet that it makes you self-conscious. What little traffic there is tends to run by the mountains on the far side of the valley, so there's barely any artificial noise. Few of the plots of land around our five acres are developed. It's as if you're intruding on something/someone when you crunch the pebbles on the driveway or slam the door too loudly. 

But, very slowly, being here is quieting down all the tumult in my own mind, and it's growing on me. 

**From the past couple months**

From me: 

- Canyoneering Pool Arch Canyon, Moab \[[Link](https://youtu.be/Qz0yXNeThRo?si=2dqGyyVPAwM2vv93&ref=nickrroberts.com)\].
- Turning my truck into a shovel on Fins & Things, Moab \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/10gxeDFScpQ?ref=nickrroberts.com)\].
- Drone shots from the southern Utah backcountry \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iv6Gzy0PCjA?ref=nickrroberts.com)\].
- Rappelling next to Pool Arch, Moab \[[Link](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jSw7Ncg0%5FbM?ref=nickrroberts.com)\].

The Navalmanack \[[Link](https://www.navalmanack.com/almanack-of-naval-ravikant/table-of-contents?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]. *I treat this like Aurelius's* Meditations *and peruse during thoughtful moments. Recommend reading with coffee.*

The Ballad of Pecos Hank \[[Link](https://youtu.be/yrHg1OJfnZ0?si=ZzJXvQ5JsUK5lO6n&ref=nickrroberts.com)\]. *A profile of my favorite storm chaser.*

New Prada collab \[[Link](https://www.axiomspace.com/news/prada-axiom-suit?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email)\]. *Bringing fashion to orbit.*

Mental models for product managers \[[Link](https://theproductindex.com/docs/thinking-frameworks-for-product-managers.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]. *There's usually a framework for any given situation.*

Solar punk as the new futuristic aesthetic \[[Link](https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/why-we-need-the-jetsons-and-solarpunk?utm%5Fsource=%2Finbox&utm%5Fmedium=reader2)\]. 

Omens of exceptional talent \[[Link](https://guzey.com/talent/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\].

The Taliban’s Intercontinental Hotel \[[Link](https://www.nzz.ch/english/inside-the-intercontinental-in-kabul-the-luxury-hotel-run-by-the-taliban-ld.1756704?ref=nickrroberts.com)\].

Ukraine’s counteroffensive at three months \[[Link](https://warontherocks.com/2023/09/perseverance-and-adaptation-ukraines-counteroffensive-at-three-months/?%5F%5Fs=d5o09djx55ojj3ueh6po&ref=nickrroberts.com)\].

Extreme closeups of everyday objects \[[Link](https://youtu.be/D7DDSuyyOOw?si=C7NN28gVYbBwfQOh&ref=nickrroberts.com)\].

Norwegian F-35A takes off from a Finnish highway \[[Link](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-35a-has-flown-from-a-highway-for-the-first-time?ref=nickrroberts.com)\].

Case 63 \[[Link](https://spotify.link/KXY7y5w8HDb?ref=nickrroberts.com)\]. *An exceptional podcast.*

A pilot’s view from the office \[[Link](https://www.santiagoborja.com/portfolio/?ref=nickrroberts.com)\].
### Canyoneering Pool Arch Canyon, Moab
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/canyoneering-pool-arch-canyon/
Last updated: 2023-12-28T17:14:22.000Z
---

We set out just before 7am from Castle Valley and wound our way through the Colorado River canyon back to Moab. There’s nothing quite like the sunrise over the red rock desert, with the soft yellow-blue gradient glowing up from the horizon. 

We met our guide, Kai from Desert Highlights, at the shop, piled into the company van, and drove out to Pritchett Canyon. The satellite view of the area looks like some kind of trypophobia trigger with countless rock fins oriented toward the river. An endless maze. And that’s what I love about Moab. The surrounding canyonlands give you this sense of infinity. You could spend a whole lifetime out here and probably feel like you’ve barely scratched the surface. It’s still possible to stand at the bottom of some canyon where no one’s ever stood.

We parked by Kane Creek and then worked our way up the rough road typically used by very adventurous four-wheelers for the Pritchett Canyon Safari route. 

Kai took us left off the road and up a nondescript slot canyon where we shimmied up a few narrow gulleys to get the magnificent overlook of Pool Arch, named for the mucky basin of water that collects at its base.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/10/Screenshot-2023-10-25-at-8.11.47-AM.png)

The first rappel is a 140 foot drop right beside the gigantic red rock curve. I’m not gonna lie, the first look at the distance below my feet turned my stomach, but it’s funny how quickly you adapt and start to take in the beauty. 

The second rappel was a mere 50 feet and felt like a cakewalk by comparison.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/10/Screenshot-2023-10-25-at-8.12.45-AM.png)

The final rappel, 100 feet, was very nearly my favorite—it’s just hard the beat the spectacular descent by Pool Arch. You free hang a lot of this one and descend into a lush, sandstone amphitheater with a view of the canyon stretching out behind you. The landing zone is punctuated by poison ivy, so you just have to navigate around that. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/10/Screenshot-2023-10-25-at-8.13.56-AM-1.png)

The hike out was the hottest portion of the day. About a mile and a half or so in the direct sun. I wish I’d preserved a bit more water for this section. 

This trip was our first real taste of canyoneering and it set the hooks for us. Like whenever I try other climbing-related disciplines, it gave me the itch to become self-sufficient. I could visualize Fiona and I dropping into distant and unnamed slot canyons, and weaving through more of Utah’s alien terrain. 

Pool Arch is a fairly short day and close to town which makes it a great beginner excursion. We clocked in around 5 miles total and six hours from the guide shop and back. If you’re looking for a great lead-in to canyoneering and you’re in the vicinity of Moab, look no further and don’t forget to tip your guide.
### Climbing Mt. Shuksan
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-shuksan/
Last updated: 2023-09-25T13:47:05.000Z
I’d never been to Anacortes, but this is where our group headed for a day of preparatory rope work on Mt. Erie before journeying to Shuksan in the North Cascades. The town sits on the Washington coast where the San Juan islands break off into the strait between the US and Canada. I got to the Ship Harbor Inn in the evening before our rock climbing day, cracked a beer, and watched ferries coming and going in the sunset. 

I was here for my last item on the Denali prerequisite list—a glacier skills seminar with RMI. The program is six days long (ours ran September 2-7) and it’s designed to acquaint climbers with the more technical aspects of crevasse rescue, building anchors and pulleys, rappelling, and so forth. It’s also an opportunity for guides to see if you’ll be a good team fit on Denali. No one wants to spend 20+ days in tight quarters with a jerk. 

We met our guides, Mike and Sam, up at the top of Erie for a gear check and then we moved right into knot-tying: reviewing clove hitches, Munters, figure eights on a bite, alpine butterflies, Prusiks, and more. 

It was pretty hot on the rock, but our guides led us through belay procedure, multi-pitch operations, fixed-line travel with an ascender, and we capped it all off with some rappels. 

After driving over to Burlington, I spent an hour meticulously packing my bag for our climb up to Shuksan’s camp on Sulphide Glacier the next day, where we’d be spending four nights. I bought a bunch more food to be on the safe side, and maxed out my backpack’s 60-liter capacity. 

###  Climb day 1

In Sedrow-Woolley, my fellow clients, Davis and Dilip, piled into my rental car and I drove us to the Shannon Ridge Trailhead, where we threw our packs on and started up the trail to our camp at 6,200ft. 

This first day was arguably the hardest of the trip, as we shuttled 50+ pounds of gear and food up about 3,700 feet of vert.

In my summer of climbing around the Cascades, I’d been lucky not to encounter really any bad weather, but on our climb, Shuksan delivered us a rainstorm that would last the next two days. When we arrived at camp, we were already pretty soaked. We set up our tent and immediately got inside. Rainwater pooled in the gaps between our sleeping pads. Our sleeping bags were damp. The temperature sank down into the low forties. That first night was cold. 

### Climb day 2

We awoke to the storm still hanging over us. Aside from making some freeze-dried food, we hunkered down in the tent all day, and I made significant headway on a book. 

Trips to the camp’s composting toilet were…chilly. 

### Climb day 3

On the third day, we rejoiced at the bits of blue sky we could see. Slowly, but surely, the clouds boiled out of the canyons around us and we finally saw Shuksan’s severe and beautiful landscape, with the glaciers giving away to a vast rock slab, interspersed with waterfalls that crashed down out of sight.

We finally had our first real glacier skills day. Mike and Sam led us out onto the Sulphide and we started off by building various anchors with pickets and ice screws. Then we moved into simulating a teammate falling into a crevasse and transferring the weighted rope to the anchor with Prusiks. Once we’d gotten the gist of that procedure, we built 3:1 pulley systems to bring up our fallen comrade. 

Mike, our lead guide, then put us to the test by falling backwards into a real crevasse to show us how the load would feel. I caught the bulk of Mike’s weight and the harness dug into my leg and burned. It took what felt like an age to transfer the load to an anchor, but we got him up after 5-10 minutes. 

We ended the day on the Sulphide with some ice climbing out of a crevasse which I loved. There’s something incredibly satisfying and kind of unreal about pulling yourself up vertical ice. 

After returning to camp, we watched the sunset glow across the glacier and prepared ourselves and our gear for the next day’s summit bid. 

### Climb day 4

Summit day. It’s always a little bit of a scramble getting myself into a ready state while also trying to caffeinate and eat when I’m not hungry. Fortunately the pressure was off. As with Baker, Shuksan doesn’t fall apart as the day goes on, so the timetables are more lax compared to something like Rainier. We still wanted something of an early start though to beat any incoming weather in the afternoon. 

After putting on crampons, we set out on the Sulphide once more and then switchbacked our way up the steeper rise around the cliff bands.

Somewhere around 6:30am the sun illuminated the mountain in gold. We wended our way through the crevasse fields and across a large flat section before getting to Shuksan’s prominent and rocky summit pyramid. 

When we got to the loose rock, we stowed our crampons and proceeded up a gulley. It was a lot of third/fourth class scrambling. Mike had Davis and I on belay pretty much the entire time. 

When we gained the summit ridge, the views became incredible. We could see Baker for much of the climb, but we now could look down into the Baker Ski Resort area and the glaciers spilling down Shuksan’s north side. The exposure on this aspect of the mountain was huge, with precipitous drops on both sides of the ridge. 

After getting to the top, we all sat back for a long time and marveled at the Sulphide and Crystal glaciers from this new angle. I penned my name into the logbook. This was the most beautiful summit of my summer. It helped also that Mike said he decided to recommend me for a slot on Denali with him next May, which made my spirits soar. Getting access to the West Buttress expedition has been my objective for the whole year. 

On our descent we became enveloped in clouds and it started snowing lightly. But back on the glacier, it was hot. I delayered all the way back to my sunshirt as we retraced our path around the icy chasms. 

As we approached the steeper cliff bands above camp, giant runnels of glacial melt ran through the ice, making the Sulphide seem alive. 

Back at camp we had a few nice views of the surrounding canyons before the clouds socked us in again, which made it wet and cold once more. After another hearty freeze-dried dinner, we piled in the tents and turned in for the evening, satisfied with the day.

### Climb day 5

The dramatic action of the clouds give Shuksan an extra mystique. It kept bringing to mind that Caspar David Friedrich painting of the “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/09/Screenshot-2023-09-14-at-4.53.24-PM.png)

This was my final scheduled climb for the year, barring whatever I can get into in the back home in the Tetons. Looking back, I was lucky enough to see the summit of all four big mountains I attempted between May and September. I took a few risks, such as trying to nail the weather window on Shasta between lightning storms, but *mostly* made good decisions. I also befriended a wide range of fellow clients and guides which made each climb more meaningful. 

Having an endorsement for Denali, the reason I was here, gave me a spring in my step on our descent back to the car.
### July/August Links: Missile Silo Scuba Diving, Climbing, Nord Stream
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/july-august-links-23/
Last updated: 2023-08-31T15:29:21.000Z
Hello from Portland, Oregon! 

After almost four straight months on the road, we are ready to go home. The nomadic lifestyle is fun, but we learned we need more breaks in our own space between travels. Things get hectic sometimes and it burns us out. In one example week at the beginning of this month, I flew to Austin (TX) and back from Seattle for work and traveled two and half hours up to Glacier (WA)–where we were living in an Airbnb near Mt. Baker. Since our stay ended the next day and we couldn't extend it, we packed up the place that same evening. We were up the next morning at 5:45am, and Fiona drove me down to Sedrow-Woolley where I started my Mt. Baker climb. While I was up there for three days, a wildfire forced Fiona to relocate from her charming campsite next to Baker Lake and spend most of a day looking for another place to overnight. When I came off the mountain, we were both exhausted, but we proceeded to drive the four hours down to Portland. Two days later I tested positive for Covid, and we were down with the illness for about two weeks.

The sheer duration of the sickness made it a lot worse than I thought it would be. The symptoms (congestion, coughing, loss of taste/smell, fever, fatigue) weren't terrible by themselves, they just lasted...and lasted. At a certain point, I ran out of compelling stuff to watch on my phone, and just couldn't focus well enough to read. Boredom set in hard and I fell into a brief depression. 

The virus now seems to be getting everyone I know who managed to skate by for the last three years without contracting it. 

All of this makes me want to settle back into our own house in the mountains with a cup of tea and play some [Starfield](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfYEiTdsyas&ref=nickrroberts.com), which comes out in about a week!

## From the past couple months

From me: Climbing Mt. Baker:

---

The efforts to find the perpetrators of the Nord Stream explosions read like a spy novel!

[Investigating the Nord Stream Attack: All the Evidence Points To KyivIt’s a spy thriller that has the potential to change the course of international politics: A year ago, a secret commando blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Since then, investigators have been searching for the perpetrators. The leads they have found are extremely politically sensit…![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/public/spon/images/icons/touch-icon180.png)DER SPIEGEL![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/1cc7e981-79bd-451c-a39b-0ff780e265c6_w1280_r1.77_fpx46_fpy34.png)](https://www.spiegel.de/international/investigating-the-attack-on-nord-stream-all-the-clues-point-toward-kyiv-a-124838c7-992a-4d0e-9894-942d4a665778?ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

You can scuba dive an old Atlas missile silo in Texas (*via my pal Sam S.*):

[Diving Deep in the Heart of Texas – Valhalla Nuclear Missile Silo![](https://www.drivedivedevour.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Drive-Dive-Devour-favicon-55ccf5edv1_site_icon-320x320.png)Brandon says August 20, 2016 at 11:34 am Thanks, I’ll fix that. ReplyBrandon![](http://www.drivedivedevour.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Valhalla-Silo-Dive-131-548x1024.jpg)](https://www.drivedivedevour.com/diving-deep-in-the-heart-of-texas-valhalla-nuclear-missile-silo/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

Prove to yourself that you can do hard things by trying hard things:

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-15-at-5.03.45-PM.png)](https://twitter.com/nateliason/status/1678509238333718529?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

A very good writeup on Denali’s Cassin Ridge with notes about the West Buttress route I will be attempting in 2024:

[The Cassin Ridge — Brian Goes On AdventuresWe came up with the idea of going to Alaska after having too many beers one night at a bar in Chamonix. Nine months later John and I were topping out on the Cassin Ridge of Denali, one of the major alpine climbs of the world leading right to the top of the highest mountain in North America. Climbing![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55ef8a65e4b085756a63d8d9/1441767639028-QDDVZVGN9PZ6L1QW5S73/favicon.ico)Brian Goes On AdventuresBrian Monetti![](http://static1.squarespace.com/static/55ef8a65e4b085756a63d8d9/55ef8bd3e4b0d8330c6589b9/629d4c62ea5a4f7c65185626/1660099904507/IMG_5106.JPG?format=1500w)](https://briangoesonadventures.com/travel/2022/6/5/the-cassin-ridge?ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

Google's foray into LLM land:

[The AI takeover of Google Search starts nowThe 10 blue links aren’t gone, but AI is pushing them down the page.![](https://www.theverge.com/icons/android_chrome_512x512.png)The Verge![](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QQawoxSGsujkaqzq1e5nMDIBGdw=/0x0:2620x1500/1200x628/filters:focal(233x623:234x624)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24644238/SGE_Bluetooth_Speakers_v2.png)](https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717120/google-search-ai-results-generated-experience-io?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email)

---

LLMs in plain English:

[Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargonWant to really understand how large language models work? Here’s a gentle primer.![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80f04690-7ee3-44ef-a00d-1da793bac57e%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Understanding AITimothy B Lee![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc3e159bd-1228-4205-b1eb-5898ab9172d3_1600x856.png)](https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-explained-with?ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

Hoel expands on “High Tech Pastoral" (resonated with me, an aging millennial):

[High-tech pastoral as the new aestheticExplaining a common taste of aging millennials![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86612ed7-3e8e-4903-bda3-b0765de8a21b%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)The Intrinsic PerspectiveErik Hoel![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F605e23ea-841d-4b1e-b64a-58403f341baa_1181x1299.jpeg)](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/high-tech-pastoral-as-the-new-aesthetic?ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

David Heinemeier Hansson (of Basecamp) on hybrid work:

[Hybrid combines the worst of office and remote workThe honeymoon for remoteworkisover, and managers who never liked the concept to begin with are plotting its complete reversal, so that things may return to how they were before The Great Remote Experiment. This experiment convinced millions of employees of how much better life could be without a com…![](https://world.hey.com/dhh/avatar-df6405b0f7fafda980fd38b04c334bec936aef69)![](https://world.hey.com/dhh/avatar-df6405b0f7fafda980fd38b04c334bec936aef69)](https://world.hey.com/dhh/hybrid-combines-the-worst-of-office-and-remote-work-d3174e50?ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

2023 drone photography awards:

[The Winners of the 2023 Drone Photo AwardsI am a sucker for aerial photography, so I had a lot of fun looking through all the winners and runners-up of the 2023 Dro![](https://kottke.org/images/2016/ios/192x192.png)kottke.orgJason Kottke![](https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/drone-awards-2023-01.jpg)](https://kottke.org/23/07/the-winners-of-the-2023-drone-photo-awards?ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

Naval Ravikant on one the most [rewarding podcasts](https://open.spotify.com/episode/49G7nUmBklK64qzVqbnqwN?si=Mose%5FD-dR6G947QwTeL%5F-g&ref=nickrroberts.com) (Spotify) you’ll listen to this year, probably. It aired first I think in 2017, but it's just pure gold.

---

A 1956 game show episode featuring a man who witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: 

---

ChatGPT writes a college entrance essay (*via my pal Sam S*.):

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-15-at-5.07.22-PM.png)](https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1682258198374301697?s=46&t=ollfTuIvMM-pQLeSqCwSEg&ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

ACX’s Dictator Book Club: Vladimir Putin (a review of Masha Gessen's "The Man Without a Face"):

[Dictator Book Club: PutinReview of Masha Gessen’s “The Man Without A Face”![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb424cc20-0234-4207-8d0b-bbd2cddf6d3a_650x350.png)](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-putin)

---

An analysis of the pivotal battle for Hostomel Airport:

[The Battle of Hostomel Airport: A Key Moment in Russia’s Defeat in Kyiv - War on the RocksEditor’s note: The three authors recorded a companion podcast for this article for the Russia Contingency, the War on the Rocks members-only show that![](https://warontherocks.com/favicon.ico)War on the RocksLiam Collins![](https://warontherocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Hostomel_after_the_battle_962462.jpg)](https://warontherocks.com/2023/08/the-battle-of-hostomel-airport-a-key-moment-in-russias-defeat-in-kyiv/?%5F%5Fs=d5o09djx55ojj3ueh6po&ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

A strange point of contention between China and the Philippines is a beached World War II ship that serves as an outpost for the Philippine Marines in the Spratly Islands:

[BRP Sierra Madre - Wikipedia![](https://en.wikipedia.org/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png)Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Harnett_County_AGP-821.jpg)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRP%5FSierra%5FMadre?wprov=sfti1&ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

The world’s largest landowners:

[The World’s Largest LandownersMadison Trust’s Self-Directed IRA Empowers You to Invest in Your Ideas![](https://www.madisontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/apple-touch-icon.png)Choose the Best Self-Directed IRA Company and Get Control of Your Retirement Investments![](https://www.madisontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/worlds-largest-land-owners-4_thumb-min.jpg)](https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/worlds-largest-landowners/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

---

What’s special about this number? (*via Annie Rauwerda*)

[What’s Special About This Number?![](https://erich-friedman.github.io/logos/num.gif)](https://erich-friedman.github.io/numbers.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### Climbing Mt. Baker
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-baker/
Last updated: 2023-08-25T18:08:10.000Z
**Listen on** [**Spotify**](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2RCwc5a3m4tUbp1oqRSwN1?si=57a72354b6c94290&ref=nickrroberts.com)**.**

The long string of glaciated, volcanic peaks that form the Cascade Range never fails to get my imagination going. The “American Alps,” as the North Cascades are called, are partially a byproduct of repeated, cataclysmic explosions stretching back millennia. High on mountains like Baker, the smell of sulfur on the air is a constant reminder of the landscape’s impermanence, with another massive geological event lurking around the corner.

![62nd Airlift Wing Recalls Mount St. Helen's Eruption on 40th Anniversary >  Team McChord > Display](https://media.defense.gov/2020/May/18/2002302128/2000/2000/0/800518-F-XX000-001.JPG)

Mt. St. Helens, 1980

Since I’m still new to glacier travel, I signed up for a three-day, guided climb of Baker’s Easton Glacier route through RMI.

We met for a gear check at Bingham Park in Sedrow-Woolley, Washington, where I’m happy to say I didn’t have to make any emergency gear purchases. I caught a ride with a couple of my fellow climbers, Jeff and Karl (both software engineers at Lockheed Martin), to the Park Butte trailhead about 45 minutes away. The crew gathered up again and started up the trail without much fuss.

If mountains have a vibe, Baker’s was “quiet stoner” compared to Rainier’s “Type-A caffeine addict drill sergeant.” It was a welcome relief. The crowds were massively thinned out, the vert-gain-per-day was about three or four thousand, and we had two nights in large, comfortable tents, rather than a noisy wood box covered in tar. My guide Henry said the key reason for the fast-paced Rainier regime is that the mountain aggressively tries to kill you when the sun comes out, especially later in the summer. The threat of Baker shedding rock or ice in the afternoon just isn’t as high, so the timetables are much looser. For instance, were able to “sleep in” until 3:45am for our summit push.

With the Easton Glacier, you’re looking at about 7,000 feet of total gain from Park Butte Trailhead, a summit elevation of about 10,780 feet, and a total distance of approximately 14 miles out and back.

The views really start to open up when you get to the Easton Glacier’s moraine and you can stare down into its ancient path. Enormous gouts of water run down the center of this valley, forming massive, dirty waterfalls.

One of the other perks of going guided is that tents are waiting up there for you. RMI and a few other guide companies maintain outposts at Sandy Camp all summer. My tentmate, Warren, and I shared a roomy three-person Trango tent that had been thoroughly tied down to minimize wind noise.

The drawback to this luxurious semi-permanent setup is that the local mice and rats know you’re coming and have evolved into the Navy Seals of their species when it comes to getting at your food…or excrement. We were issued bear canisters with locking lids and instructed to keep as many of our snacks *and* filled poop bags inside of them as possible. It’s a little weird having those two items side-by-side in a small space like that, even with all of the packaging and barriers.

Our guides judged that the next day would be the best weather window for a summit, so rather than spend the entire second day reviewing glacier travel skills (as the original itinerary had us doing), they decided to do mountain school on our first day, summit the next, and return home the third. This was totally fine by me, as I wasn’t really feeling a full day of self-arrest practice.

After reviewing crampon travel, arresting, and walking on rope teams again, we broke for dinner. No one is paying me to say this, but [Gastro Gnome](https://www.gastrognomemeals.com/product/spicy-italian-sausage-rigatoni?ref=nickrroberts.com) freeze dried meals are a huge step up in terms of quality. I was actually excited to eat my rigatoni.

After dinner we all wound down, watched the sun set on the Puget Sound, and went to sleep around 8pm.

The next morning, I realized that something had bored a hole in the netting of our tent and into my backpack to get at the finished can of tuna there. It was a dumb mistake on my part; the guides were not exaggerating. Other folks in camp said that mice had been running up and down their tents all night.

We began our trek by headlamps, but since it was already 4:30am or so, we quickly switched them off. The morning dawned with shades of pink over the Easton. I think the beauty of the sunrise was made more dramatic by all the smoke in the air from a nearby wildfire that had grown overnight.

We hoofed it across the Easton’s large patches of solid, blue ice, and I paused once in a while to peer into some of the small boreholes liquid water drilled into various places.

The hike up the glacier is spectacular. The grade is rarely more than 20-25 degrees on the lower sections, letting you cruise at a solid pace without tiring too much. At breaks, we watched the soft light of the morning sun glow up Mount Lincoln and Colfax, which stand out like daggers on the skyline.

The smell of sulfur increases in intensity as you approach the crater’s edge at about 9,500 feet. We saw these foul plumes of steam belched upward like the exhalations of some sleeping giant. The last eruption was recorded in 1843 and I read that it gave local officials another scare in 1975 when it dramatically ramped up its heat flow making the steam vents go wild.

The “crux” of the route (if you can even call it that) is the Roman Wall—a steep, gold-colored feature that you have to scale to get to the summit plateau. The medium here is a kitty-litter mixture of tiny, yellowed pebbles and ice. It can be a little tricky to navigate, but just requires some focused footwork to get through.

The summit itself is a nub on the next plateau. Standing on top, you can peer down into the crater, which I found to be one of the most awe-inspiring views of the trip. The Sherman Crater is surrounded by a thick hanging glacier that makes whole place look primeval and hostile.

After photos, we grabbed a quick snack and began our descent back to camp, skating through the sun-softened snow. We had a much better view of the Easton in the full daylight, with its crevasses that yawn open like small canyons.

When we returned to camp, the team tore into food, chatted, and relived the climb until the sun went down.

Around 7:00 am, we started down to the trailhead. Everyone was in good spirits and cheerful. Marmots were even out enjoying the morning sun. I got a chance to connect more with Henry, who will likely be one of my guides on Denali next year if everything works out.

When I return to the Seattle area for any length of time, I would love to give the North Ridge route a shot, but I figure I need a little more multi-pitch ice experience for that. Henry invited me up to Hyalite Canyon in Montana this coming winter for just that purpose.

Baker’s Easton Glacier route was a pleasant variation from the more intense and harrowing experiences I’ve had this summer in the mountains. If you’re looking to work your way up to something like Rainier, this is the perfect training ground.
### Climbing Mt. Shasta
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-shasta/
Last updated: 2023-08-25T18:08:22.000Z
### Video

### Podcast version on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/49reLx4itezDQsJMmcbWr7?si=4a9bed1a69db47fb&ref=nickrroberts.com)

### 

Our summit bid was in doubt until the moment we set foot on it. Leading up to and after our climb, foreboding cumulonimbus clouds sailed around Shasta, strafing the surrounding landscape with lightning. I also almost lost the mental battle against pain from my blisters and fatigue.

We arrived in the evening on Friday to Northgate trailhead. The drive-in was particularly sporty because Google routed us along an unfrequented fire road that seemed like it was gradually being reclaimed by vegetation. Bushes put some good scrapes in the side of the truck.

My climbing partner, Nick, was waiting for us in his Subaru. He and I met at a wedding about a month ago in Santa Barbara. We were seated at the same table at the reception and hit it off after he mentioned he had climbed Denali. “That’s my objective!” I exclaimed through a mouthful of wine. After some conversation, it felt a lot like Nick was a version of myself three years into the future, having worked his way from guided trips on Shasta during the pandemic to technical climbs in the Alaska Range. We made plans to try Shasta together shortly thereafter.

After greetings, we made carne asada burritos and sipped beers in the parking lot while the temperature dropped and the light faded, casting a glorious pinkish glow over the summit. In the windows between cloud cover, we snatched binocular-assisted glimpses of our route to check the conditions. Even with our magnified vision, we couldn’t really tell how the snow looked. We brought our ski touring setups, but riding through giant sun cups is no fun. We ultimately decided to risk it and pack the skis.

Looking back on it now, I regret ever suggesting that we try a ski descent of Shasta. By this last weekend of June, the snow line had receded far above the trailhead. The first continuous snow turned out to be 3 miles in and a thousand or so feet higher than our starting point. Carrying ski equipment on top of my mountaineering loadout made my pack weigh something on the order of 60 or 70 pounds. It added a lot of pain for very little upside.

Day one started with a pleasant trek through the trees, though we were heavily loaded and sweating profusely, our skis catching overhanging branches as we moved. Some two miles in, I started to notice hotspots on my heels. A combination of overly-thick socks, lots of weight, and newish mountaineering boots. I applied moleskin to my sweaty feet, but it got rubbed off its placement as we continued. My blister situation felt amateurish and kind of embarrassing being in Nick’s company. I wanted to show that I had at least a little experience during our first climb together. I suppressed the pain and trudged on, vowing to fix my feet at camp. In the back of my mind, I reflected on the ropemate I had on Rainier who turned back on summit day because of the same kind of heel blistering.

We found the first worthy snow somewhere around 8000 feet and switched to our touring setups. It was such a relief to have the skis on the ground, instead of catching on trees and burdening my back. At last, I thought, the fun part begins.

We toured about 700 vertical feet higher, turning the corner left into the expanse below high camp. Things looked encouraging for a moment with snow stretching off into the distance. But it didn’t last; we got to the scrubby brush and found only rocks. We both agreed that trekking more with the skis loaded on our packs just sucked. We ditched the ski gear under a bush and continued on foot.

When we got to camp, a guided crew from Shasta Mountain Guides had taken the tent platforms Nick had intended for us. But they directed us up the slope and mentioned there was running water—a stream of melt-off snaking through the boulders.

Nick and I continued up the hill and deployed our tents in small, flat areas other climbers had hewn from the rocky terrain. We strained the water from a stream into our receptacles through my buff to filter out the sediment. Nick commented that there was an oily-looking substance on the surface of his Nalgene water, and I later realized it was some greasy mixture of sunscreen and sweat from the buff I was wearing. Oh well.

We settled in for the evening at our perch on the boulder field below the moraine next to Hotlum Glacier, cooking food, napping, and watching the weather. I managed to rig up a kind of gauze cast around my ankle in an attempt to pin the moleskin over my increasingly raw heels.

Somehow we had 5G cell service. “The forecast updated. Now there’s thunderstorm risk at 10:00am tomorrow,” Nick said from his tent. That messed up our plans for a 3:00am start. We were estimating that it would be about seven hours to the summit from here and then two back down. We knew for certain we didn’t want to be caught on the summit or some high ridge and zapped to smithereens. Neither Nick nor I even wanted to be at camp underneath one of these anvil clouds. We were pretty far above the tree line and felt like fleshy lightning rods. We decided to split up and talk to our neighbors to see what their plans were.

The guides told me that they were hunkered down, waiting to see what would happen. They were still planning a go-time around 3:00am. When I told Nick, he said “Well, they’re probably not going to summit.” It was far too late of a start to beat the weather risk. We decided to set our alarms for midnight and attempted to sleep around 7:00pm.

I woke to bright flashes in my tent around 11:00pm. Panicked, I ripped open the zippers and peered outside. Foggy clouds billowed around the tents. “Oh shit,” I thought, “it’s right on top of us.”

“Nick! Lightning.”

Another flash. It looked far away. We pulled out our phones again and tried to find out what the weather was doing. Nick pulled up a site with a radar projection, which showed that the system producing the lightning was 50 or so miles to the north, but damn did it feel closer in the dark. The radar predicted it would blow north and dissipate. This ended up being the case, but we were jittery.

I dozed for what felt like another minute before my phone alarm went off. We roused and made coffee and oatmeal in the red light of our headlamps. I wasn’t sure exactly why we were using the red light, but Nick was doing it, so I followed suit. It made everything feel a bit like a horror movie.

Nick and I threw on our packs and started up the slope by about 12:30am, stopping at the snow line to put on 12-point crampons. Then, we trudged. Hours in the dark went by. We both retreated into our thoughts, only speaking to point out hazards or clarify the route. Nick followed Gaia GPS on his phone because we couldn’t see anything beyond 100 feet away. Our line became very steep. The best I could tell, the slope angle tipped up to and possibly over 40 degrees. Footing lost here would probably have fatal consequences. I brought out my axe and began stabbing my way up the small switchbacks Nick made.

Around 4:00am, we crossed from a snowfield over a rocky ridge and onto “the ramp” of the Hotlum-Bolam route around 12,600 ft. A little higher than we intended, but we were determined to be nowhere near the crevasses of the Hotlum glacier, which guards the bottom of the ramp. In the dark, I scraped my crampons over rocks. It felt precarious.

From here, the ramp took us straight up to a pyramid-shaped snowfield below the summit block. I took the lead, feeling okay at altitude. After a few switchbacks, I found the bootpack from other climbers, which went straight up to the Rabbit Ears rock towers. Nick didn’t like the look of the near-vertical path the bootpack took in front of us so we cut right and ascended to the south summit.

After a short traverse across the summit ridge, we dropped our packs and stood on Shasta’s highest point. It was about 6:30am.

My feet were in bad shape. I tore off my complicated, yet failing, gauze bandages and opted for simple bandaids. I knew they wouldn’t hold for long, but I needed something to get me back down to camp.

We descended after about 20 minutes on the summit. Nick raced down in front of me. We were about equal on the climb, but he was significantly faster on the descent. I felt at points like I was jogging down the ramp in crampons.

4,000 vertical feet later, we arrived back at our camp and gathered up our things. I was so fatigued that the re-packing which should’ve taken me 15 minutes, took more like 45\. My legs cramped up each time I crouched to pick something up off the ground. The guides who we consulted the night before had indeed not summited with their clients, but they congratulated us as we passed them.

We got back down to 8,700 feet where we stashed our touring gear, but it took us some 15-20 minutes to find it again. I sighted Nick’s splitboard poking up from the bushes, and I wrenched my destroyed feet out of my Nepals and into the touring boots. No good.

My attempt to ski Shasta lasted about 10 minutes. I slid down the rotten snow and dropped both mountaineering boots along the way, not having been bothered to secure them correctly on my pack.

When I ran out of snow, I stowed the skis on my backpack once more and jammed my raw feet back into the sweaty Nepals. Shouldering the 60-ish-pound pack, I drew on all of my reserves to stomp back down to the car. I knew the forest down to the Northgate Trailhead was gorgeous, but I couldn’t appreciate it through the pain and fatigue. I became angry at the trail and its makers for creating such a rambling, non-direct route back to the cars. We walked for what felt like miles of winding path, losing only a few hundred feet of vert at a time.

When we got back to the cars (which I once more forgot to take video of) I unceremoniously dropped my pack in the back of Nick’s Subaru and hobbled to the passenger’s seat. We’d completed Shasta. From the standpoint of the physical toll it took on my body and the amount of willpower I had to summon for the finish, Shasta’s Hotlum-Bolam route was the hardest climb I think I’ve done to this point.

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### May/June links: AI debates, Apple Vision, Rubik's cube record-breaking
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/may-june-links-23/
Last updated: 2023-06-21T15:50:12.000Z
Greetings from Bend, Oregon!

We're here in Deschutes County through the beginning of July, before journeying up the west coast to the Seattle area. Bend is a lovely town. It's chock-full of hip breweries, dog-friendly restaurants with patios, sunny river floats, hiking, biking, skiing, camping, fishing. It combines a lot of what we love. Fiona and I are more than a little tempted to move here.

We decided on the Pacific Northwest for our summer to be close to the Cascade Range, where I have a series of climbs planned. I started with Mount Rainier at the beginning of June:

## From the past month

A couple weeks ago, I finished Mark Twight's *Kiss or Kill*, which is a compilation of his essays on climbing. He has a way of cutting to the core of things. Most are not easy reads because he's in your face, shining a light on your weakness. This one in particular haunts me:

[Twitching With TwightWhat’s your problem? I think I know. You see it in the mirror every morning: temptation and doubt hip to hip inside your head. You know it’s not supposed to be like this. But you drank the Kool-Aid and dressed yourself up in someone else’s life. You’re haunted because you remember having something m…![](https://equipesolitaire.com/cdn/shop/t/4/assets/favicon.png?v=121373669993531152741454963623)Mark F. TwightMark F. Twight![](https://equipesolitaire.com/cdn/shop/t/4/assets/logo.png?v=136370902956863760911454963665)](https://equipesolitaire.com/blogs/discourse/84418756-twitching-with-twight?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Hoel: It’s not possible to make a good social media site:

[Stop trying to make a “good” social media siteYou want what cannot be had![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86612ed7-3e8e-4903-bda3-b0765de8a21b%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)The Intrinsic PerspectiveErik Hoel![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c997fbc-d614-4d3a-9eee-bd12b539ac3d_1181x1299.jpeg)](https://open.substack.com/pub/erikhoel/p/stop-trying-to-make-a-good-social)

Mark Andreessen on why AI will save the world:

[Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen HorowitzThere’s a full-blown moral panic about AI right now. But the real risk is losing the race to global AI technological superiority.![](https://a16z.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/cropped-favicon-512-270x270.png)Andreessen HorowitzMarc Andreessen![](https://a16z.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AI-Saves-The-World_Yoast-FB.jpg)](https://a16z.com/2023/06/06/ai-will-save-the-world/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on ChatGPT:

[ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the WebOpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?![](https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico)The New YorkerCondé Nast![](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/63e43e3f986288e90c859958/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/Chiang_final.png)](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The trouble with covering AI as a journalist:

[Why I’m having trouble covering AIIf you believe that the most serious risks from AI are real, should you write about anything else?![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F714ff80f-6186-4445-a7e2-547c30c5c347%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)PlatformerCasey Newton![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4df5c1db-2226-4a8f-8969-c8f10f9fe5a1_1024x1024.png)](https://www.platformer.news/p/why-im-having-trouble-covering-ai?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Apple Vision Pro early access review:

[My First Immersion in Apple Vision Pro: Heavy, Man!This morning, I spent half an hour trying the Apple Vision Pro headset. Here’s the punch line: This is one freaking mind-blowing piece of…![](https://cdn-static-1.medium.com/_/fp/icons/Medium-Avatar-500x500.svg)MediumDavid Pogue![](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:936/1*9Ptr0j3f7qdkuzr2-ZXPNQ.png)](https://medium.com/@davidpogue/my-first-immersion-in-apple-vision-pro-heavy-man-d99f0a940c7c?ref=nickrroberts.com)

A fantastic take on where Apple Vision is headed: "Just like you, your SecondSelf sometimes needs to take a wellness break. Scheduled firmware updates take place on the first Monday of every month between 2 and 3 am. During the firmware update, you may experience vivid dreams of elk charging across a snowy plain, of steam curdling from the nostrils of an infinite herd of elk, of tracking the elk with a stone-tipped spear, bone-thin, ravenous, of the snow melting and the grass sizzling around your burning feet of fire, of hot blood gushing from the hide of an elk...

Do not remain awake during the firmware update":

[How to enjoy your SecondSelf Skinset ProLove yourself. Love your SecondSelf.![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F53cf7d04-ae95-43b9-8c0c-7a4a290c872b%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Numb at the LodgeSam Kriss![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa39ef680-00d3-4d19-bfa6-3b6d201429d4_1588x1080.jpeg)](https://samkriss.substack.com/p/how-to-enjoy-your-secondself-skinset)

Speaking of Apple products, I was recently alerted that there exist a whole line of airplane TV adapters for your Airpods, so you don't have to use the shitty headphones they give you as you board. Genius:

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-21-at-8.27.44-AM.png)](https://www.amazon.com/Twelve-South-Transmitter-Noise-Cancelling-Headphones/dp/B0BQZBMXD4/ref=asc%5Fdf%5FB0BQZBMXD4/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The 3x3 Rubiks cube world record solve time was recently broken by Max Park:

Wisdom I couldn't agree with more: "An hour before 9 is worth two after five":

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-21-at-8.31.21-AM.png)](https://twitter.com/aliabdaal/status/1654425583286120448?s=46&t=ollfTuIvMM-pQLeSqCwSEg&ref=nickrroberts.com)

Sam Kriss on King Charles III, whose coronation was last month:

[In England’s dreamingLizards and black magic: a republican case for Charles![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F53cf7d04-ae95-43b9-8c0c-7a4a290c872b%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Numb at the LodgeSam Kriss![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3102871a-1b01-4519-bfac-d805d00ceb4f_1234x861.png)](https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/in-englands-dreaming?r=binh0&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=email)

Vladimir Putin’s vodka empire:

[Russia Has a Vodka Addiction. So Does Vladimir Putin – But Not the Same Way.The Russian leader is famously sober. There’s a reason that his country isn’t.![](https://www.politico.com/android-chrome-192x192.png)POLITICOMark Lawrence Schrad05/05/2023 04:30 AM EDT Link Copied![](https://static.politico.com/48/1b/00b92f3d45529b0e31b1df7a0087/keithleeillustration-politico-2-300ppi-web.jpg)](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/05/05/vladimir-putin-vodka-empire-00095109?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Japan’s choices in the event of a war over Taiwan:

[Should Japan Defend Taiwan? - Responsible StatecraftResponsible Statecraft Should Japan Defend Taiwan? Analysis -![](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/cropped-RS-Logo-3-284x284.png)Responsible StatecraftKiyoshi Sugawa![](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/warships-japan.jpg)](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/05/02/should-japan-defend-taiwan/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Diary entries from a Ukrainian filmmaker-turned-soldier:

[The Diary of a Ukrainian Filmmaker-Turned-SoldierA cinematographer reflects on his time on the battlefield in Europe’s biggest land war in decades![](https://newlinesmag.com/wp-content/uploads/cropped-New-Lines_Favicon_Black-Background-270x270.jpg)New Lines MagazineArtem Ryzhykov, as told to David Lepeska![](https://newlinesmag.com/wp-content/uploads/For-David-Lepeska-story-web.jpg)](https://newlinesmag.com/first-person/the-diary-of-a-ukrainian-filmmaker-turned-soldier/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

RUSI report on Russian tactics in the second year of its invasion of Ukraine:

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-21-at-8.39.54-AM.png)](https://static.rusi.org/403-SR-Russian-Tactics-web-final.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The ebb and flow of Russian power \[podcast\]:

[The Russia Contingency with Michael Kofman![](https://warontherocks.com/favicon.ico)](https://warontherocks.com/premium/therussiacontingency/feed/wqngvedo1lpb68dobw9379mk5qj42rwp/1/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Der Spiegel on Wagner and Prigozhin:

[Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Meat Grinder: A Moment of Truth for Russia’s Wagner Group in BakhmutThe Russian mercenary force Wagner Group has propped up autocrats from Mali to Syria in recent years. In Bakhmut, however, it now finds itself in the bloody spotlight of the war in Ukraine. Leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has long enjoyed Putin’s support – but for how much longer?![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/public/spon/images/icons/touch-icon180.png)DER SPIEGEL![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/141997d8-bc0c-4252-bfb0-d832452d35d2_w1280_r1.77_fpx48_fpy36.jpg)](https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/yevgeny-s-prigozhin-s-meat-grinder-a-moment-of-truth-for-russia-s-wagner-group-in-bakhmut-a-f306a3c2-0e90-4085-8b90-ad36ef3d81ab?ref=nickrroberts.com)

A tour of the Fort Worth F-35 plant:

[Building the F-35![](https://bucket.mlcdn.com/a/3037/3037351/images/a1e7472fbbf1a05748a2aa90e7bbbc971d1818fb.png/dad4ab0fc79e2e0e7cd4598215bf239ce24b0e23.png)![](https://bucket.mlcdn.com/a/3037/3037351/images/d1f4706baae2aa41838689af68c385cee3b53732.png/49d197a5749d973231230395a67035d2eef641a9.png)](https://www.themerge.co/blog/s9h7u0-building-the-f-35?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### Climbing Mt. Rainier
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-rainier/
Last updated: 2023-08-25T18:08:32.000Z
### Video

### Podcast version on Spotify [here](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sOK7vv60AMWZ6ip5R5CL7?si=c0a04245981b4464&ref=nickrroberts.com)

I set out from Bend, Oregon, this past Wednesday morning and began the five hour commute up to Ashford, Washington. The whole time I was driving, I fretted about the weather. Rainier, like most big peaks, is known for unpredictable and rapid changes in its atmospheric attitude. Looking back on my experience, I feel like I cheated a little: We summited with cloudless skies and mellow winds. For many climbers, the weather is an obstacle to surmount not unlike the glaciers and vert that make Rainier the challenge that it is.

When I pulled into Ashford I was thinking about all of the climbing legends who’ve been through this place: Ed Viesturs, Mark Twight, Jim, Lou, and Pete Whittaker, among many more. Rainier is a test piece. It’s the place where countless climbing careers begin, and some tragically end. As Twight says “the mountains have teeth.” One of the worst accidents in US mountaineering history happened right here in 1981, where 11 people were killed when the Ingraham Icefall fractured and avalanched down the glacier. It was the very same route we’d be attempting.

My friends and I went with the four-day climb through RMI (Rainier Mountaineering Inc.), which dates back to 1969 and was one of the first guide services operating in the vicinity. Two of the four days of the climb itinerary are dedicated to prep and the other two are for the climb itself.

After checking in at RMI’s basecamp, we met two of our guides: Ray and Brent, and we’d later be joined by Nicole. Brent Okita is the humble world record holder for the most summits of Rainier—before our climb, 579\. They walked us through an extensive briefing on the route and what to expect high on the mountain. Brent assessed the conditions were right for an attempt at the Ingraham Direct route, which shaves off an hour or more each direction relative to Disappointment Cleaver, the most common way of accessing the summit. The ID, as it’s called, is highly dependent on the condition of glacier and finding a passable way through the crevasses. In mellower winters, when the snows don’t fill in enough, the guides don’t even attempt it.

After our briefing, we spread our gear out on the grass. Brent came to each of us in turn and inspected our stuff. I was slightly irritated that several of the pieces of equipment I’d purchased were not up to the task or just unnecessary, like my rain pants which didn’t have a zipper running all the way to hip. According to Brent, it would make them impossible to remove without first taking off my crampons, which would just take too long.

When we were all finally situated with our gear and rentals, I drove up with road with my pals to Wild Berry, a Nepalese restaurant. The unassuming guy filling up water glasses here was none other than Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, the world record holder for the fastest ascent of Everest from basecamp —10 hours and 56 minutes.

Full from my Chicken Thali and samosas, I headed back to my motel in Eatonville. I was too late in the game to get a room at the Whittaker Bunkhouse and I’m sorely disappointed I didn’t. It seems like a very cool and historical part of the RMI experience. The place was originally built in 1912 to house loggers and was later renovated by Lou and Ingrid Whittaker.

I inventoried my gear on the bed for “mountain school” the next day, where we’d review critical skills for the climb. RMI provides a handy checklist which I ran through something like four times.

The next morning, we convened at basecamp and boarded our shuttle up to the Paradise area in Rainier National Park. The road that winds its way up to the trailhead teases you with glimpses of the mountain, before the view suddenly opens up entirely before you. Rainier is gigantic up close.

We trekked a short distance from the Paradise lot to a snowfield. Here we spent the day practicing the critical techniques we’d need on the climb: Self arrest, traveling on a rope team, moving in 12-point crampons. We also tried our hands at glissading.

After mountain school we ate at Wild Berry again, and I checked and re-checked my pack for the climb to Camp Muir the next day.

The morning of our ascent to Muir, I was up early enough to snag some footage of Rainier and Alder Lake glowing in the sunrise.

I met up with the crew at RMI’s basecamp again, and the shuttle whisked us to the trailhead at Paradise once more. The climb to Camp Muir, which sits at just over 10,000ft, is about 4.5 miles but sticks you with around 4,500 feet of elevation gain. It’s a gorgeous route though. The Nisqually Icefall hangs far above, its ice cliffs blue and threatening, while the glacier spills out into the canyon below.

After about five hours of hiking, we finally arrived at Muir, which is a collection of humble shelters built out of the surrounding rock next to Cowlitz Glacier, the first glacier we’d cross on our summit bid. We dropped our bags and immediately began prepping for sleep and our early start, unpacking anything we didn’t need to carry to the summit. RMI’s shelter has space for something like 20 people. Everyone grabbed a bunk and a Thermarest pad, which I later found to be pretty wanting.

Brent arrived in the shelter and briefed us on the next day’s ascent. He wanted us prone by 6pm for a start somewhere vaguely “between the pm and the am.” I was a bit mystified as to why he couldn’t just tell us the precise wakeup time. It later caused me to wake up whenever I heard someone moving around because I thought it was go-time.

After the briefing, we ate our dinner on the deck protruding from the back of the outhouse, which sounds gross, I know, but it didn’t smell and possessed one of the best views at camp. We watched the marine layer from the Pacific spill in far below. Up at our altitude, not a single cloud interrupted the expanse from horizon to horizon.

We bunked up and tried our hardest to sleep through chaos of a helicopter landing and people stomping out of our shelter to hit the bathroom.

At 12:15am, we woke to Brent’s flashlight. We had a crammed hour to eat, slug instant coffee, and prep our gear before stepping out onto the Cowlitz with our crampons on, roped together. I stole a moment to record the bright full moon illuminating the Muir Snowfield and the bits of the Nisqually you can see from camp.

I was the “anchor man” (i.e. last) on Brent’s rope team, but we were the first group out onto the Cowlitz. It was hard to process my surroundings in the darkness and because a lot of my focus went into managing the slack in the line between myself and my ropemate in front of me. I did steal glances up the mountain, though, and saw another party’s headlamps strung out above like a glowing caterpillar.

We crossed Cathedral Gap, which is exposed rock and dirt. It’s an odd sensation to walk on with crampons, which scrape along.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/06/Screenshot-2023-06-08-at-7.02.24-AM.png)

Ingraham Direct route from Camp Muir

We arrived at the mighty Ingraham Glacier, though I didn’t know its scale in the dark. At a break point here, one of the members of my rope team turned back because the double boots were killing his feet. We said brief farewells and I hoped this wasn’t some kind of bad omen.

We began to step over the crevasses. At first, small ones inches or a foot wide, but then larger, more yawning chasms with the undulating terrain underneath the ice. By the light of my headlamp I peered into some these abyssal cracks but couldn’t see anything that looked like the bottom.

At some point near the top of Disappointment Cleaver around 3:00am, we saw the glow of morning light crawling up from the horizon, accenting the darkness with hues of orange and blue. By 5:00am we were wearing sunglasses.

When we passed 13,000 feet, I began to notice the altitude. Small waves of nausea buffeted my stomach. I focused on my rest step. The smell of sulphur hung on the air. Oh yeah, I reminded myself, this is an active volcano.

By High Break, I was flagging, but victory was near. The wind had picked up, but it was under 25mph and the sky free of weather.

At 6:10am, we crossed into the crater of Rainier’s summit. It’s a bit cruel, however, because the true summit is another 200 vertical feet higher and about 20 more minutes away. After dropping our packs and taking a brief rest, a large portion of the group followed Brent to the Columbia Crest, where we signed the registry housed in its weatherproof container. Number 580 for Brent, 1 for me.

At the true summit I whipped out the tall boy can of Rainier beer that I’d surreptitiously dropped into my pack. My buddy Nic and I took a big slug each and then poured the rest out on the nub marking Rainier’s highest point. It was too obvious a photo opportunity to miss.

We trudged back to collect our bags and began our 9,000 vertical feet of descent. In the light, the bergshrunds, seracs, and crevasses revealed themselves. As we passed beneath it, I kept an eye on the looming features of the Ingraham Icefall, reflecting on the events of 1981.

At Ingraham Flats, we paused for a break. Brent’s words were drowned out by the whirr of a helicopter rotor. It began hovering over the glacier near the route back to Cathedral Gap. After listening into the chatter on the radio, Brent informed us that the helicopter had been searching for an 80-year old man who had vanished somewhere up here two days before.

We continued our descent back through the Gap and across the Cowlitz while the helicopter’s roar followed us. My camera footage stops about here. I was deliriously tired when we got back to Muir High Camp and left my GoPro in my bag as I repacked the things I’d left. We descended the Muir Snowfield, glissading as we went, and arrived back at RMI’s basecamp after a 45-minute shuttle ride, on which I struggled to keep my eyes open.

I’m grateful that whichever stars had to align to give us our summit did so. The National Park Service’s historical [data](https://www.nps.gov/mora/planyourvisit/annual-climbing-statistics.htm?ref=nickrroberts.com) on Rainier’s climbing attempts shows that between 40% and 60% are actually successful in a given year. The weather and fatigue factors being the most common causes of a canceled ascent. My advice to other suitors of Rainier’s summit is to control the controllables, like your fitness. Cardio and leg strength are key. It’s easy to underestimate the mountain from afar.
### April links: Roulette, Twitter alts, nerds/hipsters
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/april-links/
Last updated: 2024-11-11T23:59:45.000Z
It's staggering how fast skills atrophy without maintenance.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but only this past week did I finish my first book of the year: *A Gentleman in Moscow*. A recommendation from my friend Rob, it was a delightful story, and had that NYT Bestseller kind of profundity that you can feel even a few pages in. Both [Bill Gates](https://www.gatesnotes.com/A-Gentleman-in-Moscow?ref=nickrroberts.com) and [Barack Obama](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-obama-reveals-favorite-books-songs-2017/story?id=52095117&ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=As%20for%20his%20reading%20list,to%20start%20the%20new%20year.%22) liked it. But it took me about two and a half weeks from start to finish, which seemed slow given the thickness of the volume (480 pages). I read a *lot* of articles online these days, but, after returning to my Kindle after months of neglect, it's apparent to me that long-form reading is its own kind of muscle group in your mind. You have to be good about making chunks of time for it and also have the discipline not to look at your phone every two minutes and then reset your mental context. Picking up a book again, after months of delving into video games and writing [reviews](https://nickrroberts.com/tag/games/) about them, I found myself zoning out, reaching for quick dopamine hits on other devices.

I also went out for my first few runs of the year this week. I am sore as hell because, though I've been hitting the stationary bike like a fiend this winter, few of those cycling muscle movements seem to translate to a jog. Whatever running-oriented strength I had in my quadriceps, hamstrings, and all those countless stabilizers last fall has disappeared.

I got wrapped up in this idea that I do lots of activities that can be grouped together as pursuits for specific outputs. For example, as I was planning my objectives for 2023, I tried to think more about what my underlying motive was when I set a "books completed" goal like I've done in prior years. I figured that my goal should be to absorb good *stories* rather than just good *books*, and good stories come in many formats: Novels, articles, TV shows, movies, VR, video games, etc. So I adjusted my [goal list](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2022/) for the year to account for this concept (See: "changes to 2023 planning"): "Finish 50 pieces of long-form *media*." I keep a log of it all [here](https://nickrroberts.com/media/).

I did the same thing with exercise and came up with a goal for "cardio miles" because I'm after good cardio health in general, rather than "miles run" specifically. I realized I do lots of cardio that isn't necessarily running and wanted more flexibility in what counts at the end of the year. After renegotiating the rules with myself, cycling, hiking, backcountry skiing, and running all accumulate toward my 1500 mile goal for '23.

It all looked really nice on paper, but I'm starting to bump into cases where my system pushes me more in a generalist, master-of-none direction and I have to make up my mind whether I like that or not. If you focus on **ends** (absorb good stories, be in good, general cardio shape) rather than **means** (read lots, run lots) like this, it necessitates that you be okay letting some of your skills regress. 

## From the past month

(From me, and technically from May) 2023 productivity methods and tool stack:

[2023 productivity methods and tool stackAn overview of my current systems and software![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/05/DALL-E-2023-05-04-09.21.27---a-person-being-productive--digital-art.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/2023-tool-stack/)

(From me) A review of Horizon Forbidden West

[Horizon Forbidden WestA gorgeous and well-crafted adventure![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/6R8obvbX4bs7V2b56Gvq49.jpg)](https://nickrroberts.com/horizon-forbidden-west/)

I didn't know before that OpenAI benchmarks its models' performance [against standardized tests](https://openai.com/research/gpt-4?ref=nickrroberts.com):

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-07-at-10.21.57-AM.png)

How to beat roulette:

[The Gambler Who Beat RouletteFor decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game.![](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/soup/bowl/v0/img/favicon-black.png)BloombergKit Chellel Photo Illustrations by Irene Suosalo![](https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iCNdl_VqnIl8/v0/-1x-1.jpg)](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette-gambler-figures-it-out/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

A short, nice summary of the plot a Gentleman in Moscow, the book I just completed:

I know it's very much in vogue to dunk on Elon Musk after his bizarro and max-drama Twitter takeover, but I've tried to ignore all of that. However, this latest Musk shot-from-the-hip directly affected me and I was not happy about it. I follow a few Twitter-roundup kinds of Substacks that essentially got shut out of that ecosystem:

[Elon Musk Wants You to Hear About Substack NotesHe’s boosting the Substack competitor to Twitter that he wants to kill. Plus: Killer AI sounds fake to me.![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb5bba900-6f64-4bd1-8f38-eab0745a60fa%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Very SeriousJosh Barro![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52a6ed4e-caa8-4840-a0b3-9347732be65e_1024x1024.png)](https://www.joshbarro.com/p/elon-musk-wants-you-to-hear-about?utm%5Fsource=post-email-title&publication%5Fid=573691&post%5Fid=113372613&isFreemail=true&utm%5Fmedium=email)

The explosion in Twitter alternatives continues:

[Bluesky’s big momentA new Twitter clone is surging in popularity. Could it have legs?![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F714ff80f-6186-4445-a7e2-547c30c5c347%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)PlatformerCasey Newton![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60b4aab5-1592-4d56-ade0-275a03e731a7_1024x1024.png)](https://open.substack.com/pub/platformer/p/blueskys-big-moment)

The writer Sam Kriss on looking for forms of speech beyond Musk products: 

[Eight billion hogs, screamingFreedom to speak; freedom to groan; freedom to whimper![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F53cf7d04-ae95-43b9-8c0c-7a4a290c872b%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Numb at the LodgeSam Kriss![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fac09cdb6-fdcd-49ad-93a9-8418e8f9a7ac_1598x1483.png)](https://samkriss.substack.com/p/eight-billion-hogs-screaming)

It blows my mind that McDonald's started as a barbecue joint:

[Early McDonald’s MenusMcDonald’s started out as McDonald’s Bar-B-Q in San Bernardino, CA in 1940\. Here’s a copy of the menu from that![](https://kottke.org/images/2016/ios/192x192.png)kottke.orgJason Kottke![](https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/original-mcdonalds-menu-00.jpg)](https://kottke.org/13/03/early-mcdonalds-menus?ref=nickrroberts.com)

I'm a big fan of the game *Superhot* in VR, and these speedrunners made me feel like I had 0 skill:

A Russian T-90 tank appears at a US truck stop:

[Destination Of Russian T-90 Tank Left At Truck Stop Comes Into FocusThe Russian T-90A tank taken off the battlefield in Ukraine appears to be headed to the Aberdeen Test Center.![](https://www.thedrive.com/uploads/2021/12/14/favicon-196x196-1.png?auto=webp)The DriveHoward Altman, Joseph Trevithick![](https://www.thedrive.com/uploads/2023/04/15/T90-tank-truck-stop.jpg?auto=webp)](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/destination-of-russian-t-90-tank-left-at-truck-stop-comes-into-focus?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Sam Kriss on the death of nerds and hipsters (also some excoriation of the Marvel MCU that particularly resonated with me):

[All the nerds are deadHow Andy Warhol invented nerd culture; why it’s imploding![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F53cf7d04-ae95-43b9-8c0c-7a4a290c872b%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Numb at the LodgeSam Kriss![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa59b06c9-95f6-48a4-9bc9-c6c76122ec84_1024x973.png)](https://samkriss.substack.com/p/all-the-nerds-are-dead)

Scott Alexander's rebuttal to Sam Kriss:

[Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters…![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9547b2b8-2758-4584-92cf-d40795991571_1920x1080.jpeg)](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-kriss-on-nerds-and-hipsters)

Replies to Alexander from Kriss and others: 

[Highlights From The Comments On Nerds And Hipsters…![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca6879fd-a8a8-497f-8436-e4234c0e8608_640x360.webp)](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-nerds)

A Twitter thread on the history of "twin films" where various film studios rush to pump out films with extremely similar plotlines. I've sort of noticed this over the years, but I have no idea how it works. Corporate espionage, perhaps?

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/05/Screenshot-2023-05-06-at-1.21.51-PM.png)](https://twitter.com/leesteffen/status/1645547828180033538?s=46&t=ollfTuIvMM-pQLeSqCwSEg&ref=nickrroberts.com)
### How I plan my life now
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/how-i-plan-my-life-now/
Last updated: 2025-01-10T13:46:12.000Z
*Updated: Winter, 2024*

The last [installment](https://nickrroberts.com/my-gtd-setup-and-workflow/) I wrote about my productivity routine was almost five years ago. While the core of my practice is the same, I've simplified my planning process considerably and I've updated the tooling I use day-to-day. 

In case it helps other folks grappling with how to sort through their obligations and goals, below I'll discuss my current planning rituals, the artifacts I use to keep track of things, my daily routine, and list the software I use these days as collection surfaces, repositories, and otherwise.

## Rituals

My system is now kinda [GTD](https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280?ref=nickrroberts.com), kinda my own thing. I tend to pluck many [tactics and strategies](https://nickrroberts.com/my-highest-leverage-productivity-tactics/) from the productivity buffet, keep what works well over long periods, and discard the rest. It's an ongoing process, and I'm sure my habits and practices will shift again in the coming five years.

These are the core rituals I now practice, ordered from the furthest horizon to the present moment:

- The Yearly Review
- The Weekly Review
- Daily, real-time adjustment

One big change since I last wrote about my system is that I've realized that planning my life with any specificity beyond a year is not sustainable. Sure, we can set down long-range goals for our future, e.g. "Climb Denali," but I've found planning these things for precise timeframes years from now just isn't realistic. Especially on longer timescales, opportunities arise that tend to disrupt my plans set for more than a year away (e.g. "let's be digital nomads and travel the world"), interests shift, injuries or illnesses happen, friends and family alter my trajectory, and generally, change occurs as it always does. I've learned that it's best to think of any goal, near or far, as an "intention" rather than some immutable structure. 

Outside of derailments from the unexpected, my daily objectives roll up to my weekly ones, and my weekly objectives roll up to my yearly ones. That's really it. At the risk of parroting very common wisdom, I've found that if I can sustain this pattern of goal setting and execution particularly at the daily and weekly level, I achieve my yearly objectives automatically. You'll find a great deep-dive on this concept in [Atomic Habits](https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits?ref=nickrroberts.com), by James Clear.

### The Yearly Review

I now like to organize my goal planning around the calendar year. I think it's a long enough timeframe to make meaningful changes and improvements, such as with fitness, and a short enough timeframe that your plans can be firmed up and clarified, e.g. buy plane tickets, book hotels, book mountain climbs.

At the end of each December, I take an inventory of my long-range intentions from my "Future" list (discussed in the "Artifacts" section below), look at what I accomplished in the previous year to get a sense of what's possible or not and decide what to take up for the following year. Pro tips:

- Try to make your objectives' definition of "done" as clear as possible. I do this by committing to specific metrics and numbers where I can.
- Consult with people your goals will affect (e.g. wife/partner) and clue them into what you're planning to minimize conflict.

I then commit these items to my "Year" list and try like hell not to touch them until my next yearly planning cycle.

This process usually takes me hours because I try to collate everything I'd possibly like to do in each category of my life (fitness, creativity, career, personal growth) and then narrow down the list to something reasonable to accomplish in 365 days. As an example, here are my goals for 2023:

- Maintain a sleep quality of 75%+, sleep time 8+ hours average for all of 2023 (tracked in Garmin Connect)
- Do 1500+ miles of cardio exercise
- Do 15,000 pushups
- Summit 3+ glaciated peaks in preparation for Denali
- Organize Denali trip and place deposit
- Publish 5+ articles with paired podcasts
- Publish 10+ longer-form videos
- Publish 15+ short-form videos
- Finish 50+ pieces of long-form media ([log](https://nickrroberts.com/media/))
- Maintain average weekly goal completion of 80% or higher

While I'm at it, I like to take this moment to tally up all of my metrics for the year to see how I'm trending. For instance:

[A look back at 2022My statistical year in review![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/DALL-E-2023-01-03-14.27.06---person-tracking-metrics--digital-art-2.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2022/)

### The Weekly Review

The Weekly Review is the centerpiece of my planning process because it serves as a chance to check in on my progress toward yearly goals, provides an opportunity to adjust, and sets a clear focus for the next seven days.

During each Weekly Review I:

- I look over my "Near" and "Year" lists (discussed below) in case I need to pull any to-dos into the coming week
- I look at my backlog of items captured in [Things](https://culturedcode.com/things/?ref=nickrroberts.com) and decide what I might want to take up
- I look at my calendar for the week and estimate how much bandwidth I'll have for exercise, creativity, reading, etc. around work and the essentials
- I finalize my goals for the coming week in a Notion page called "Week"
- I log my metrics using a Google Form that populates a Google Sheet containing my tally of things like "training duration," "Sleep quality," etc. This sheet is the instrument I use to check my progress toward my yearly numerical goals and to make adjustments. If I'm slipping on my cardio one week, on the next I might sacrifice another objective to catch up on the following one

I fill out this template in Notion and note down how I felt about my performance in each area of my life that week:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-06-at-8.16.00-AM.png)

### Real-time adjustments

Flexibility is key. A concept commonly invoked in Taoism is that one should [flow like water](https://freedominthought.com/writings/lao-tzu-be-like-water?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=And%20in%20one%20translation%20of,comes%20close%20to%20the%20Tao.). When water meets a barrier, it flows around it, or it builds up and goes over the top. So it should go with goals and projects to manage your stress. You need to find the right balance for yourself between pushing hard toward objectives and backing off when circumstances change. I still find GTD guy David Allen's framework useful here, where real-time adjustments to your goal list come down to:

- Context: Your circumstances. Where are you and what makes sense to do while you're there? Did you just get sick? Did you spontaneously enter a quarter/mid-life crisis?
- Time available: Do you have enough time to accomplish what you'd like to, or is there a better way to spend the next 10 minutes or 7 days?
- Energy available: Are you getting smoked by other priorities during the week? Would it be better to push that thing to next week when you're fresh?
- Priority: What's the highest return on your time right now?

The weekly and yearly planning processes I've outlined above give me a nice sense of control and intentionality over my time, but baking in some forgiveness is essential. You never know if you might break your leg and torpedo your running goal for the year. A family member could become ill and circumstances require you to assist them for huge portions of your day. Any number of curveballs could destroy the neat list of objectives you've laid out for yourself. However, I find the most common problem is that I simply overload my week as I'm sitting there caffeinated and optimistic at my Monday morning Weekly Review.

So, every morning when I sit down at my desk, I organize my specific to-dos for that day, I try to figure out what is reasonable or essential to accomplish, and sometimes delete things or reduce expectations on my weekly goal list according to Allen's framework above.

Planning outcomes weekly is nice because you have the full seven days to get stuff done and it doesn't matter what you do on an individual day. If I fall ill for a couple of days, I just shift around to-dos in Things and do them at another time that week, or turn down my objectives (e.g. run 15 vs. 20 miles).

During this quick daily planning process, I preen my to-do list and then set time blocks on my calendar to get those things done. I try to shoot for two+ hour blocks for anything thought-intensive, e.g. "complete draft of an essay about your goal system."

Also, I'm trying to develop more discipline around this, but shutting down Slack and email while attempting to do deep work is critical. 

## Artifacts and tactics

**I organize my objectives into five lists in Notion and Things**

- **Future**: Long-range, ***achievable*** objectives with no specific due date. I glance over these weekly and groom that list when necessary. During a Yearly Review, I'll decide if I want to take any of these into my Year list, where they become a much more solid commitment.
- **Year**: The bulleted list of items I intend to complete during the calendar year.
- **Near**: The bulleted list of items I'd like to accomplish on a timeframe greater than one week but less than one year. This is a nice way to capture things you may want to do in the current quarter, or on a six-month basis. When I add something to the Near list, I use the Weekly Review to break it down into chunks for that week to make progress toward those outcomes. One note: The things on my Near list don't necessarily correspond to things on my Year list. It's how I organize small projects that come up spontaneously at work or in my personal life. Near also functions as my "Maybe" list, which I've seen other people use. I try to filter stuff I know I'll never do up front and not add them, but if there's a good chance I will do it or need to do it, I'll add it here.
- **Week**: The bulleted list of items I'm committing to complete in the next 7 days. This is the list I try the most not to waiver on.
- **Daily task list**: The items for the day which I base on what I'm trying to get done that week. I keep these tasks in the Things application (more on this below).

I also keep each written Weekly Review note in Notion(template screenshotted in the Weekly Review section above) which also serves as a kind of journal as I check in with myself.

**Tactics**

- Particularly in my Year and Week lists in Notion, I try to keep all objectives under **10 bullets**. This forces me to prioritize and eliminate the inessential.
- I often let my Future and Near lists grow longer than 10 bullets, but try to keep those items rank ordered and preened
- I try to keep my daily task list in Things to under **5 tasks.** The days are short and require even more ruthless prioritization!

**How I use Things**

[The all-new Things. Your to-do list for Mac & iOS![](https://culturedcode.com/favicon.ico)Things![](https://culturedcode.com/things/2022-07-21/images/hero-logo-things-io70.png)](https://culturedcode.com/things/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

- I do not use the Projects feature now and instead keep those in Notion in the Week, Near, Year, and Future lists
- When they arise, I try to capture ideas and reminders by life area (Health+Hygiene, Work, Creative, Media, Relationships, Finance, etc.)--I use Things' "Areas" concept for these. Most of these items I log as "Someday" if they're not something I *need* to do like "Pay taxes."
- I no longer use the Inbox feature because I've never really bought into the idea in GTD that there are so many items coming at you all the time that you can't do any real-time prioritization or categorization and so you must fill up an inbox list and process it in spurts like you do email, Slack, and so forth. If something pressing comes up spontaneously, I'll break it down, and add those tasks to my Today view or even my Week or Near lists. If it's not a pressing issue or idea, I'll store it as "Someday" in the corresponding life area list (e.g. Work) and bypass the Inbox.
- I review these life area lists weekly and decide what to take up in Future, Year, Near, Week. I do this by going to the Someday tab and deciding whether to keep the reminders I have or not
- If I take up an idea or project in any of these backlog lists, I complete the reminder since it’s tracked in Notion and I don’t want duplication
- I try to keep the backlog of stuff in Things light and be judicious about what I bring into my Future, Year, Near, Week lists. If I know I won't read a book suggested to me and which I've stored in my "Media" Someday list, I'll just cancel the task.

## My current daily routine

I'm far from perfect about this, but I try to wake up at or around 6:00am and start personal projects from 6:30am-8:30am (read a book, write, and sometimes start a work project that gets me ahead). I like to formally start work at 8:30am and do that for the rest of the day. I try to protect my work focus until noon if I possibly can and schedule no/limited meetings during that time. That 6:30am-8:30am space could be filled with whatever efforts push me toward the personal objectives of that week. I like the idea of having personal production weeks and consumption weeks that alternate. For example, I'll try to make as much progress on reading in a given week (one or multiple books even). The following week, I may try to write an article, record a podcast, or edit a video. You can get a lot done with morning focus + nights + weekends outside of work.

I've shifted exercise to the evenings after work, or, sometimes, in the middle of the day.

## Personal tool stack

*Not an exhaustive list, but these are the tools I tend to use most day-to-day:*

### Core apps

**Notes and goal lists**: **Notion.** It does what I need it to do, which is to manage my goal system and also store info. I like the way writing looks in Notion and I'm on the free tier. It's very clean.

**Daily to-dos:** **Things 3\.** I still love the minimal, Apple-y aesthetic. It's just a lot more usable than Apple Reminders with its keyboard shortcuts, task ordering, and scheduling. I don't have any reason to switch to a subscription-based model with Todoist or similar.

**Calendar**: **Notion Calendar.** I like it well enough so far. It's free and has some cool features like cross-calendar time blocking.

**This newsletter/my website**: Ghost. It's like a super clean, stripped-down Wordpress with editing tools that feel a lot like Medium. I'm not using Substack (at least for now) because I don't like the constraints on the look and feel of it and I'm resistant to getting sucked into yet another Medium-like ecosystem.

**Mail client**: Gmail (though experimenting with Notion Mail's early access)**.** It does what I want! Although I am very curious about [Superhuman](https://superhuman.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com), of which I've seen screenshots, $30 per month for a Gmail reskin is insane.

**Email services, cloud storage, and documents**: Google Workspace. I pay for a small business plan so I can use Google Workspace with my custom domain.

**LLM**: ChatGPT Plus. I don't use it for my blog. This entire piece is 100% me. So far, my use of LLMs has been around finding or correcting code syntax, or to check the content of an email I'm about to send for grammatical accuracy. I also use it for lots of random specific fact searches, which I find better than Google most of the time. 

**Password management**: 1Password**.** This is probably my favorite security application. I don't have experience with the others on the market like LastPass, but once I started with 1Password, I never looked back.

**Integrated development env/text editor**: Cursor.Super powerful. Probably going to start paying for it in combination with ChatGPT. 

**Terminal**: Mostly used inside of Cursor, iTerm when I'm not. Also use[**ohmyzsh**](https://ohmyz.sh/?ref=nickrroberts.com). I don't need anything fancier than this.

**Quick, shareable screen recordings**: Loom. Just a slick tool I use at work all the time. It's insanely quick and easy to share app walkthroughs or presentations. You can also see how many views your recordings receive and who's viewed them if they're within your work organization.

**Browser**: Brave**.** It's got most of the bells and whistles of Chrome, but it's intensely focused on privacy. I work in "Shields up" mode most of the time to shed those annoying trackers. Comes with a built-in VPN addon that you can pay for. If you wish, you can also get paid in attention tokens (BAT) for seeing ads on your home screen.

### General

**Fitness tracking and sharing**: Strava. I'm a paid user for the data and dashboards.

**Sleep tracking**: Garmin Connect. I switched over to the Garmin ecosystem (Fenix 6 Sapphire) from my Apple Watch, because the battery couldn't hang on big climbing expeditions. I have been massively impressed with Garmin's Connect app, particularly all of the insights about my health that it surfaces. 

**Reading**: Back on paper books! Trying to limit my use of screens of any kind when I'm not working or hacking on personal projects. I just like the immersing myself in the personality of the paperback– the typography, the artwork, etc. I use the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite + Mac Kindle App when I'm traveling and need to save space**.** I used to be an Apple Books guy, but I just don't like reading on my phone or iPad very much anymore because that blue light hurts my eyes over time and then the screens are super hard to read in the sunlight. I love the form factor of the Kindle device and the fact it does not ping me with notifications or tempt me with a browser (I guess it technically has one but it's so clunky to use that it's not worth it).

**Music**: Spotify**.** I gave Apple Music an honest shot, but Spotify's personalization algorithms are still so much better in my experience.

**Weather**: OpenSnow. Super precise forecasting for that sick pow.

### Finance

- Simplifi (by Quicken)**:** Unifies all of my accounts into a single view so I can easily see my investment performance, cash, and net worth in one spot.
- Robinhood **\-** Great for easy crypto trading (which I don't do so much anymore). They recently released a wallet too, so you can finally send and receive funds. My [referral link](https://join.robinhood.com/nicholr67?ref=nickrroberts.com) if you're interested!
- Wealthfront **\-** Auto-rebalanced ETF portfolios for diversified investments. The Cash accounts have great interest rates you won't find in branch-based banks. My [referral link](https://www.wealthfront.com/c/affiliates/invited/AFFC-0AWR-LIS3-VTCL?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a Cash account. My [referral link](https://www.wealthfront.com/c/affiliates/invited/AFFC-Y991-TM50-JICI?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a brokerage account.
- Chase bank **\-** I use Chase begrudgingly for traditional banking operations that I can't do well with online banks– good old checks, wire transfers, etc.

## In closing

My productivity routines have evolved significantly over the past five years, incorporating elements of GTD with practices that I've found to be more sustainable and with less process overhead. The main pitfall with purist GTD practice in my experience is that there is simply an enormous corpus of processes to follow. It feels unwieldy.

I think it's easy to get caught up in the systems and software ("[productivity porn](https://pmarchive.com/guide%5Fto%5Fpersonal%5Fproductivity.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)," as Marc Andreessen calls it) and lose sight of the actual stuff you're trying to get done. I'd recommend setting up a system that works for you that minimizes the amount of time you're in planning so you're actually *doing*. Whatever timeframe you like to plan for, be it in years, 90-day increments, or otherwise, the two most important things I've discovered are:

- Maintain a ritual of regular check-ins (weekly is a good cadence)
- Learn to forgive yourself if circumstances change and you have to alter your objectives
### Horizon Forbidden West
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/horizon-forbidden-west/
Last updated: 2023-04-11T13:14:26.000Z
## Grade: A-

Warning: There are a few spoilers below!

This review is going to be pretty short because I have very few words in my Apple Note on this game other than "wow," "holy shit," "this is fantastic."

What is it about these *Horizon* games? I discussed this with my friend Rob, who graciously lent me his PS4 to experience *Forbidden West (HFW)*, and we agreed that it has something to do with the delightful balance Guerrilla Games manages to strike between enrapturing combat, crazy interesting storylines (on and off of the main quest), and a *Far Cry*\-like focus on gorgeous settings. As far as open world games go, it's damn close to perfect in my book. I only have a few minor gripes detailed below. 

To highlight what *HFW* gets right, I find it helpful to compare it to something like *Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (Odyssey)* which gets a lot wrong. 

I enjoyed many elements of *Odyssey*, such as the combat and the beauty of the landscape, with the opalescent blue water and white sand beaches. But the story gets derailed among the hundreds of stupid, repetitive side quests. You fetch what feels like endless items for endless, random people you never see again. You fight a farting boar. You're forced to defend low-HP civilians who insist on fighting your ambushers and dying, causing you to fail the quest. There's one where you romance some guy's sex-deprived wife for a few days so he doesn't have to.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/image-1.png)

The world of *Odyssey* is exceptionally beautiful, but it's what happens inside that counts. Source: [GamesRadar](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamesradar.com%2Fassassins-creed-odyssey-review%2F&psig=AOvVaw0dvK0tsCVVIcAI-bFKppv4&ust=1681238210000000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CBAQjRxqFwoTCIiJtsT6n%5F4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE).

It's a grindfest, and maybe cynically so. Ubisoft tries to get you to purchase XP with real dollars so you don't have to play the base $60 game and level up the hard way. Many areas of the map are denied to you almost indefinitely because you're too low-leveled and you die instantly if you attempt combat. 

There's a reason why the reviewer hordes almost uniformly dunk on the *Assassin's Creed* games. It really seems like Ubisoft does not learn and continues to serve up micro-transaction-laden confections that have promise but just aren't fun when you start to stack up the play hours. I played a lot of *Odyssey*, but stopped a few hours into *Valhalla* after realizing it's essentially the same laborious thing reskinned to a Nordic setting.

Learning from games like *Odyssey*, I think this is a good recipe for success in an open world title:

- **The main storyline is compelling enough to draw you in and keep you invested. You feel a sense of mission and purpose. *HFW*: ✅**

What better sense of purpose than saving the world again? The biosphere in Aloy's world is disintegrating without the influence of GAIA, the AI who manages each specialized subsystem, like HEPHAESTUS, and prevents them from spinning out of control. The consequences for failure are clear: The end of humanity. 

This mission is made more interesting by the fact that the Far Zenith colonists have returned to Earth, also seeking GAIA for their own ends. They're a compelling antagonist force in that 1) they're very dangerous and 2) extremely arrogant, so you want to hurt them. I *love* revenge as a key character motivation in games and movies. It's the same reason why I find Tarantino movies so compelling. It feels so good to watch the bad guy(s) get their comeuppance.

- **Fun combat mechanics. *HFW*: ✅**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/image-4.png)

Source: [VG247](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vg247.com%2Fhorizon-forbidden-west-key-upgrade-materials-burrower-soundshell&psig=AOvVaw1M7E0GDv-rZYKeqSBUsiZm&ust=1681247497429000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CBEQjRxqFwoTCKDA%5FJCdoP4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE)

Just like in *Horizon Zero Dawn*, fighting machine dinosaurs is just plain badass. I love the Focus mechanic where you can highlight a given machine's components and blast them off with well-placed arrow shots. *HFW* brings in a bevy of new machine types like the Slaughterspine (Spinosaurus analog) and the Clawstrider (robot velociraptor) with differing fighting styles. The fighting is fun, dynamic, and terrifying at times, depending on the adversary, which keeps it all fresh. In other games with less diverse enemy types, behaviors, and sizes, I find that I lock in a specific combo set and strategy for the entire game. *HFW* forces you to adapt constantly.

- **Beautiful scenery.** ***HFW*: ✅**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/image-3.png)

source: [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/HorizonForbiddenPhoto/comments/y2eiha/basic%5Fphotography%5Fi%5Fhope%5Fthis%5Fgame%5Fengine%5Fwill/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/The-Bulwark-1.png)

[Source](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AONl4yx4PpDKLyYykq4nw1HiKqHsibYE?ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/The-Digsite-3--DT-.png)

[Source](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AONl4yx4PpDKLyYykq4nw1HiKqHsibYE?ref=nickrroberts.com)

- **No micro-transactions. *HFW*: ✅**

[None](https://www.reddit.com/r/horizon/comments/tgg5yr/can%5Fwe%5Ftake%5Fa%5Fmoment%5Fto%5Fappreciate%5Fthis%5Fgame%5Fnot/?ref=nickrroberts.com). 

- **Side quests fill in some backstory for the main story's plot and seem to have a purpose. They don't *feel* repetitive. *HFW*:** ✅

My aforementioned pal Rob described the side quests in Odyssey as "empty calories," which I think is a very apt description. The ones in *HFW* are decidedly not that. The feeling of emptiness or repetition I find comes from having to do missions that can be easily categorized, like the infamous "[tailing](https://www.reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/ifihsn/how%5Fmany%5Ftailing%5Fmissions%5Fdoes%5Fassassins%5Fcreed/?ref=nickrroberts.com)" missions from the *Assassin's Creed* series or "fetch me x widget" quests, and when they're too transactional. In *Odyssey*, it's often a race to see how quickly you can fetch the widget, or kill the person in question, and get out for the XP. The mission is often exactly as described and there are few/no delightful or scary surprises along the way. They feel very rote very quickly and they deviate from, or have nothing to do with, the main quest or characters.

*HFW*'s side quests serve the story. They provide more background on your friends in [The Base](https://www.ign.com/wikis/horizon-2-forbidden-west/The%5FBase?ref=nickrroberts.com) and the inner-workings of tribes like the Tenakth, Oseram or the Utaru. [They're full of twists](https://gamerant.com/horizon-forbidden-west-best-side-quests/?ref=nickrroberts.com#the-promontory) and varying rewards. When I started the "Wound in the Sand" mission to find out why the well in the town of Scalding Spear (built on a post-apocalyptic rendering of one of the [Ivanpah Solar Power Facility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah%5FSolar%5FPower%5FFacility?ref=nickrroberts.com) near Las Vegas) was dry, it seemed mundane. But this path ultimately leads Aloy to pick sides in a violent showdown for tribal leadership.

- **You can pursue the main storyline without having to deviate too much to build XP and therefore finish in a reasonable amount of time (which I define as <30 hours for a $60 game). *HFW*:** ✅

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/Screenshot-2023-04-10-at-1.19.58-PM.png)

https://howlongtobeat.com/game/79775

### Some minor gripes

- SAVES. Having to manually save progress at campfires feels dumb and forced. Especially early game, I found myself forgetting to do this, dying, then losing 10+ minutes of gameplay routinely.
- This one is probably more on me than the game, but I kept forgetting to use the combat enhancers like "Valor Surge" or the special weapon capabilities like the triple shot. I think those could use a little more signposting to remind the player they're there if unused.
- Also potions. I found them difficult and inconvenient to use and you can carry so few of them early game. I almost exclusively used berries to heal.
- Also traps, tripcasters, etc. I never used them because they're inconvenient and unnecessary. All you need is a few bows.
- Like *Horizon Zero Dawn*, the first installment in this series, I found myself NEVER engaging in melee combat. My playthrough was 99% ranged, excepting stealth kills. It's funny too because the game tries to get you to do up-close fighting with the introduction of "Melee Pits." Meh. The combat engine is almost a victim of its own success here because ranged combat is so fun and nuanced.
- Why do you have to climb on highlighted yellow bars/nipples? Aloy is clearly a skilled climber and I'm a little mystified that you can't scale any textured surface without first pulsing your Focus to ensure it has yellow lines or holds on it. It just feels like an arbitrary limitation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/image-2.png)

They still make you climb on vetted surfaces marked by yellow lines or holds. Image source. [SVG](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.svg.com%2F772827%2Fhow-to-turn-on-climbing-markers-in-horizon-forbidden-west%2F&psig=AOvVaw39NVxwRbo0T%5Fbm9US6tAMg&ust=1681242992234000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CBAQjRxqFwoTCPD-3qyMoP4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE)

- I'm not really a fan of games within games like Machine Strike because I want to interact with the actual story and characters. I felt similarly about Gwent in *The Witcher 3\.* I didn't play at all and I don't think the world needed it. Not really sure what the motivation was to include it.
- Aloy's hair is still out of control.

### Overall impression

This is the kind of game I feel like I could return to every few years, which is exactly how I feel about *Elders Scrolls: Skyrim*, my favorite game of all time. I think *HFW* is safely nestled in my top five.
### March links: More GPT, gigantic Tesla wheels, a sputtering Russian offensive
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/march-links/
Last updated: 2023-04-07T18:40:46.000Z
Hello! I am writing to you after having just completed my Month of Decompression, in which I didn't decompress all that much. I asked for about 30 days between accepting my new job offer and my start date so I could take a breather after an exceedingly stressful start to the year: New house, new dog, new small-mountain-town lifestyle, and yet no job (because I was laid off in December). Between furniture assembly and the countless miscellaneous tasks involved with a move-in, January and February were pedal-to-the-metal on job hunting, interviewing, brushing up on technical skills, refining my elevator pitch, etc.

So, a break sounded pretty nice. However, when I don't have anything to do, I tend to make up new and engrossing projects. This time around, it was negotiating a vehicle trade-in, home improvement/construction, figuring out property management for our house while we're away nomading, writing, and reading up on cybersecurity. I'm not very good at sitting still. 

One of my proudest achievements in my month away from job hunting/working was building a set of plywood cabinets in our garage to sequester stuff from guests while we Airbnb our house this summer. It was a massive education in woodworking precision (specifically how enraging it is when you're not precise in your cuts) and how labor intensive it is to build anything of note in a house. Doffing my hat to contractors like my friend Sam D., who builds houses for a living. For these cabinets alone, I made something like 14 trips to the hardware store, mostly for small parts I'd forget. 

Toward the end of March, I decided to do a short solo retreat to a cabin in Island Park, Idaho, which is about an hour and half from our place in Driggs. It's a gorgeous settlement on the banks of Henry's Fork of the Snake River. Usually a summer destination for fishermen (fisherpersons?), it's empty and dead in the winter. Kind of creepy actually. When I wasn't slurping beer and stoking the fire in the cozy woodstove, I tried to go out for small cross-country skiing sorties or walks. But the whole place felt a bit haunted, or like something out of *The Shining*. Snow piled tens of feet high on the cabins around mine, rendering many completely inaccessible. There was no one about except for the odd contractor. The entire forest around me was so silent I could hear my own heartbeat. It felt like the place was telling me to leave, or to go insane. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/IMG_9124.JPG)

Having just raced to complete myriad projects earlier in the month, and with this strange silence and sudden ceasing of motion, I found my solo time at the cabin incredibly disconcerting. I had nightmares. My paranoia flourished. It occurred to me that I was experiencing [Cabin Fever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin%5Ffever?ref=nickrroberts.com).

I returned from northern Idaho more exhausted than when I departed. And I yearned to work again, not from a place of feeling decompressed, but simply to escape the bad thoughts brought on by my isolation and lack of activity. Whatever gets you ready to work again I suppose!

## Good stuff from the last month

Art made in Apple Notes:

[Notes ArtEvery day, Chris Silverman draws a small artwork using only the Notes app on his iPhone. #notesArt is a style formed by the![](https://kottke.org/images/2016/ios/192x192.png)kottke.orgJason Kottke![](https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/notes-art-01.jpg)](https://kottke.org/23/03/notes-art?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Packy McCormick on the transition to browser-based computing. However, feels like this kind of thing has been coming for a long time with the advent of things like the Chromebook, which have essentially no local processing power and all apps live inside of Chrome:

[Internet ComputersThe Third Browser War and the Fight to Bring the OS to the Cloud![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5ec10a31-1fa7-415a-b2ae-53a71f17baed%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Not Boring by Packy McCormickPacky McCormick![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3d0a7b71-51d9-4ede-b67c-e10657e2f8ef_1200x600.png)](https://open.substack.com/pub/notboring/p/internet-computers)

Highly relatable Strava poems:

[Strava: A Fitness App. Also: Poetry? - Semi-Rad.comAfter I got home from a run in November of last year, I typed into my phone a list of things I’d seen on my run and added it to my Strava post. I thought I might keep doing it, as an exercise in noticing things. It was nice, having a little visual journal of \[…\]![](https://i0.wp.com/semi-rad.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/cropped-Semi-Rad-initials-logo.jpg?fit=192%2C192&ssl=1)Semi-Rad.combrendan![](https://semi-rad.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Heard-a-crunching-noise-copy.jpg)](https://semi-rad.com/2023/03/strava-a-fitness-app-also-poetry/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

More ChatGPT tomfoolery:

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/04/image.png)](https://twitter.com/mallardreborn/status/1623171540979183616?s=46&t=ollfTuIvMM-pQLeSqCwSEg&ref=nickrroberts.com)

A really good Hogwarts Legacy mod:

A very good YouTube channel where an Australian guy does very dumb stuff in a very entertaining way

The greatest Tesla video of all time:

A profile of Brandon Sanderson, one of the most boring, yet successful, writers around (*via my pal Rob G.*):

[Brandon Sanderson Is Your GodHe’s the biggest fantasy writer in the world. He’s also very Mormon. These things are profoundly related.![](https://www.wired.com/verso/static/wired/assets/favicon.ico)WIREDCondé Nast![](https://media.wired.com/photos/6418c4b05842f211652a9fbf/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Sanderson-DSCF2575.jpg)](https://www.wired.com/story/brandon-sanderson-is-your-god/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

A YouTube channel dedicated to a bridge in Durham, NC, that routinely destroys trucks over the height limit:

[yovo68The 11foo8 bridge is a railroad trestle over Gregson St in Durham, North Carolina and it has earned a reputation for for its rigorous enforcement of the laws of physics. No truck taller than 11 feet and 8 inches will pass under this stubborn piece of infrastructure. Period. On this channel we docume…![](https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/932eb6a8/img/favicon_144x144.png)YouTube![](https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/ytc/AL5GRJVOAUHSITHkNCL4bbl6vFEeKqz7rTRPRdy-kZPoGg=s900-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)](https://youtube.com/@11foot8plus8?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Ukraine

Ukrainian use of Tolkeinian lore to drive their war narrative:

[Constructing the Orc: Embracing Fiction in Ukraine’s Tactical NarrativeFiction-based wartime narratives can have a powerful impact at the tactical level, as evidenced by Ukraine’s embrace of Tolkienian themes.![](https://rusi.org/icons/icon-512x512.png?v=0ffd3fafcafb82b941a238660cf259ea)Royal United Services Institute![](https://ik.imagekit.io/po8th4g4eqj/prod/tr:h-630,w-1200/orc-faces-1080x720px.jpg)](https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/constructing-orc-embracing-fiction-ukraines-tactical-narrative?utm%5Fsource=RUSI+Newsletter&utm%5Fcampaign=9830315641-RUSI%5FNEWSLETTER%5FMAR%5F10&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fterm=0%5F-c5d4319a7a-%5BLIST%5FEMAIL%5FID%5D)

German Ostpolitik-hangover:

[A Year After Germany’s “Sea Change,” Policy Change Remains Elusive - War on the RocksNine days before Russian President Vladimir Putin began his war of conquest in Ukraine, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Moscow. He summed up his![](https://warontherocks.com/favicon.ico)War on the RocksGeorge Bogden![](https://warontherocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Scholz_Artillery.jpg)](https://warontherocks.com/2023/03/a-year-after-germanys-sea-change-policy-change-remains-elusive/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Perun on the Wagner Group:

Theorizing what will happen to Proghozin:

[What Will Happen to Prigozhin?A Major Problem for Putin![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd59415a7-5c0e-4edb-b0a9-29d505e0a500%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Weapons and StrategyStephen Bryen![](https://substackcdn.com/image/upload/w_1028,c_limit,q_auto:best/fsl65c691wwmmghr7le2)](https://weapons.substack.com/p/what-will-happen-to-prigozhin)

A report from Vuhledar:

[Will Vuhledar be Russia’s bloodiest offensive?Away from Bakhmut, Putin faces a mutiny![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/cropped-favicon-270x270.jpg)UnHerdWill Brown![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/fixed-ukraine-trench-copy.jpg)](https://unherd.com/2023/03/will-vuhledar-be-russias-bloodiest-offensive/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### February links: ChatGPT, F-22s, Russian Grand Strategy
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/february-links/
Last updated: 2024-07-08T14:14:40.000Z
Happy Friday!

I'm writing to you after just having closed on a new job! Feeling enormous relief because of it. I didn't broadcast this widely before, but I was caught up in a massive layoff at my old company in December. 

Searching for work amidst the holidays is always hard, but searching while capital markets are shrinking with economic turmoil (Ukraine, COVID inflation hangover) and where companies from Series A to Google/Meta/etc. are laying people off and revising headcounts is even harder. 

A few learnings from this experience if you find yourself in the same situation:

- First thing: Lock down your pitch and develop structured response frameworks for interview questions where you can't pre-draft your reply. I created a massive Google Doc with prototyped answers to the most common types of questions for product managers. It helped a TON to memorize the gist of each response and rattle those off during interviews. I also used interviews to test messaging and see what worked well, what didn't, and iterate from there.
- Build a full-time routine where you divide your days into things like "lead development" and "interview study." Batch recruiter calls into blocks so you can hop from one to another to another. This habit compounds a ton over weeks.
- Leverage mentors and your personal network to the fullest extent you can. The best leads I received were from folks who moved onto cool companies and could lobby for me from the inside. I was telling my ex-boss "I used to think \[networking\] was a gross and sleazy business school thing, but now I realize it’s just creating a group of people who would enjoy working with you and would vouch for you."
- Don't just take. Refer leads you don't have capacity for to others you know are in a similar position, refer good candidates to companies who have expressed interest in you but you can't make work. There is a very real karmic reward.

On the upside, this time not working has afforded me the bandwidth to knock out our house move-in, assemble furniture, and, well, ski and play a lot of video games. It's been a good start to the year overall. 

I've also had the time to play with ChatGPT, on which this link roundup edition will focus a bit more.

## ChatGPT intrigue

You get the sense when you interact with ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) that you're speaking with an extremely powerful entity with vast and unknown potential. Like a personalized and semi-omniscient god. Though, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, this one is fallible.

I tested it in a variety of ways: 

- Basic conversation and general knowledge questions (on which it performed perfectly)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.51.10-AM.png)

- Code writing (impressive, but I didn't give it anything super complex--though others [have](https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1598042665375105024?ref=nickrroberts.com) to varying degrees of success)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.10.51-AM.png)

- Had it read some of my articles and summarize them (did okay here but for reasons I don't really understand, I hit the edges of its competency and it started making shit up)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-11.00.59-AM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-11.00.33-AM.png)

ChatGPT making shit up.

- Had it emulate my friend Rob after giving it his website to read (to hilarious results)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.56.36-AM.png)

Legit enough.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-10.55.25-AM.png)

This one is just total bullshit, but we got a good chuckle out of it.

Then, in early Feb, Microsoft released a chat function on Bing powered by OpenAI's tech. People quickly found ways to make it sound really scary:

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-11.02.27-AM.png)](https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1598042665375105024?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Here's Eric Hoel on where this all might go, which is even more disconcerting (where I got the above thread):

[“I am Bing, and I am evil”Microsoft’s new AI really does herald a global threat![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86612ed7-3e8e-4903-bda3-b0765de8a21b%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)The Intrinsic PerspectiveErik Hoel![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb6b831be-b46a-4b4a-9c08-224ea7f4daee_1022x730.jpeg)](https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/i-am-bing-and-i-am-evil)

## Other links of note from last month

From me, a series of video game reviews (warning: some spoilers!):

[Hogwarts LegacyA cozy and entertaining retreat from reality![](https://nickrroberts.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://nickrroberts.com/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-01-at-8.04.27-AM.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/hogwarts-legacy/)

[Mass Effect 3A dramatic and engaging finale to the Mass Effect trilogy![](https://nickrroberts.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://nickrroberts.com/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-3-2_15_2023-1_34_35-PM.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-3/)

A good DALL-E query:

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/Screenshot-2023-03-03-at-11.09.36-AM.png)](https://twitter.com/nat%5Fsharpe%5F/status/1611487478086619139?s=46&t=0c%5FD77DcOxs7RiPzG1pE1g&ref=nickrroberts.com)

Pro-skier Cody Townsend on shedding his ego while ski mountaineering Denali (*via my pal Rob*)

[Cody Townsend Sheds His EgoThe elite ski mountaineer was struggling mightily on an expedition. To get through it, he would have to get out of his own way.![](https://www.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/favicon-194x194-1.png)Outside Onlinemlarsen![](https://www.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/cody-townsend-daily-rally_h-1024x576.jpg?width=1200)](https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/daily-rally-podcast-cody-townsend/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The USGS does a Martian survey:

[Detailed Martian Geologic Maps from the USGSThe USGS Astrogeology Science Center recently released a series of detailed geological maps of Mars that detail features from![](https://kottke.org/images/2016/ios/192x192.png)kottke.orgJason Kottke![](https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/usgs-mars-maps-01.jpg)](https://kottke.org/23/01/detailed-martian-geologic-maps-from-the-usgs?ref=nickrroberts.com)

That whole Chinese surveillance balloon debacle:

[F-22 Safely Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon Off South Carolina CoastA U.S. Air Force fighter safely shot down a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a written statement.![](https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/favicon.ico?ver=wSJzjXOlssZVvf5cay20vA%3d%3d)U.S. Department of DefenseJim Garamone![](https://media.defense.gov/2023/Feb/04/2003155870/1280/1280/0/221209-F-DP387-1130A.JPG)](https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3288543/f-22-safely-shoots-down-chinese-spy-balloon-off-south-carolina-coast/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

A pretty cool replay of the F-22 balloon kill using the real audio via Digital Combat Simulator:

And one of many great memes that followed (*via my pal Jason*):

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/IMG_6574-copy.png)

On the Ukraine front, a followup from Der Spiegel on tank donations from the West:

[Ukraine: Tank Deliveries Could Mark Turning Point in WarThere is enormous relief in Kyiv that, after months of hesitation, the West is now willing to supply main battle tanks. But can the Leopard 2s supplied by Germany and its allies really turn the tide on the battlefield?![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/public/spon/images/icons/touch-icon180.png)DER SPIEGELChristoph Reuter, Maximilian Popp, Oliver Imhof, Christina Hebel, Ann-Dorit Boy, DER SPIEGEL![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/bc79822c-8e27-4a1f-897e-a981a8f9297f_w1280_r1.77_fpx66_fpy53.jpg)](https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/a-needed-upgrade-tank-deliveries-could-mark-turning-point-in-war-a-d192fcec-fedc-42d0-9003-4460c3ba76e6?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Perun (again) on Russian grand strategy in Ukraine:

A retrospective on one year of war in Ukraine:

[The War Will Grind On: Reflecting on A Year of War in Ukraine - War on the Rocks“So it begins!” This was the message shared among my team at the Royal United Services Institute on Feb. 22, 2022 as Russian President Vladimir Putin![](https://warontherocks.com/favicon.ico)War on the RocksJack Watling![](https://warontherocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Ukrainian-Army-Tank.jpg)](https://warontherocks.com/2023/02/the-war-will-grind-on-reflecting-on-a-year-of-war-in-ukraine/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

For aviation enthusiasts, a wonderful little video on the NOTAM: an endangered, outdated species (*via my pal Jason*)

Also, on the topic of aviation, I digitized the hype video from one of my father's F-15E squadrons in the '90s. As a kid, I probably watched this tape 400 times after my dad brought it home. I rediscovered the VHS in my parents' basement a couple years ago. Hoping that some of my father's squadronmates might see this! If you're among them, please don't hesitate to reach out! I still think it is awesome!

Lion burgers grown in test tubes:

[Lion burger? Tiger tacos? Meet the cell cultured start-up working in exotic meatsCultivated meat is often heralded as an emerging alternative to intensive animal agriculture, promising new ways to produce slaughter-free beef, pork or poultry proteins. But one cellular ag start-up is working from a different playbook. Primeval Foods is developing lab-grown exotic meats that, it s…![](https://www.foodnavigator.com/bundles/wrbmgbsite/images/favicon/foodnavigator/apple-touch-icon-180x180.png)foodnavigator.comKaty Askew![](https://www.foodnavigator.com/var/wrbm_gb_food_pharma/storage/images/publications/food-beverage-nutrition/foodnavigator.com/news/business/lion-burger-tiger-tacos-meet-the-cell-cultured-start-up-working-in-exotic-meats/15279553-1-eng-GB/Lion-burger-Tiger-tacos-Meet-the-cell-cultured-start-up-working-in-exotic-meats.png)](https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2022/03/30/lion-burger-tiger-tacos-meet-the-cell-cultured-start-up-working-in-exotic-meats?ref=nickrroberts.com)

A simulated mushroom trip:

Why everyone is so boring (except for me, of course):

[Why Is Everyone So Boring?Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament “But it’s all so boring!” And in a standard trope of fiction, a spark of art infuses life, energy, and vitality into dull adults whose lives have lost all meaning. (E.g. recent movie Living.) Both groups agree: the world is far more boring th…![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb5119a05-d1c6-420f-96f7-07ed5219ad5a%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Overcoming BiasRobin Hanson![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.overcomingbias.com%2Ftwitter%2Fsubscribe-card.jpg%3Fv%3D-1614118661%26version%3D9)](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/why-is-everyone-so-boringhtml?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Salami earrings (*via my friend Sam*):

[@weirdtripclub on Instagram215K Likes, 3,835 Comments - @weirdtripclub on Instagram![](https://static.cdninstagram.com/rsrc.php/v3/yb/r/lswP1OF1o6P.png)Instagram![](https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/327484906_1508878596272471_2273565620191189286_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_s640x640&_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=8ae9d6&_nc_ohc=lywVM4BDe2oAX_aCg6N&_nc_ht=scontent.cdninstagram.com&oh=00_AfD2bFgtaKByAandgQTidPVNFr-l50tJk1y5TKIhUBG-kg&oe=64075B65)](https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cn7JKdgJIpK/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The eight best techniques for evaluating someone's character (the one about how they treat service workers is so real! I have witnessed the predictive value of this one firsthand):

[My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating CharacterThese methods have helped me enormously—and can save you much heartache and anxiety![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa1fa1445-60df-4be2-981a-d798d4819ff0%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)The Honest BrokerTed Gioia![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faeb866b3-12f9-444f-a9df-d7ba9e34b83e_632x480.webp)](https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/my-8-best-techniques-for-evaluating)
### Hogwarts Legacy
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/hogwarts-legacy/
Last updated: 2023-08-14T20:29:52.000Z
## Grade: B+ 

Warning: There are spoilers below!

I'm not going to touch the [storm of controversy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OV4VaNW4FU&t=11s&ref=nickrroberts.com) around this game. But I will say that the people who gave it [terrible reviews](https://www.wired.com/review/hogwarts-legacy-review/?ref=nickrroberts.com) mostly seem focused on the political stances of J.K. Rowling and try to take out their frustration on this title because it's set in her fictional universe, which I think is unfair to the developers. Rowling was [not involved](https://www.hogwartslegacy.com/en-us/faq?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=Rowling%3F,a%20new%20story%20from%20J.K.) with this game at all.

Well, I loved it, mostly. To me, the point of this game was to revisit my childhood and experience some of the *Harry Potter* world's familiar magic again. On this front, it absolutely delivered. I was blown away by the coziness, too: The seasonal decor, the warmth and inviting character of Hogsmeade, the delightful little mysteries and surprises around Hogwarts castle–which is rendered in astonishing fidelity to the books and movie sets. 

Example of one of the many delightful surprises as you explore the school.

Every time I booted up *Hogwarts Legacy (HL)*, it was like sitting down with a hot toddy and watching a snowstorm swirl outside. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/03/Hogwarts-Legacy---2_28_2023-6_50_06-AM.png)

The Great Hall at Christmastime.

But like the *Harry Potter* books, the game gets moodier as the story progresses. The narrative takes you away from classes at Hogwarts where you learn interesting and fun new spells, to darker places, like the caves and wilderness in the surrounding Scottish countryside, to fight goblins and bad wizards. You kill people all the time, though the game weirdly doesn't acknowledge it and ping-pongs you back to innocent and charming plotlines, like learning to ride a broomstick or a hippogriff, like nothing happened. You might not be using the killing curse until you unlock it, but your character leaves a massive trail of bodies in their wake. It sets up a strange contradiction in the story, where your character often takes the moral high ground over enemies who engage in the Unforgivable Curses, murder, and poaching, while at the same time, you murder *them*, often using those same no-no curses yourself. The game dutifully provides you all three Unforgivables and incentivizes you to use them with satisfying effects in combat and zero perceptible downside (covered more below). In only one instance that I saw do you actually hand someone over to the justice system–the Harlow storyline.

Part of the reason for all the murder your character performs is that *HL* is built around combat. I'd guess it was one of the first things the developers hammered out and then everything followed from there. It's the centerpiece of the gameplay and, as below, it's fun! Everything that you do, be it potion-brewing, learning spells, or capturing beasts for the loom gear upgrades is in service of pwning enemies. 

There is a more "pacifist" play style where you use invisibility to sneak around evil wizards/goblins, but you still have to do things like kill Victor Rookwood, Ranrok (the main bad guy), and countless other henchmen. While Harry Potter kills people in self-defense in the books and movies (e.g. Quirrell, Voldemort), he doesn't feel good about it or seek it out. The sheer volume of gleeful, fun killing, often with Unforgivable Curses, in *HL* feels completely at odds with the supposed innocence of being a young student at Hogwarts.

### Gameplay/combat

Despite the mismatch between your cozy student life and the savage killing you do, the gameplay is incredibly fun. I give an A+ to the designers of the combat engine. It's very fluid, with plenty of opportunity to get creative with curse combos, deliver power attacks with ancient magic, or to throw nearby objects or venomous plants at your foes. You can also cocoon yourself with the "Protego" spell or dodge-roll out of danger. I found myself completely engaged and feeling that this was the most well-developed part of *HL*. 

However, let's talk about Unforgivable Curses a bit more. There's no penalty to using them. The game is loaded with mechanics of different kinds borrowed from other open-world RPGs (talent trees, gear upgrades, hunting, etc.) to the point that I think there is almost too much going on, but the lack of a morality system seems seems like a massive oversight for a game where wizards can choose the dark or the light path. I could easily see a compelling storyline where you unlock Unforgivables *if* you elect to become a dark wizard, whereas they're inaccessible to those that choose the light path. In [GameRant](https://gamerant.com/hogwarts-legacy-no-morality-system-players-evil/?ref=nickrroberts.com), the lead designer, Kelly Murphy, is quoted as saying "\[the players\] don't have to use them... and the world does react to their use." But I disagree! I saw other characters, like Sebastian, punished for their use, but I used the Cruciatus and Killing curses constantly with no repercussions whatsoever. 

Beyond good and evil, I also noted the following gripes during my playthrough:

- There's a weird auto-tuned quality to my character’s voice like it’s been heavily modulated from whatever voice actor actually recorded it. It sounds odd
- NPCs have bland and predictable patterns that break the immersion if you watch them for any length of time
- Slight delay when you open up the menu is kind of annoying because that time adds up
- Walking through ghosts doesn’t visibly freeze you! They got so many other details right!
- Kind of hilarious that you can break into people’s houses and they don’t seem to care while you take their shit
- Why do you have to wait for potions to brew?
- Gold farming takes a long time. I postponed my third broom upgrade indefinitely because I thought it would take way too long to get 7500 gold
- “Rescuing” beasts like Pokémon is a weird mechanic. You use the beasts for gear upgrades and it’s essentially like a more humane version of the Far Cry system where you kill animals for money or materials
- There are a staggering number of upgrade systems like the Room of Requirement, beast breeding, the Talent tree, Collections, Challenges, broom upgrades, gear upgrades at the loom, learning spells, etc. It seems like a little too much going on
- The enormous amounts of gear you find in your travels dilutes the experience of finding good stuff. A given legendary item feels almost worthless because it is so replaceable
- You're also absolutely inundated with low-quality gear even in late game. It starts to feel like clutter and takes the motivation out of treasure hunting
- Why is there no "Sell all" button in marketplaces? At least I didn't see one and had to sell each piece of gear individually
- Was Quidditch just too much to put in the game? Why no Quidditch?

### Character development and story

This was a more lackluster part of the game for me. I felt as though I only bonded with Sebastian Sallow, your character's misguided Slytherin buddy, because he had the most visible and comprehensible motivation: To rid his twin sister Anne of an evil curse. You meet Anne and see the little homestead where she and Sebastian grew up before attending Hogwarts. You see her in pain and want to help her too. The other characters in your orbit, like Poppy Sweeting and Natsai Onai, explain their backstories, which form their motivations for questing to save animals or kill Harlow henchmen, in dialogue trees that drag on and on.

I felt that the storyline with Sebastian, Ominis, and Anne was the best out of them all, including the main quest with the Keepers. The primary antagonist, Ranrok, is flat, evil, and kind of boring. His motivations aren't nearly as complicated or understandable as Sebastian's, who stumbles into dark magic and gradually becomes consumed by it. You feel for Sebastian (as with Isadora, the Keeper) and get the sense that he's a good person who cares about his sister; he just chooses the wrong path. Good character development causes you to sympathize with even the people who turn out bad.

### Graphics

Mostly great. I was awestruck by the flying around Hogwarts, in particular, and just how good that looked both at night and during the day. 

I also thought that the sketched look of this "trial" was amazing:

### Overall impression

I'd recommend it to anyone, especially fans of the Harry Potter lore, assuming they don't object too much to the focus on combat and killing.
### Mass Effect 3
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-3/
Last updated: 2023-07-12T15:43:43.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/07/Mass-Effect-3-2_15_2023-1_34_35-PM.png)

## Grade: B+

**FYI spoilers below.**

I had to stare at the wall for a while after I finished the third *Mass Effect (ME3)* installment. I chose the "Refuse" option and unintentionally condemned all advanced organic life in the galaxy to destruction by the Reapers. This was followed by a very depressing cutscene of a hologram version of Liara T'Soni appearing far in the future to unknown lifeforms in the next Cycle to pass on the knowledge of the their imminent destruction, just as the Protheans attempted to do for humans and other races in the first game. 

I chose the way that I did because the Catalyst (appearing as a Chuckie-like virtual child and whom we learn is the combined intelligence of all of the Reapers) told me that I'd kill all synthetic life, destroy the Mass Relays, and (I think) a bunch of Alliance ships if I used the Crucible. It was a split-second decision based on "oh, that sounds kind of expensive" and an assumption that the game might reward me for my restraint. Super wrong. 

I stared at the wall because I realized I'd just played dozens of hours to reach this conclusion and it sucked. Afterward, I watched videos on the other endings I could have chosen and felt marginally better knowing those. I was still bummed because I'd become unmeshed in the story and I felt a distinct sense of ownership over my playthrough. 

I'm giving this game a "B+" rather than an "A" for some annoying particularities of the gameplay and the way the storyline collapses down to a few outcomes after what feels like a hundred impactful decisions. However, I give the Mass Effect trilogy as a whole an "A+" for its breathtaking scope. The "import character/story" features at the beginning of the second and third installments reinforce the butterfly-effect weight behind your decisionmaking. Characters interact with you very differently depending on your choices in the prior games, such as sparing the Rachni bug queen (many people seem to think you were stupid to do that even though the Rachni appear to be a neutral/benevolent force). Some characters won't even appear in *ME3* based on your selected path in the second installment (for me: Jack, Samara, Thane, etc.), having died during the finale mission to the Collector Base.

In *ME3*, outside of the Refuse option that I chose, the ending outcomes available to you differ based on the Total Military Strength (TMS) score you run up prior to the finale mission to Earth (I think I landed somewhere around 2300). I found these helpful matrices that lay them all out.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Screenshot-2023-02-22-at-6.49.57-AM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Screenshot-2023-02-22-at-6.49.44-AM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Screenshot-2023-02-22-at-6.49.04-AM.png)

Source: [Gamesradar](https://www.gamesradar.com/mass-effect-3-endings-effective-military-strength-ems/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

It's an interesting way to incentivize players to do as many of the side quests as possible to crank up their TMS score. Normally I ignore the majority of extra missions in story-driven games precisely because they don't matter in the end. They tend to give the character extra loot: fancy armor or weapons that make combat more fun or satisfying. Because side-questing leads to a better macro-outcome in *ME3*, I'd do as many as possible in a future playthrough (and pick the Destroy option). 

### Gameplay/Combat

Combat got another upgrade in *ME3* over *ME2*. It's fun! BioWare increased the adrenaline, savagery, and flow of fighting. The pace of it seems accelerated. There are more opportunities to flank your enemies and surprise them. You don't fatigue after [sprinting for five seconds](https://www.reddit.com/r/masseffect/comments/nmootb/fatiguedmy%5Fguy%5Fshepherd%5Felite%5Fsoldier%5Fspectre/?ref=nickrroberts.com). The bash mechanic got a long-press option that causes Shepard to whip out an energy sword and viciously stab a target. The developers added a bunch of new enemy types with different fighting styles, like Brutes which are basically Hunters from *Halo,* but still fun to go up against. 

Outside of combat, the game also got rid of all of the decryption and bypass mini-games from *ME2* which became incredibly annoying and interruptive by mid-game. This helps keep focus on the story.

Also, you finally get an in-game objective display rather than having to consult your Journal and the Map all the time to figure out where to go. It's not perfect, but it definitely felt like it kept me out of the menu more and moving around.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-3-2_15_2023-1_59_54-PM.png)

Most of my critiques of this game and others boil down to whether the developers create or remove obstacles to story and game flow. The more events keep moving forward with minimal, tedious choring, the better chance a game has to captivate its audience with the narrative. *ME3* generally does well here, but it stumbles in places:

- Every time you finish a mission you're transported to the Comms area near the War Terminal, and you have to trek back to main deck's Galaxy Map via this stupid blue grid that slows you down. You do this dozens and dozens of times over the course of the game. There was one mission to Tuchanka (the Krogan homeworld) if I'm remembering correctly, where you have three back-to-back missions available on the planet and every single time you complete one, you're teleported back to the Comms console and have to walk all the way to the Galaxy Map, through the dumb blue grid, to do the next thing.
- I found this mission to the Geth hivemind to be pretty draggy and tiresome after blasting orange blocks off of the third data cluster representation, but it just kept going.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/image-2.png)

[Source](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamezone.com%2Foriginals%2Fmass-effect-3-walkthrough%2F&psig=AOvVaw3tE%5FN-Z9gHyvG-NATg6Y7m&ust=1677164271928000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=https://www.gamezone.com/originals/mass-effect-3-walkthrough/).

### Character development

This Shepard character modifier was even more ridiculous than in *Mass Effect 2*. Even if you import a character, the game still lets you change Shepard's features substantially. I ended up with this, which I honestly regretted a little bit after having to stare at that mug for hours on end:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-3-2_17_2023-5_56_44-AM.png)

My Normandy-casual outfit:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-3-2_17_2023-8_42_07-AM.png)

Beyond simple looks, the character development in *ME3* feels much more full and player-driven with the Paragon/Renegade mechanic. You can role play Shepard in different ways depending on how many blue (good person) or red (kinda bad person) decisions you make. And in this way, Shepard evolves and other characters interact with him differently. My problem with the last two games was that his character was extremely flat. In this installment, *ME3* takes pains to show that Shepard is human, particularly with his repeating nightmare of a child he saw murdered by Reapers on Earth early in the game.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-3-2_17_2023-7_10_28-AM.png)

The dream sequence where you follow the creepy child

I also liked how *ME3* brought down the number of available squadmates to take along your missions from the second installment (from twelve to eight). It gives you a better chance to learn a few of them in more detail and actually form bonds. 

### Graphics

There were many moments where I had to take in the beauty or scale of a scene. Curing the Krogan Genophage was one of them. All these little pretty sparkly things floating around you and your team added to the satisfaction of completing the mission:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-3-2_17_2023-7_05_24-AM--1-.png)

Though there were almost too many cutscenes in my opinion, I do love a gigantic space battle. The big one near Earth against the Reapers was visually delicious:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-3-2_19_2023-7_51_21-AM.png)

### Overall impression

Excellent. Would play again.

### My previous Mass Effect reviews

[Mass Effect 2Much improved over the first one![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Screenshot-2023-02-16-at-6.58.10-AM.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-2/)

[Mass Effect 1A slog to get to the next installments in the series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/Mass-Effect-1_29_2023-7_41_35-AM.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-1/)
### Mass Effect 2
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-2/
Last updated: 2023-02-23T16:21:24.000Z
## Grade: B

Now we're getting somewhere. By the time I finished the second *Mass Effect* installment, I was hooked. While the [first one](https://nickrroberts.com/notes-on-mass-effect-1/) does a good job setting up the alien races, politics, and backstory for the fictional universe, the actual gameplay is pretty poor. *Mass Effect 2* *Legendary Edition* (ME2) improves on a lot of that and delivers a solid gameplay experience, even by 2023 standards. 

FYI: There are spoilers below.

## Positives

### Gameplay

The team did away with several annoying mechanics from the first installment (ME1): 

- You don’t have to trek back to the Normandy every time you finish a mission and you're dropped back in front of the Galaxy Map so you can go immediately onto the next thing.
- There's less purposeless walking. In ME1, there were so many times where I noticed how large and empty the buildings or landscapes were...for no apparent reason. I thought maybe the developers wanted me to think "wow, this place really feels like the boundless void of space." Featureless corridors between openable doors extended for what felt like miles and added a lot of walking time.
- Amost no elevators– which seemed to be the default for getting anywhere in ME1\. Each time you'd get in, the game would make you watch a silly animation of Shepard standing in formation with his squad as they changed floors.
- No Mako! The clumsy tank-like vehicle doesn't feature at all, except in the crash-site of the Normandy.
- You can make Shepard look hilarious in the character modifier

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/278C26F0-A70E-44D8-966C-B9AE214A3CEB_1_201_a.jpeg)

I was going for 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger with my Shepard

- Also, this wonderfully gross meat armor:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-2-2_2_2023-3_46_43-PM--1-.png)

### Graphics

The *Legendary Edition* of ME2 looks really good on a 4K screen. Watching [side-by-sides](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2ZLxu4JAeU&ref=nickrroberts.com) with the original version makes it look even better. 

I was also blown away by some of the cool and vibey settings like this one:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-2-2_15_2023-8_18_48-AM.png)

Inside the Collector ship.

## Negatives

In terms of storyline, ME2 gets a bit too complicated for its own good. I can't tell what benefit bringing in the whole Cerberus/Illusive Man dynamic serves. In fact, this just feels like another ripoff. My main complaint with ME1 was that it felt like a wannabe *Halo*. Introducing the Illusive Man feels like the BioWare team really wanted their own "G-Man" from *Half Life*. If we needed a shady, Machiavellian actor, why not just make him a morally-questionable admiral in the Alliance Fleet? Instead, we have this whole bizarre paramilitary/pseudo-terrorist organization who the developers have to explain by killing Shepard only to immediately him back from the dead AND rebuild a newer, better Normandy. It just adds a lot of hoop-jumping into the plot for little gain, since Shepard, the Normandy, and its crew act in essentially the same way as they would have as Alliance Fleet members for the rest of the game. 

### Character development

Shepard has a tad more inflection in his voice, but he's still a flat character without an arc. I can't really point to anywhere in the story where he's learning from his mistakes or changing. He's always the same crusty marine who's seen some shit.

As above, I think the game proceeds to bring in too many team members and there's a lot of the story that feels like *Oceans 11* or something where you're going around recruiting a heist team. If you're like me and you mostly play the main storyline, the opportunities to emotionally connect to any of these characters is diluted by the sheer quantity of them. You can have 12! There's just not enough time or reason to have that many. 

When I did do one of the squadmate side-quests because the game forced me to (I had to wait for the Reaper IFF device to come online or something) I went to Jack's biotic kid asylum to blow it up. Her character was tortured by the Cerberus group and molded into a bitter, biotic wizard with highly destructive capability. After I completed this and could go on the finale "suicide mission" to the Collector base in the center of the galaxy, Jack died immediately! I said "oh" to myself and then moved on. Also, I don't want to sound Victorian or anything, but how is this a practical outfit to go tromping around the chilly galaxy in, developers?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-2-2_1_2023-4_35_31-PM.png)

Jack's getup.

### Graphics

There were stretches of time where I'd become really immersed in the story, but then funny things like this would happen and snap me out of it:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass_Effect_Clips_AdobeExpress.gif)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass_Effect_Clips_2_AdobeExpress.gif)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass_Effect_Clips_3_AdobeExpress.gif)

### Gameplay/combat

- I don’t love the mission selector interface on the Galaxy Map. Feels clunky to move this tiny ship around. I actually prefer the ME1 map interface where you can much more easily hop the cursor between star clusters.
- I never once used a probe. Not really sure what that extra mechanic was for.
- You still have to deal with a lack of a heads-up display objective system to keep yourself pointed in the right direction. Still lots of flipping between the Journal and the Map to figure out where to go/what to do.
- They moved the Equipment into weapons lockers that you have to stumble upon which is kind of annoying
- Still struggling with minor step ups. With an XBox controller, if you press "A" near any kind of wall or object, you crouch down. You had to repeat this crouch dynamic every time you wanted to hurtle over an obstruction and it felt clunky.

Overall, I liked ME2! I dove right into ME3 as soon as I'd finished. More on that soon.

### My other Mass Effect reviews

[Mass Effect 1A slog to get to the next installments in the series![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/Mass-Effect-1_29_2023-7_41_35-AM.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-1/)

[Mass Effect 3A dramatic and engaging finale to the Mass Effect trilogy![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-3-2_15_2023-1_34_35-PM.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-3/)
### Winter in the Tetons
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/winter-in-the-tetons/
Last updated: 2023-02-22T19:37:11.000Z
A quick spin through the Idaho and Wyoming sides of the Teton Range. 

Also, here's a bonus short video I made about backcountry skiing with Fiona inside the National Park:
### January links: Video games, tanks for Ukraine, Teletubbies
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/january-links/
Last updated: 2023-03-03T18:46:42.000Z
Good morning from Idaho!

Between bouts of home furnishing in our new place in the Tetons, things in my life have been very video game-themed this month: I finished *God of War* on PC (excellent), tried *Elden Ring* (after a couple hours, I figured out that I just didn't want to invest the time required for the difficulty), and played through *Mass Effect* (little writeup on that [here](https://nickrroberts.com/notes-on-mass-effect-1/). I didn't love that one either!). I wrote a piece below on how I justify to myself time spent on games like these. 

Also along these lines, we've been watching *The* *Last of Us* on HBO, which has been a weekly delight. The show is based on a video game, which illustrates just how cinematic and powerful the stories have become in recent PC/Xbox/Playstation titles. The third episode with Nick Offerman absolutely blew us away. Can't recommend it enough. 

## From the last month (or first few days of this one)

From me: Rationalizing my leisure time. I'd read it in conjunction with the link below this one:

[On rationalizing my leisure timeJumping through hoops to tie everything I do to some larger purpose![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/DALL-E-2023-02-01-09.48.22---Man-thinking-about-time--digital-art.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/on-rationalizing-my-leisure-time/)

On video game addiction:

[Video! Game! Addiction!A guide for navigating a world of infinite entertainment![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86612ed7-3e8e-4903-bda3-b0765de8a21b%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)The Intrinsic PerspectiveErik Hoel![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb945eeac-d858-479e-975a-c1ea85bb24c2_1240x886.jpeg)](https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/when-video-game-addiction-strikes)

Not to go too far down the "Hoel" hole, but I would now also describe mine and Fiona's new lifestyle as “high-tech pastoral”:

[Remote work is the best thing to happen to families in decadesYet commentators and politicians keep missing it![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86612ed7-3e8e-4903-bda3-b0765de8a21b%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)The Intrinsic PerspectiveErik Hoel![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbd7e8608-9644-4400-84c6-b7c2bd6d369b_1181x843.jpeg)](https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/remote-work-is-the-best-thing-to)

I plan to shamelessly copy this guy's style in some future videos:

A continuation of the Scott Alexander Bay Area House Party series:

[Even More Bay Area House Party...![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75%2Fapple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe26aab22-f34d-44c3-a923-c207fff6bd2e_512x512.png)](https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party?r=binh0&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=email)

Why big online platforms get shitty over time:

[Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow![](https://i0.wp.com/pluralistic.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/cropped-guillotine-French-Revolution.jpg?fit=192%2C192&ssl=1)Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.Cory Doctorow![](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/21Jan2023.jpg?w=840&ssl=1)](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/?ref=nickrroberts.com#hey-guys)

Funny little photos from carrying a camera around everywhere:

[A lighter side of life – picture essayAdvertising art director turned photographer Alan Burles on the influence of French-American photographer Elliott Erwitt and the beauty of getting ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’![](https://static.guim.co.uk/images/favicon-32x32.ico)The GuardianAlan Burles![](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7b987080aeaa7fa07e1d463fc60ce7c35a70267b/0_106_6000_3600/master/6000.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=5922c401d36c85e27343b9c32b5753db)](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/dec/26/a-lighter-side-of-life-picture-essay?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Finalists for the close-up photo of the year:

[The Top 100 — Close-up Photographer of the YearThe best 100 close-up, macro photography and photomicrography pictures of 2022\. View the winners of Close-up Photographer of the Year (CUPOTY 04).![](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aae554545776e4f59c31b2c/1522327502670-44QTI5TOTX28OA4HVL4Y/favicon.ico?format=100w)Close-up Photographer of the Year![](http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5aae554545776e4f59c31b2c/t/637f853d8f9fba3705116551/1669301569102/Danny-Wilson-Wormhole-banner-30%-CUPOTY.jpg?format=1500w)](https://www.cupoty.com/winners-04?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The Bradley fighting vehicle in Ukraine:

[What Bradley Fighting Vehicles Will Mean for UkraineThe Bradley has the speed, range, and firepower to help Ukraine retake its territory.![](https://www.thebulwark.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/cropped-amp-icon-1-270x270.png)The BulwarkMark Hertling![](https://www.thebulwark.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/GettyImages-1241176268-scaled.jpg)](https://www.thebulwark.com/what-bradley-fighting-vehicles-will-mean-for-ukraine/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

And, finally, tanks for Ukraine: “'Scholzing' means “communicating good intentions, only to use/find/invent any reason imaginable to delay these and/or prevent them from happening.”

[The Last Taboo: Germany’s Leopard Tanks Are a Game Changer with Significant RisksWith the delivery of Leopard battle tanks from Germany, the Ukraine war is entering into a new and dangerous phase. Olaf Scholz must now clean up the political damage he has caused, hold his country together and find a path with his international partners to end the conflict.![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/public/spon/images/icons/touch-icon180.png)DER SPIEGEL![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/d4161683-2d51-489a-80c3-dbc90c9068c6_w1280_r1.77_fpx53_fpy48.jpg)](https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-last-taboo-germany-s-leopard-tanks-are-a-game-changer-with-significant-risks-a-6da8d3eb-4402-4fec-8159-9e16c8d0f27e?ref=nickrroberts.com)

USMC pilot arrested for training Chinese pilots *(via my pal SamS)*:

[Former US Marine Corps pilot Major Daniel Edmund Duggan was arrested in Australia in October 2022 on charges that he was training Chinese fighter pilots in violation of multiple arms control laws.Posted in r/Spycraft101 by u/Spycraft101 • 235 points and 11 comments![](https://www.redditstatic.com/desktop2x/img/favicon/android-icon-192x192.png)redditSpycraft101![](https://preview.redd.it/qzqleb0c58ca1.jpg?overlay-align=bottom,left&crop=600:314.136125654,smart&overlay-height=15p&overlay=%2Fwatermark%2Ft5_2u6fvr.png%3Fs%3D515ab7f16113ac97033ac07f3ee782ee5bb98909&width=600&height=314.136125654&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=0e45419fbf6f19137fbc33dd34abecb33c9e89a8)](https://old.reddit.com/r/Spycraft101/comments/10cmc8v/former%5Fus%5Fmarine%5Fcorps%5Fpilot%5Fmajor%5Fdaniel%5Fedmund/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Russia’s new military barons:

[Public Politics in the Wartime Russian Dictatorship - War on the RocksWill President Vladimir Putin’s regime implode? Unfortunately, the media’s fixation with this question — understandable as it might be — has prevented us![](https://warontherocks.com/favicon.ico)War on the RocksJulian G. Waller![](https://warontherocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Putin_Meeting_Soldiers.jpg)](https://warontherocks.com/2023/01/public-politics-in-the-wartime-russian-dictatorship/?%5F%5Fs=d5o09djx55ojj3ueh6po&ref=nickrroberts.com)

Software defines tactics:

[Software Defines Tactics - War on the RocksThe book “The Bomber Mafia” revolves around the efforts of military officers to develop effective tactics for a bomber force, emphasizing the feedback![](https://warontherocks.com/favicon.ico)War on the RocksJason Weiss![](https://warontherocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/5959501-scaled-e1674416063972.jpg)](https://warontherocks.com/2023/01/software-defines-tactics/?%5F%5Fs=d5o09djx55ojj3ueh6po&ref=nickrroberts.com)

Teletubbies has a Twitter account:

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Screenshot-2023-02-02-at-8.03.37-AM.png)](https://twitter.com/teletubbieshq/status/1584637028456894466?s=46&t=1uVanySgxIrgITIHpMhXtQ&ref=nickrroberts.com)

Text to music generator:

[MusicLM![](https://t0.gstatic.com/faviconV2?client=SOCIAL&type=FAVICON&fallback_opts=TYPE,SIZE,URL&url=https://github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/&size=128)](https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### On rationalizing my leisure time
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/on-rationalizing-my-leisure-time/
Last updated: 2025-02-03T19:25:02.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/DALL-E-2023-02-01-09.48.22---Man-thinking-about-time--digital-art-1.png)

"Man thinking about time, digital art." DALL-E2.

After spending 2022 on the road, the only thing I really missed about our days in an apartment in the city was my PC tower. I left it in storage because it didn't make the cut for our space-constrained car. More boring things like clothes took priority.

I spent so many hours and dollars lovingly crafting that computer. It has RGB lights that pulse across the motherboard, a graphics card (one of the few to escape the crypto mining bros) around a foot long and which looks like something out of an alien spacecraft, and a series of colorful cooling fans. I got sucked into [r/battlestations](https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations/?ref=nickrroberts.com) at one point and tried to emulate the neon components that make the Modern Gaming PC. Sometimes I just like to stare at it and listen to it whirr. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/image-1.png)

Example of what's vogue from [r/battlestations](https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations/comments/c2k12u/new%5Fsetup%5Fnew%5Fpost/?ref=nickrroberts.com). The water-cooled crazybox on the right is a PC.

During our high-velocity nomadic year, I resolved that I would vent my pent-up gaming energy on a long binge whenever I pulled my PC back out of the storage unit. But part of this resolution was that I'd be careful about it and select *finite,* story-driven games. This [highly-relatable](https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/when-video-game-addiction-strikes) piece on video game addiction from Eric Hoel (thanks to my pal RobG for the link) makes this "finite"/"infinite" distinction about gaming that I'd internalized but hadn't put into words before. 

I learned back in college that *League of Legends, Starcraft,* or *World of Warcraft*\-types of games consumed my time, my motivation, and, ultimately, me. My first battle in *League of Legends* was fun, with its little lines of minions, vibrant crystals, and surprise attacks, but also revealed just how much I sucked. Instead of shutting it down and doing homework, I cracked my knuckles and decided I would level up. That's the moment where these things can go wrong, because there's no end to that project. It's an infinite-type game. The addiction starts because you get good enough to win, but then the game places you in rounds with increasingly competent players. The time investment required to start winning against better opponents grows and grows. If you stay committed, something else in your life has to give: Relationships, grades, job, etc. For many players, it's a toxic spiral into a bad place.

I was fortunate enough to see where things were headed during that months-long romance with *League*. What I realized was that, unless I sought a professional career as an e-sports player, there was no *point* to any of it. All that time and energy spend was just for some diversion in the moment and I still had homework to do. 

So, I went cold turkey, and not just in that arena. I stopped reading fiction altogether for a while. Anything I judged to be an indulgence without a life-improving purpose I refused to give my attention. The [Protestant Work Ethic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant%5Fwork%5Fethic?ref=nickrroberts.com) is one of those platformy parts of the American psyche that you feel strongly but don't notice unless you periodically examine your source code. 

I had many slip-ups though, like when *Elder Scrolls: Skyrim* came out. The pull to play it became overwhelming with friends and the internet losing their shit about it. 

After proceeding to dump 100+ hours into *Skyrim* like a lapsed addict, I had a realization. It wasn't like *League–*an infinite competition with a lack of story. *Skyrim* is entirely a story, and a very good one at that. So, I figured, maybe the presence of story was "life-improving" enough to make it comport with my vision of appropriate leisure activity because I could actually do something with it, however indirectly. 

I started writing a lot more around the mid-2010s: Some bad fictional stuff and blogs. Writing feels productive, American. And I figured that good stories (be them in video games, novels, or elsewhere) are the seeds of good writing. The human mind is a recombinatorial creative machine. So, boom, my rationalization was born. 

Suddenly video games were back in my life full-swing! And, ever since, I've been moving through the world with this philosophy in tote. 

I'm writing this piece because I became aware that this outlook has expanded to most other areas of my life. Having fun outside, like skiing, climbing, or camping means I can film stuff and publish adventure videos. Getting a meat smoker means I can make videos or write about smoking meats. Every run goes up on Strava to contribute to the yearly mileage goal. Every input is a tool for creative output or a larger goal. I rarely do anything unless I can justify to myself that it will fit into my objective structure.

I'm hesitant to declare this whole way of operating my life good or bad. I can see that this is where the anti-capitalist philosophers would jump in and tell me that I'm just running on Max Weber's treadmill and not being present and that I should meditate more and do things purely for their own sake. At the very least, this structure to my life does beg the question: So if you do all of these things to seed creative outputs or hit larger targets, what are those all for?

I dunno, a sense of broader meaning and purpose? I just know I don't feel good when my balance tilts too much toward consumption rather than production. I don’t have a desire to deconstruct that and reformulate my personal meaning into something less Calvinistic or whatever. Or strip it all away like a nihilist. 

The thing is: I like it. It works for me. It's compelling to think that all of your leisures actually roll up to a larger goal, even if there is some self-deception involved. It's impossible that every grain of every story I imbibe makes it into something I produce. Maybe not everything has a utility! But it feels pretty good to operate like this and I feel like it helps me achieve some balance: Knowing that I have to take a break from the video games or reading or movies to work on some writing, or some relationships, and contribute something back to the world.
### Mass Effect 1
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-1/
Last updated: 2023-02-23T16:22:02.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/Mass-Effect-1_29_2023-7_41_35-AM.png)

Shepard is pretty much one of the robots he's fighting.

## Grade: C-

My god have story-driven games come a long way since 2007\. This was a tough play-through after *God of War*, which I finished last week on PC. *GoW* was graphically gorgeous, made combat very fun, and its tightly-focused storyline about a father and son made me care deeply about its characters. I found myself in tears at the end and not since *Red Dead Redemption 2* has a game wrung so much emotion out of me. I know it's not a fair comparison with *Mass Effect*, but it is a stark reminder of just how much big-name titles have evolved over the last decade or so. 

I played *Mass Effect* on the advice of multiple friends, on whom this series made a big impact. I'm still making my way through *Mass Effect 2* (already markedly better) at the moment so we'll see how much it pans out, but they recommended I evaluate the series as a whole, with *Mass Effect 2* and *3* being where things get really good.

FYI: Spoilers below.

## Positives

It sets up the storyline and universe for the other Mass Effects, I guess, which is why I didn't grade it an "F." Taken on their own, the backstory and environment of *Mass Effect* are compelling and vibey. I would read books that build on them.

## Negatives

In general, the first *Mass Effect* feels likea cheap *Halo* knockoff. The main character, Commander Shepard, might as well be Master Chief unmasked. The Mako is a shitty Warthog. The Normandy is the Pillar of Autumn.

### Character development 

Every character is cardboard, especially Shepard. He's a tough-guy marine type and the quests offer nothing to complicate his persona or increase his likability. I would've appreciated if he was a collector of Pokemon cards or something like that to offset his one-dimensionality. As Shepard, you mainly punch/shoot people, figure out how to open locked doors, and that's really it.

At several points, the game forces the player to make tough decisions, like the choice between destroying the main bad guy, Sovereign, and saving the Council (a governing body for all species in the galaxy). Whichever decision you make, Shepard takes it all in stride, like he knew he was right all along. There isn't really any kind of hand-wringing or wallowing like one would expect from a human being: "ah man, that was hard. I really feel for all of the people my big decision just fucked over."

No offense to Mark Meer, the voice actor for Shepard, but the tone of his voice doesn't really adapt or change much based on the situation. It's just kind of flat all the time, which makes it feel like talking with the crew holds the same gravity as the final showdown with Saren.

None of the other characters get fleshed out either. The female ones are uniformly busty and undifferentiated. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/Mass-Effect-1_27_2023-2_59_01-PM.png)

### Graphics

I played *Mass Effect Legendary Edition* and, compared to the original XBox 360 assets, these graphics were enormously improved. But, there were still many moments that left me giggling. It's the *eyes*. People’s eyes make them look psychopathic and it takes the seriousness out of almost every situation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/Mass-Effect-1_27_2023-4_51_39-PM.png)

### Dialogue 

One thing that really annoyed me was that the game completely softens or alters the user-selected dialogue options. I'd select a prompt like "You asshole!" and then Shepard would proceed to say something like "You're being difficult." This happens over and over and I can't remember if Shepard actually ever said what I selected on the dialogue wheel.

### Gameplay/combat

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/Mass-Effect-1_29_2023-6_35_55-AM.png)

I actually did like the vibe and look of this place.

Notes I jotted down on my phone as I played:

- The combat is unsatisfying. For example, there's a bludgeon mechanic where you can walk up to an enemy and press B. However, it's really like a small bump with Shepard's elbow and they fall over, dead. It's so far removed from the *God of War-*style savage attacks that you can practically feel through the screen. That said, the squad-style combat was likely an interesting innovation for its time. I see this pattern repeated in more recent games, like the *Far Cry* series, where you can sic your AI pal on an enemy or have them move to a location.
- There’s a lot of choring early game and not a lot of combat. It's weird because combat is clearly what most of the game is built around with all of the equipment and squad management options.
- The objective system leaves you guessing and walking around for a long time to find some person or alien for a piece of dialogue to advance the game. You have to flick constantly between the Journal and the Map to figure out where to go. And maps aren't connected! If you're on the wrong floor, you can't see the names of the rooms from your journal that signpost where Shepard is supposed to head. The in-game heads-up objective display I assume was created because developers realized this kind of thing interrupts you constantly, diving into a menu to remember what you're supposed to be doing. A HUD keeps the game flowing.
- Why am I fatigued after sprinting for 10 yards? Isn't this guy a badass space marine?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/Mass-Effect-1_27_2023-7_15_17-AM.png)

- Dumb puzzles. For example: The core stack mover thing. I didn't want to take the time to figure it out and had to convert all of my gear into Omni-gel except one gun to pay to get past this part.
- My decryption levels were never high enough to crack 90% of the loot boxes even late game.
- Fucking elevators all the time.
- The Mako. I don't know what to Mako' it. The handling defies all expectation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/Mass-Effect-1_29_2023-6_54_39-AM.png)

It flipped and it can't get up. There's no "flip warthog" type option if you manage to do this.

We'll see what they fixed in *Mass Effect 2*.

### My other Mass Effect reviews

[Mass Effect 2Much improved over the first one![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Screenshot-2023-02-16-at-6.58.10-AM.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-2/)

[Mass Effect 3A dramatic and engaging finale to the Mass Effect trilogy![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/02/Mass-Effect-3-2_15_2023-1_34_35-PM.png)](https://nickrroberts.com/mass-effect-3/)
### December links: ChatGPT, Vatican observatories, Taiwan
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/december-links/
Last updated: 2023-02-21T13:35:56.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/DALL-E-2023-01-06-11.24.38---robot-in-front-of-a-landscape-in-the-style-of-cgsociety-1.png)

"Robot in front of a landscape in the style of cgsociety" DALL-E 2

Hello from Salt Lake City! We're just about to embark on our move up to our new house in the Tetons and Fiona and I are extremely excited about it. Having our own basecamp and some space will be so nice after a year on the road. Plus, I'm really hoping I run into [Jimmy Chin](https://www.instagram.com/jimmychin?ref=nickrroberts.com) at a local bar, since he's a fellow resident. 

Our plan for 2023 is to hunker down for around five months in our Eastern Idaho abode, where we'll do as much backcountry/cross-country/alpine skiing as we can, and then head to the Pacific Northwest for the summer. We're going to be in Bend, OR, followed by the Seattle area. Our goals are to a) to see some cool new places and b) place ourselves near the Cascades, where I'll be participating in a series of expeditions to glaciated peaks to prep for a 2024 Denali attempt. If you're going to be around any of those places in the summer and want to meet up, please reach out!

## Links from the last month

### I'll start with my stuff

Things I wrote in the last month if you haven't seen them:

- [My 2022 metrics](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2022/)
- [A review of our nomad year on the road](https://nickrroberts.com/a-review-of-our-year-on-the-road/)

Short videos I made (I've been cooking a lot!):

- [Smoking things: Pulled pork](https://youtube.com/shorts/LlW3DIZD%5FY0?feature=share&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [A few wintry scenes from Utah](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b0a-vXFcLlQ?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Smoking things: Frozen beef tenderloin](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6GpejS-s-8M?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Learning to ice climb](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kE%5FYckh2UQg?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Christmas morning cookout](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/26p92YrBa5o?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Grilling things: Carne asada](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wstsGR8hJGQ?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Grilling things: Chicken tacos](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aL5IbZQUHqM?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Ribeye reverse sear (Babish style)](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8CJ6G4DvjZo?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Artificial intelligence-related

- I haven’t personally messed with ChatGPT yet, but [this](https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1599082185402642432?s=46&t=uCb4EBQEHLgtcldQBzj3HQ&ref=nickrroberts.com) was incredible. It can write plausible code! Also, someone in my orbit submitted a music theory essay written by ChatGPT to their college professor and scored a 95%. Look out for a rash of startups or incumbent plagiarism-tracking software companies to come out with ChatGPT identifier features for academia.
- Humanity wins every time ([link](https://open.substack.com/pub/embedded/p/i-dont-care-what-the-ai-wrote)).
- A [potential future](https://www.secondbest.ca/p/before-the-flood?ref=nickrroberts.com) where our 70-year-old government firmware meets sophisticated machine models.

### Security/Ukraine

- A Chinese seizure of Taiwan would be [a pyrrhic victory](https://www.csis.org/analysis/reunification-taiwan-through-force-would-be-pyrrhic-victory-china?ref=nickrroberts.com) if they could even pull it off.
- [Fascinating report](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/16/world/europe/russia-putin-war-failures-ukraine.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) from the New York Times on the first ten months of the Ukraine conflict. Truly incredible journalism!
- Perun [on the race](https://youtu.be/RPrWm6fWuaM?ref=nickrroberts.com) for sixth-generation aircraft.
- The [F-35B crash](https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/zmtn80/f35b%5Fcrash%5Fand%5F00%5Fejection%5Fat%5Ffort%5Fworth%5Ftoday?ref=nickrroberts.com) at Fort Worth (*via my friend Sam S.*).
- The War on the Rocks [must-reads](https://warontherocks.com/2022/12/most-read-war-on-the-rocks-articles-of-2022/?%5F%5Fs=d5o09djx55ojj3ueh6po&ref=nickrroberts.com) of 2022.

### General

- Fiona and I were down in southern Arizona visiting her family for Christmas. While we were driving around just north of the border with Mexico, Fiona's father pointed out an observatory in the mountains and said it was owned by the Vatican. Sure enough, the Roman Catholic church [runs](https://www.npr.org/2021/06/06/1003231191/the-vaticans-space-observatory-wants-to-see-stars-and-faith-align?ref=nickrroberts.com) deep space observatories!
- Speaking of Arizona, shortly before Christmas we visited [Winterhaven](https://www.livingplaces.com/AZ/Pima%5FCounty/Tucson%5FCity/Winterhaven%5FHistoric%5FDistrict.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) in Tucson. To live here, you must decorate your house to the nines. It was cool, but absolute chaos. It seemed as though the entire town was out touring the neighborhood that night.
- [NUTS](https://warontherocks.com/2022/12/nuts-mcauliffes-1944-christmas-letter-3/?ref=nickrroberts.com)— the WWII American General McAuliffe’s reply to a German demand for surrender.
- The [deeper story](https://www.army.mil/article/92856/the%5Fstory%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fnuts%5Freply?ref=nickrroberts.com) on "NUTS."
- A [really good channel](https://youtu.be/GG0LY8OLBG8?ref=nickrroberts.com) that reminds me of when the History Channel was at its best.
- The [incredible story](https://www.damninteresting.com/lofty-ambitions/?ref=nickrroberts.com) of Maurice Wilson and Everest
- San Francisco killer police robot [controversy](https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/07/us/san-francisco-rejects-police-controlled-robots/index.html?ref=nickrroberts.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/image.png)

"You are in direct violation of Penal Code 1.13, Section 9."

- [Count Things](https://countthings.com/en/accuracy?ref=nickrroberts.com). A $120-per-month service that counts tubes and other stuff, presumably with machine vision models.
- A beautiful [little meditation](https://vimeo.com/765112056?ref=nickrroberts.com) on dreams and running.
- Subway sandwich air strike [takes out](https://twitter.com/frrancis/status/1586503884402327552?s=46&t=n4HcOg0yQmBjeGALsuvpsw&ref=nickrroberts.com) grandpa.
- This isn't new and I no longer play the game on which the story is based (League of Legends), but I watched the Netflix show [Arcane](https://www.netflix.com/title/81435684?ref=nickrroberts.com) in the last month and thought it was amazing. The character development is incredibly well-done.

That's it for now! Have a great January.
### A look back at 2022
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2022/
Last updated: 2023-12-11T15:54:54.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2023/01/DALL-E-2023-01-03-14.27.06---person-tracking-metrics--digital-art-1.png)

"Person tracking metrics, digital art" DALL-E 2

Happy 2023! I compulsively track many things in my life and I've put together yearly personal scorecards since 2018\. Below are my 2022 totals (this is [last year](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2021/) for comparison).

## 💪 Fitness

**Overall, according to Strava, I was probably slightly less fit in 2022 than 2021\. I did fewer pushups, ran more, and did no cycling. I still didn't feel like a slouch though!**

Goals:

- ✅ **774/750** miles ran (*vs. 750.8 miles in 2021)*
- ✅ **18,500/18,000** pushups completed (*vs. 20,400 pushups in 2021)*
- No cycling goal, no time on a bike. *(20,194 kilojoules output on Peloton in 2021)*

Other things I tracked:

- **112 hours 27 minutes** spent running (*vs. 108 hours 3 minutes in 2021)*
- **43,868f**t running vert (*vs. 72,146ft in 2021*)
- **168** total runs (*vs. 153 in 2021*)
- **0** miles cycled on Peloton (*vs. 387.9 in 2021*)
- **71** highest Strava fitness level (*vs. 67 in 2021*)--my average fitness was higher in 2021 according to the chart though. I'm having trouble downloading that data to actually compare.
- **134,160** calories burned between running and cycling (*vs. 140,847 in 2021*)
- **2 peaks** over 10,000ft tall summited (*vs. 0 in 2021*)

## 🥕 Health

**I slept worse in 2022 than I did in 2021\. I meditated less. And, apparently, I was less happy on average than in 2021\. I didn't track this part, but I *feel* like the highs were higher though.**

Goals:

- ❌ **68.88%/75%** sleep quality\* *(vs. 71.24 in 2021)*
- ❌ **7:57/8:00** average nightly sleep length *(vs. 8:17 in 2021)*
- ✅ **2,085/2,000** minutes meditated *(vs. 2720 in 2021)*

Other things I tracked:

- **79.7** happiness index average\* *(vs. 84 in 2021)*

## 🧠 Brain

**I was massively more productive in 2022 in terms of creative output. I read slightly less.**

Goals:

- ✅ **15/15** books read\* *(vs. 17 in 2021)*
- ✅ **19/10** articles published, including newsletter issues\* *(vs. 5 in 2021)*
- ✅ **5/5** podcasts created *(vs. 0 in 2021)*
- ✅ **48/5** videos published: 16 [long-form](https://www.youtube.com/@nickrrob/videos?ref=nickrroberts.com), 32 [short-form](https://www.youtube.com/@nickrrob/shorts?ref=nickrroberts.com) *(vs. 5 in 2021)*

## ❤️ Relationships

**I grew the number of active friendships and acquaintances in my life.**

No goals here

Things I tracked:

- **27** active friendships\* *(vs. 25 in 2021)*. This is my sum of the "Good friends" ring plus everything interior to that from the diagram in the article [here](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/05/robin-dunbar-explains-circles-friendship-dunbars-number/618931/?ref=nickrroberts.com))
- **26** inactive friendships\* (*same as 2021*) (generally corresponds to the "Friends" ring, but those who aren't "Good friends")
- **23** number of acquaintances (*vs. 20 in 2021*) --I'll be honest that my tracking wasn't perfect here. There are probably quite a few more in both this year and last. I'm just not great at noting them down.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/image.png)

From the Atlantic article linked above.

## 

## Details

**Strava Fitness:** From their site: “While fitness is a complicated concept, it can be simplified to an accumulation of training. The Fitness Score is calculated using Training Load and/or Relative Effort to measure your daily training, and an impulse-response model to quantify its effect over time. This will intuitively capture the development of fitness from training, as well as the loss of fitness during a break.”

**Sleep Quality:** Source: [AutoSleep](http://autosleep.tantsissa.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com): "The Quality ring shows hours of quality sleep achieved. This makes it easier to compare with other days. This looks at the overall sleep time, how much light sleep, how much deep sleep, how restless and the nocturnal dip in heart rate and determines how much quality sleep you had. The ring completion target is 85% of your required sleep hours.”

**Happiness index:** Holistic spot-check of how good I feel psychologically and physically, based on my relationships, job satisfaction, financial well-being, goal completion, etc. on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being that life can’t get any better.

**Books:** I've italicized books that I read in part but put down or come back to as reference. I've bolded books that I'd especially recommend.

- **Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy, Martha Wells**
- **Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells**
- **Murderbot Diaries: Artificial Condition, Martha Wells**
- **Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red, Martha Wells**
- *The First 90 Days, Michael D. Watkins (50%)*
- Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson
- Fairytale, Stephen King
- No Shortcuts to the Top, Ed Viesturs
- **Training for the New Alpinism: A Manual for the Climber as Athlete*, Steve House, Scott Johnston (Reference text)*
- **Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills 9th Ed.* (This is a textbook and intended for ongoing reference. Apparently required reading for many aspiring mountain guides.*)
- In the Shadow of Denali, Jonathan Waterman
- **Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman**
- The Paris Apartment, Lucy Foley
- The Guest List, Lucy Foley
- **Endurance, Alfred Lansing**
- **Eiger Dreams, Jon Krakauer**
- **Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer**
- *A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (15%)*
- **Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer**
- *Bunker: What it takes to survive the apocalypse, Bradley Garrett (48%)*

**Articles**

- [A review of our year on the road](https://nickrroberts.com/a-review-of-our-year-on-the-road/)
- [November Tidbits: Skiing, deep-fried coffee, Ukrainian victories](https://nickrroberts.com/november-tidbits/)
- [October Tidbits: Ski alpinism, Ukraine, a missile silo Airbnb](https://nickrroberts.com/october-tidbits/)
- [новая Земля](https://nickrroberts.com/novayazemlya/)
- [September Tidbits: Psychedelia, Zuck, LARPing trauma](https://nickrroberts.com/september-tidbits/)
- [Climbing Mt. Superior, Utah](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-superior-utah/)
- [July/August Tidbits: Psilocybin, Survival, Starfield](https://nickrroberts.com/july-august-tidbits/)
- [Climbing the Grand Teton](https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-the-grand-teton/)
- [June Tidbits: Naval fascinations, Xi Jinping, a couple great Australians](https://nickrroberts.com/june-tidbits/)
- [Requiem for Naval Air Station Alameda](https://nickrroberts.com/requiem-for-naval-air-station-alameda/)
- [Exploring the USS Midway](https://nickrroberts.com/exploring-the-uss-midway/)
- [Great pieces on the war in Ukraine, April '22](https://nickrroberts.com/a-few-more-excellent-sources-on-ukraine/)
- [Our nomad year, report from Bozeman, war in Ukraine](https://nickrroberts.com/nomadism-bozeman-ukraine/)
- [Keeping up with the situation in Ukraine, how to help](https://nickrroberts.com/keeping-up-with-the-situation-in-ukraine/)
- [Meditations at age 30](https://nickrroberts.com/meditations-at-30/)
- [A few thoughts on Everest](https://nickrroberts.com/a-few-thoughts-on-everest/)
- [I turned my dog into an NFT](https://nickrroberts.com/i-turned-my-dog-into-an-nft/)
- [Notes from the Copper City](https://nickrroberts.com/notes-from-copper-city/)
- [A look back at 2021](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2021/)

## Changes for 2023 planning

A few changes this year.

First, to account for my increasingly multi-sport cardio lifestyle, I’m not going to set a running goal. I’m going to set a “cardio mileage” goal instead. What counts?

- Hiking/mountaineering
- Cycling
- Running
- Cross-country skiing
- Backcountry skiing

Second, I’m not going to set a meditation goal. I completed my “meditation minutes” goal early this year and I’ve been experimenting with not meditating ever since. I haven’t felt that I’ve lost all that much. Not saying I won't meditate, just that I don't want to hold myself to a specific amount of it. I think much of my sanity can be maintained by just doing less stuff overall (lol, we'll see if that actually happens).

Third, I'm killing my "number of books read" goal. Since good stories can come from myriad places and formats, I decided to roll up all of my long-form media consumption objectives into a single goal. Why set a goal here? I want to incentivize myself to absorb good stories so that I can write good stories in turn. What counts?

- Movies
- Television series
- Books
- Video games (in particular: finite, single-player, story-driven ones, e.g. Elden Ring)

## Goals for 2023

- Maintain a sleep quality of 75%+, sleep time 8+ hours average for all of 2023
- Do 1500+ miles of cardio exercise
- Do 15,000 \[Edit: 10,000\] pushups
- Summit 3+ glaciated peaks in preparation for Denali
- Organize Denali trip and place deposit
- Publish 5+ articles with paired podcasts
- Publish 10+ \[Edit: 5\] longer-form videos
- Publish 15+ short-form videos
- Finish 50+ pieces of long-form media ([log](https://nickrroberts.com/media/))
- Maintain average weekly goal completion of 80% or higher
### A review of our year on the road
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-review-of-our-year-on-the-road/
Last updated: 2022-12-31T20:47:13.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/12/IMG_1803-min-1.png)

One of the natural arches in Coyote Gulch, southern Utah.

I'm slowly caffeinating and jotting notes for this piece while taking in the morning glow. As the sun crests the Mule Mountains, the golden light spreads itself over the gulch that clutches old-town Bisbee, Arizona. My wife's family lives here and we're visiting again for the holidays. I wrote about[ this place](https://nickrroberts.com/notes-from-copper-city/) earlier this year, before all the craziness of 2022\. It's a strange and storied old copper mining settlement near the border of Mexico, just north of Naco. The scene out of the window in front of me is peaceful, and it reinforces that I haven't had enough of these kinds of moments lately. This year of nomadism was terrifying, beautiful, and probably the most intense period of introspection in my life thus far.

![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/jdd18CQnBJOIFNwrolmeobifl0f6W6qSaC5I1wHM7TAwvH5rtD03niL2GKZv4iqfTo6fcVGg_H9hA3jbo22G4wyaFN9FlY137aknBLvuwzawF_urP9ECHYd8ddxPQd0srvTdrluA5zwLApRuRD3Gfgq0dQuKkZvSCX5C3AEVVQay8Q3Ma7a6kjiOGY3rWg)

Our destinations this year: San Francisco, CA, Vancouver, Canada, Salt Lake City, UT, Bozeman, MT, La Verkin, UT, Coyote Gulch, UT, Tucson, AZ, Bisbee, AZ, San Diego, CA, Alameda, CA, Driggs, ID, Costa Rica (La Fortuna, Monteverde, Tamarindo), Point Reyes, CA, Petaluma, CA, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Austin, Texas, New Orleans, Louisiana, Dallas, Texas, Albuquerque, New Mexico

### **Motivations**

I've wanted a taste of the itinerant life for at least a decade. The hedonistic appeal is obvious: Do cool stuff in places you haven't been, eat and drink delicious new things, and meet interesting people. The philosophical appeal is straightforward too: The open road might help you find meaning in your life. On top of having such short existences, our exposure to ideas, projects, or passions is constrained by our initial conditions, like our parents' values, socioeconomics, time, and place. Cranking the valve open on the experience firehose, I thought, might break me out of some of those constraints; might help me get a better idea of which projects I want to dedicate my life to.

The other piece of our decision to nomad around was to sample cities. I've only lived in two places for an extended period as an adult (Salt Lake and San Francisco), and Fiona hadn't lived in many more than that. If you're counting towns that we moved to of our own volition, rather than being located there by our parents, it was even fewer: A total of one for me. We had it in the back of our minds that we'd settle down in a place for the rest of–or a big chunk of–our lives. Chances were, we figured, *some* town in the US would speak to our souls. So, this nomadic endeavor was more like research, we figured.

I still think there's some truth in this, but, at the end of the day, we just wanted to have fun. And with remote work becoming so commonplace in the era of COVID, it was pretty easy to set in motion.

### **Figuring out a nomadic method**

Once we committed to the idea of life on the road, we had to decide on the way we wanted to do it. There are nearly endless permutations, but they all come down to pretty much four factors: Discomfort tolerance, money, trip length, and career goals.

- Discomfort tolerance: How many modern luxuries can you sustainably part with? E.g. a full kitchen, a proper bed, a proper bathroom, etc.
- Trip length: Is this a one-month thing? A multi-year thing?
- Money: How much do you want to spend on your nomadic equipment/accommodations? e.g. van, car,[ Earthroamer](https://earthroamer.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com), Airbnb.
- Career goals: Are you trying to keep up a professional career on the road? Are you going for a climbing or ski bum lifestyle?

Once you answer these questions, the method you select becomes more obvious. A high discomfort tolerance, a trip length of a few months, an unwillingness to spend lots of money, and a goal to climb, ski, or hike without working could all point to car camping as a good option.

For us, the decision was a pretty easy call. We essentially wanted our normal lives but in different cities. Maintaining our professional work was paramount and, based on our planned year of nomadism, we knew we wanted a situation (and the comforts) to make that easy. So, we rented Airbnbs for about a month at a time in different places and commuted between them in our car. We also found this way of traveling to be pretty nice because, once we moved into a new city, we didn't have to tote all of our valuables everywhere we went, as you would have to if you were in a Sprinter van. But the tradeoff is that picking up and moving to a different city is more cumbersome.

![](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/n2uMMvh9mUidRI7cnNoqNdEbVDX2mDwe0q-tttzat9wTU1lPdaahIIjl8wd-lqTkh35BJG4Yn8M1Dunsr4IMM3fjIN9QP3x-e7pnAJW-QtFOP7WnrNwp3qsTxyJkxVRVHUHtM8kedfKP6QnLArxe0B1n3cu7JI0EYdx_WEban4IsKY8t7BNmmrhJkHqDDA)

Our car, set up with rooftop tent, hitch basket, and all of the camping accouterments.

We did, however, decide to modify our car setup a bit because we wanted to do some offroading and a lot of camping along the way. The video below walks through our gear:

### **Learnings**

**Hire guides and imbibe some intensity**.

I found that simply being in a new place isn’t enough of an experience generator by itself if you’re aiming for a perspective shift. Getting out and doing stuff, preferably with locals, is key. Attempting challenging things with them is even better, like ice climbing, mountaineering, or fly fishing. Since it wasn’t the case that we had friends or family in many places that we went, I’d go with guides. In a few cases, I became friends with them outside of the activity. Bryson, my fly fishing guide, turned into my drift boat buddy and I’d help him load the boat on the trailer and drive between the start and end points of our fishing float in exchange for free guidance on the river.

Local people also tell you stories about the area you’re visiting and I found that once I understood the mythos of a place, I appreciated it more. The Grand Teton, for example, would for me just have been a very large piece of rock if I hadn’t come to learn about the harrowing tales and reverence the guides had for that peak. All the people killed by lightning up there, the beauty of the sunrises on the surrounding summits, and the victories of local climbers establishing new ascent lines. As we climbed, they painted a picture of its majesty and its terrors. These things blended with my own experience on the climb and I came away with a semi-religious fervor for mountaineering. Now, I’m targeting a Denali climb in 2024.

A deeper look at my Grand Teton experience:

**Constant movement creates enormous amounts of stress. Pacing makes everything more sustainable**.

Fiona and I are both pretty tired. This year's constant movement created an undercurrent of chaos and stress that, even now, makes us feel uneasy when we should be enjoying time with family and friends. We thought that this would be an anomalous year and 2023 would see us return to the Bay Area and our offices there. That pressure made us want to make the most of it and created in us a kind of “GO GO GO” attitude all the time. But moving so often, we worried constantly about getting work done, exercising enough, and having enough time for personal creative projects. On top of it all, we were concerned about the security of our stuff in those moments of transition. Often, our car, with all its valuables, would be parked on a busy sidewalk as we ferried our gear into places like our pad in New Orleans.

Doing it all over again, I would target at least two months in each location. In places like Austin, Texas, I felt like we were only just getting into a rhythm when our month was up. For us, working on the road, we had to learn that we shouldn’t plan it like a vacation with a tourist schedule, where you might spend a week here and a week there. The months where we had weekly transitions were the ones I was least excited about.

**Stay near the party, not in it**.

Staying in the French Quarter of New Orleans sounded great on paper, but the reality of being there for a month while trying to maintain jobs and normal routines turned out to be less than ideal. I wrote in a newsletter installment in October: “we thought \[it\] would be a dreamlike place to crash…Except, we didn't account for how tiresome the debauchery would get in this part of town. It's not uncommon to see some heavyset man clutching one of those neon-green jugs of hurricane cocktail puking his guts out on the street. Saturday morning smelled like urine as I went out for my run. Tourist trash heaps up in small piles in the gutters. Parking anywhere close to our apartment is a nightmare. But hey, the French architecture is cool.”

From now on, we’re going for more “quiet suburb” than anything else.

**Alone time is sacred**. **Bake it in.**

We had housemates for the whole back half of this year. Our friends and family are great! But the constancy of it for six months straight, after living alone for five years, was hard. Having other people around makes it more difficult to establish many of the mundane routines, like eating, exercise, and work, which are already challenging on the road, because you just have to factor in the schedule and preferences of the other people you’re staying with. Setting boundaries around who can stay with you and for how long gives you sanity. Next year, we’re planning on zero extended stays with housemates.

**Conclusion: Nomadism accelerates self-discovery**.

Stationary life makes creating community and routine a lot easier, and those things are important. But, if your goal is to push outside of your comfort zone, sink into novel places and explore new concepts of meaning, it's all but impossible to do with the standard American vacation schedule (two to three weeks per year somewhere other than home and work). Regularly living in new places gives you nights and weekends to absorb them and a chance to feel like a local.

And, the city sampling worked for us. After spending a lot of time in southern Utah and Driggs, we realized that we’ve been desperately missing mountain life. We ended up buying a house in Victor, Idaho, to give ourselves permanent access to the wilderness, for at least part of the year. The idea is to rent the place out when we’re not there and keep traveling–though with a few modifications to our pace. I now think the ideal kind of lifestyle for our goals (sanity, professional career growth, and a hint of danger) is six to eight months per year in our Idaho base camp with one or two other long stays for the remainder.

It’s probably obvious from the existence of this newsletter as well, but I learned to enjoy this flywheel of adventuring, making stories, and documenting them with words or a camera, which leads to more adventures and more words. So, stay tuned for more!
### November links: Skiing, deep-fried coffee, Ukrainian victories
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/november-tidbits/
Last updated: 2023-02-21T13:37:45.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/11/DALL-E-2022-11-27-09.30.52---a-mountain-made-out-of-meat--digital-art-1.png)

DALL-E: "A mountain made out of meat, digital art."

Hello from Salt Lake City, UT. It was another whirlwind month. Since the last "Tidbits" installment, Fiona and I drove 1700 miles over three days from New Orleans to my parents' house in Utah for the holidays, picked up [our puppy](https://www.instagram.com/eggthegoldenboy/?ref=nickrroberts.com), and put on a hell of a Thanksgiving spread. During that long drive, we also finished three of the [Murderbot Diaries](https://www.amazon.com/All-Systems-Red-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B01MYZ8X5C?ref=nickrroberts.com) series on audiobook, which I would highly recommend to anyone looking for crushable sci-fi (thanks to my pals CharlieG and NicB for that recommendation!).

For Thanksgiving, I convinced my family to let me smoke a brisket in place of a turkey. Up to that point, I had no experience with smoking meats. So, I picked up a [Traeger](https://youtu.be/iAk2cKbOFZ4?ref=nickrroberts.com) and went on something of a "meat-blitz" over one week to get some reps in before the main event. I made short videos out of each endeavor:

- [Pulled pork](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iFMvlDApe-I?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Test brisket](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZyD1K4EpfNs?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Smoked apple pie](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NcmArOy-Ix8?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [A whole chicken](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tO5QoYcpEec?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Chicken wings](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zz%5FeMqmsjrI?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Pork tenderloin](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EFT1vWeAnso?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [The final, delicious Thanksgiving brisket](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/267h5GtTC-E?ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/11/smokinmeats-zucc.gif)

## Good stuff from last month

"In a sport where being called 'crazy' is often a compliment, few of Cummings’s contemporaries knew how to regard someone who fit the term’s clinical meaning."

[The Final Descent of Dean CummingsFrom the outside, things seemed perfect for the former world extreme skiing champion: he had a family, a successful guiding business, and unending adventure out his front door in Valdez, Alaska. But something dark festered beneath the surface.![](https://www.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/favicon-194x194-1.png)Outside Onlinejversteegh![](https://www.outsideonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/19/dean-valdez-2018_h.jpg?width=1200)](https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/dean-cummings/?utm%5Fcampaign=OOL%20-%20NL%20-%20Dispatch&utm%5Fmedium=email&%5Fhsmi=234751358&%5Fhsenc=p2ANqtz---1AyD1kALfb8whZMGPR0JXpvRyOzSkYMwAz%5F2EiBgamFoCmk4T2AqW6X4cwjOnaFGdt9snNACv%5FQ4gTdy3S1qZqYXTQ&utm%5Fcontent=234232759&utm%5Fsource=hs%5Femail)

A bitchin' ski edit made at Alta, UT, (where I grew up skiing) that got me excited for winter

I found this webzine about the western US pretty darn charming

[Desert RatsA love letter to people who love the desert![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/39ae6778-654e-41e0-961a-c20910858a02/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)CowgirlCowgirl![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9278c456-05fc-4fcc-a8d7-0b1147bf5c94_4032x3024.jpeg)](https://cowgirl.substack.com/p/desert-rats)

A brief explanation of the [FTX thing](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/technology/ftx-binance-crypto-explained.html?ref=nickrroberts.com).

Categorizing the 10,000+ SOS calls from Garmin InReach, as an InReach owner I found this fascinating

[10,000 People Have Hit ‘SOS’ on a Garmin InReach—Here Are the DataHere’s who calls for rescue and why.![](https://www.adventure-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cropped-AJ_favicon2.gif)Adventure JournalJustin Housman![](https://www.adventure-journal.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/ananya-bilimale-Gp4A3N-YomI-unsplash.jpg)](https://www.adventure-journal.com/2022/10/10000-people-have-hit-sos-on-a-garmin-inreach-here-are-the-data/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

What happens when you deep fry coffee?

Medieval beats by Dre

Apples, ranked

[Home - Apple Rankings by The Appleist Brian Frange - Comedian Brian FrangeThe industry-standard, definitive, inarguable guide to ranking and reviewing munching apples. Curated by comedian Brian Frange.![](https://applerankings.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/apple-favicon-300x300.png)Apple Rankings by The Appleist Brian Frange](https://applerankings.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Someday soon you too will ride to space in a tricked-out balloon while sipping a cocktail

[Travel to SpaceSpace Perspective is taking space travel to a new level. Discover a new way to travel to space.![](https://spaceperspective.com/favicon/apple-touch-icon.jpg)Space Perspective![](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/2yyup5mx/production/d5a915cd9db3444998926f61645b6f83a53aced0-5000x2813.jpg?rect=390,0,4220,2813&w=1200&h=800&auto=format)](https://spaceperspective.com/?atrkid=V3ADWF95DD0F9%5F126951591747%5Fkwd-833297783694%5F%5F583501339618%5Fg%5Fm%5F%5F%5F&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI05S2%5FsvO-wIVtxvUAR15ZQJOEAAYASAAEgKEWPD%5FBwE&ref=nickrroberts.com)

Top Gun, but with a cat

### Ukraine/ Security stuff

How the Ukrainians retook Kherson

The power of open-source intelligence:

The Taliban's air force

[One Year On: The Taliban Air ForceBy Lukas Müller in collaboration with Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans This article summarises the development of the Islamic Emirate Air...![](https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/favicon.ico)OryxOryx![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV23g07K4PeHT1lwTX5fHR0K5l75h70FC1yKbFiQleVDkNiKBiRz7jp-wc2ijWY01obZby_t6u0-d-h2-3RPFDIL5kkXnwBrd80uSJ0eJR78uSkEwCo3u-NyHlAREuDHhIKjvKjLj9wC2WXNdXmF6MeuzX0Im7iece3rYuTUXehYsBd_UoBnzm4_eV/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/657.png)](https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/11/one-year-on-taliban-air-force.html?m=1&ref=nickrroberts.com)

Impact of US artillery [on the Ukraine conflict](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-artillery.html?ref=nickrroberts.com).

The end of Chimerica 

[The end of the system of the worldA critical point has been reached; decoupling is for real this time.![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a242bd04-28e0-4418-8968-e96e069a8358/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)NoahpinionNoah Smith![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ec8ce96-8814-4d0e-81f2-f9b334a89b67_1024x678.jpeg)](https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-system-of-the-world)

The "Pentomic" Division: How the US army attempted to design a force structure for a tactical nuclear conflict

[The Rise and Fall of the Pentomic Army - War on the RocksRonald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev failed to reach an agreement on the elimination of nuclear weapons while in power, but both men agreed in 1985 “that a![](https://warontherocks.com/favicon.ico)War on the RocksR.F.M. Williams![](https://warontherocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Nuclear_Artillery.png)](https://warontherocks.com/2022/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-pentomic-army/?%5F%5Fs=d5o09djx55ojj3ueh6po&ref=nickrroberts.com)

How many nuclear weapons does one really need?

[The Illogic of Nuclear Escalation—AsteriskHow much is enough? It’s the most basic question in the nuclear arms race. For over sixty years, few have asked it, and even fewer have received an answer.![](https://asteriskmag.com/media/pages/issues/1/ce37940f05-1665421751/asterisk_marks_1.png)![](https://asteriskmag.com/media/site/b9eb9efa6f-1668731997/socialshare.jpg)](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/1/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Requirements for the Tempest program--UK's sixth generation air dominance fighter

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/11/Screenshot-2022-11-27-at-8.30.08-AM.png)](https://static.rusi.org/OP%5F356%5FTempest%5FProgramme%5Ffinal%5Fweb1.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### October links: Ski alpinism, Ukraine, a missile silo Airbnb
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/october-tidbits/
Last updated: 2023-02-21T13:37:54.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/10/download--2--1.jpeg)

[Stable Diffusion](https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion?ref=nickrroberts.com): "Man happily eating a po-boy sandwich, digital art"

Hello from New Orleans, Louisiana! This is the final leg of our nomadic tour of the Americas for 2022\. In November, we're headed back to the mountains of Utah for the holidays where we'll start raising our new puppy ❤️. I'm planning to release a retro on this year's nomadic experience, but suffice it to say that, while a lot of fun, we're a little burnt out on the pace and our extended separation from the mountains. 

New Orleans is a bizarre, storied old city that really seems like it shouldn't exist, being that it's [below sea level](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/how-humans-sank-new-orleans/552323/?ref=nickrroberts.com) and requires enormous resources to prevent it from simply washing away. We chose an Airbnb in the French Quarter, which we thought would be a dreamlike place to crash for a month. Except, we didn't account for how tiresome the debauchery would get in this part of town. It's not uncommon to see some heavyset man clutching one of those neon-green jugs of hurricane cocktail puking his guts out on the street. Saturday morning smelled like urine as I went out for my run. Tourist trash heaps up in small piles in the gutters. Parking anywhere close to our apartment is a nightmare. But hey, the French architecture is cool. 

## Good stuff from last month

- I wrote my first piece of fiction in a very long while. It's behind a paywall, but just email me if you'd like comped access!

[новая ЗемляA short story.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/size/w256h256/2021/11/android-chrome-192x192.png)Nick RobertsNick Roberts![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/10/download.jpeg)](https://nickrroberts.com/novayazemlya/)

- The Fifty (*via my buddy Rob*). What a refreshing series! For most of my life, ski movies have just been about "sendin' it!" without any discussion of the perils of big lines on untrustworthy snow. *The Fifty* is *real*. Cody Townsend, the force behind the project, works his way through the lines in the "[Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North America](https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Ski-Descents-North-America/dp/0982615434?ref=nickrroberts.com)" (a book with a massive cult following among ski alpinists). But each episode documents not only the epic shredding, but all of the risk analysis. Might not be everyone's cup of tea for that reason, since there's quite a bit of standing around and talking, but I love it. Townsend probably knows that this project will inspire droves of people to attempt the same classics, which are absolutely fraught with objective hazards. So, a big chunk of the show is about mitigating danger. He demonstrates how he reads weather reports, analyzes snow conditions, and even how to [layer up correctly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evZ6V%5FgP6AM&ref=nickrroberts.com). It's not uncommon for him to call off a climb because conditions are too dangerous.
- "Another Bay Area House Party" by Scott Alexander:

[Another Bay Area House Party...![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb1f71b3-98b5-4853-b693-264926a24f36_1024x1024.png)](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party?r=binh0&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=email)

- The YouTube algorithm strikes gold again. This time, it sent me down a big rabbit hole about competitive eating. This channel is a great follow:
- All of the dark patterns on the web rolled into one brilliant [performance piece](https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com). (*Via Fiona*)
- This guy shows that there are no new opinions under the sun:

> A Brief History of Kids Today Are Too Soft  
>  
> 🧵
> 
> — Paul Fairie (@paulisci) [August 13, 2022](https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1558579983022338048?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

- [What the United States/NATO would likely do](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/russia-ukraine-nuclear-weapon-us-response/661315/?ref=nickrroberts.com) if Russia actually detonated a nuclear weapon.
- [The Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults](https://archive.org/details/LawEnforcementGuideToSatanicCults1994VHSOccultHilarity) from 1994\. I just love it. The sweater, the dad-vibes, that his preferred title is "Cop / Pastor."
- Matt Yglesias on [t](https://www.slowboring.com/p/russias-military-and-economic-strategy?ref=nickrroberts.com)[he effects](https://www.slowboring.com/p/russias-military-and-economic-strategy?ref=nickrroberts.com) of the sanctions regime on Russia.
- [Who blew up the Nord Stream pipes](https://www.spiegel.de/international/sabotage-in-the-baltic-nord-stream-attacks-expose-vulnerability-of-european-infrastructure-a-03337f93-a32a-40a1-9266-fc2692289e33?ref=nickrroberts.com)?
- A Russian pilot ejects from an Su-25 😲:
- On failing to keep a diary:

[I Do Not Keep a Diary | Will ReesBut I plan to become a committed diarist any day now. Every preparation is in place and it only remains for me to begin.![](https://mldihohglpug.i.optimole.com/qMgxKVE.mXpJ~46095/w:auto/h:auto/q:90/https://astra-mag.com/wp-content/themes/astramagazine/img/apple-touch-icon.png)Astra Magazine![](https://mldihohglpug.i.optimole.com/qMgxKVE.mXpJ~46095/w:auto/h:auto/q:90/https://astra-mag.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Rees-Diary-Credit-Sargent-F.png)](https://astra-mag.com/articles/i-do-not-keep-a-diary/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

- Apple moving [some supply chains](https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-suppliers-add-manufacturing-sites-in-u-s-with-focus-on-california-11664884045?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email) back to the US and away from China.
- Odysseus goes to apply for a job:

> INTERVIEWER: can you explain this gap in your resume  
>  
> ODYSSEUS: ok it’s actually a really long story
> 
> — Ben Rosen (@ben\_rosen) [October 4, 2022](https://twitter.com/ben%5Frosen/status/1577109603170471936?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

- A beautiful mini-documentary on running in San Francisco:
- A kind of grim but cool "days since incident" [tracker](https://neal.fun/days-since-incident/?ref=nickrroberts.com) (*via my buddy Rob*).
- The best place to stay in Roswell, New Mexico, that isn't a Motel 6:

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/10/Screenshot-2022-10-25-at-9.25.24-AM.png)](https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/46711243?check%5Fout=2022-11-25&adults=1&check%5Fin=2022-11-18&s=42&unique%5Fshare%5Fid=03B8E470-2BE1-490E-98C5-900E9C40EE18&%5Fbranch%5Fmatch%5Fid=1113460411321793945&%5Fbranch%5Freferrer=H4sIAAAAAAAAA8soKSkottLXT0zKS9LLTdU3DA0oTolw9DYtSQIA4CTOFhsAAAA%3D&source%5Fimpression%5Fid=p3%5F1666707877%5FCBMr354Gn%2FALQ72r&ref=nickrroberts.com)
### новая Земля
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/novayazemlya/
Last updated: 2024-11-11T16:08:28.000Z
"Novaya Zemlya"

Alice could visualize the nanospindles in the right arm of her combat suit popping under the immense pressure of the battleboot now planted there. A quick glance at the impact site revealed spidery hairline fractures webbing out, up to her elbow. It would take days for the bots to complete repair work on those. She remembered the schematics from the ACSIII operating handbook her cadre had to memorize back in flight school. Why, at this particular moment, was she projecting in her mind's eye those fine-lined diagrams of her suit? In the same microsecond she chided herself to get back to saving her own life. With her free left hand, she countered with a mech-boosted blow to the thigh connected to the offending boot. That force, she knew, would be like getting struck by an engine piston. 

The boot, emblazoned with a red star, lifted. Glancing up, she saw the figure, man or woman she wasn't sure, the tinted orange face shield prevented any kind of identification. Her opponent's combat suit was extremely angular and, apart from its facial area and a few red stars in various locations, it looked entirely obsidian in color, glinting vaguely in the light. She'd never seen anything like it.

_This post is for subscribers on the Supporter tier only._
### September links: Psychedelia, Zuck, LARPing trauma
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/september-tidbits/
Last updated: 2025-05-06T17:22:31.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/09/download--1-.png)

The [Stable Diffusion](https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion?ref=nickrroberts.com) model's output from my prompt "man typing on keyboard anxiously psychedelic cartoon style." I'm starting to really enjoy this new DALL-Era of algorithmic surrealism.

Hello from Austin, Texas! We made it here after driving almost 1300 miles from Salt Lake City. We broke up the journey by crashing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a week, where we rented an Airbnb on a six-acre commune outside of town. We also hit up [Meow Wolf](https://meowwolf.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) which was one of the most impressive art installations I've seen in my life. It's like a psychedelic and immersive version of the Sistine Chapel. Just...see what I mean:

### Good stuff from the last month

- LARPing gay conversion [therapy](https://www.wired.com/story/my-4-days-in-fake-gay-conversion-therapy-nordic-larp/amp?ref=nickrroberts.com).
- An ideology for every US state ([tweet](https://twitter.com/WoodlouseM/status/1546419294598500353?ref=nickrroberts.com))

> A California Ideology equivalent for every state! [pic.twitter.com/fRWCGh9Ob6](https://t.co/fRWCGh9Ob6?ref=nickrroberts.com)
> 
> — M3MBRAN3 (@WoodlouseM) [July 11, 2022](https://twitter.com/WoodlouseM/status/1546419294598500353?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

- *[Everything Everywhere All At Once](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxN1T1uxQ2g&ref=nickrroberts.com)* was fantastic. There seem to be many movies about multiverses, lately. EEAAO was goofy, wild and also set deep emotional hooks. While it dealt with a lot of zany complexity, it kept focus on the fraught relationship between a mother and daughter and the tense, inner-workings of a marriage. It was especially good in the wake of plane-watching *[Dr. Strange: The Multiverse of Madness](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWzlQ2N6qqg&ref=nickrroberts.com)* which was a rambling trash-heap and didn't really even really feature "the multiverse" apart from a single scene in which the characters crash through a few realities!
- Some Shetland ponies wearing sweaters ([tweet](https://twitter.com/SketchesbyBoze/status/1560291655500062724?s=20&t=YtM5ZEGnhvcvt1TSTuGjMA&ref=nickrroberts.com))

> hoping to encourage tourism, Scotland placed a couple of Shetland ponies in sweaters and it might be the best promotional campaign ever [pic.twitter.com/1qbHESXXQ4](https://t.co/1qbHESXXQ4?ref=nickrroberts.com)
> 
> — Owl! at the Library 😴🧙‍♀️ (@SketchesbyBoze) [August 18, 2022](https://twitter.com/SketchesbyBoze/status/1560291655500062724?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

- How Putin's war [changed Moscow](https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-putin-s-war-changed-my-moscow-a-3b5049e7-93fd-4c2a-9c9f-742635ae2099?ref=nickrroberts.com) for one Russian correspondent.
- Here's a delightful, weird short about a space dog:
- Mark Zuckerberg on [Joe Rogan](https://open.spotify.com/episode/51gxrAActH18RGhKNza598?si=00605ce0d5114649&ref=nickrroberts.com)'s show. I'm now less dead-certain that Zuckerberg is a lizard-person masquerading as a human. Notable to me was that Zuck said "fuck" on at least one occasion during the interview. Somehow, I didn't think that was in his androidy parlance. He's also, apparently, into practicing mixed martial arts and hydrofoil surfing. In this, he spoke about the need to do physical activities that require absolute focus to take his mind off of work to feel replenished, psychologically. I actually really relate to that. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that a lot of his responses to Rogan's pointier questions about content policing and the toxic nature of social media were coached by his PR team.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/09/giphy.gif)

"What would a human do in this moment?"

- [Background](https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/youtube-custom-chips-argos-asics?ref=nickrroberts.com) on the Google-built chips for video transcoding and the chip war going on more generally between big tech companies.

> *"What’s really at stake here is controlling the product road map of the semiconductor companies."*

- Big Robert Eggers fan here. He did *The Witch*, *The Lighthouse*, and recently, *The Northman*. *The Northman* is now on my list of [top five](https://nickrroberts.com/movies-media/) movies of all time. It's visually-stunning at every turn. This scene with Björk is a good example of the vibe:
- A very cool webzine about business stuff (via my pal Andrew):

[The Constitutional Documents IssueWhat good citizen looks like at your company. Brought to you by The Kool-Aid Factory.![](https://secureservercdn.net/72.167.241.46/b7r.f51.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/favicon.ico?time=1660066707)The Kool Aid Factory![](https://secureservercdn.net/72.167.241.46/b7r.f51.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Twitter-post-2-4.png?time=1659437301)](https://koolaidfactory.com/zines/the-constitutional-documents-issue/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

- Puts things into perspective, yeah. ([Tweet](https://twitter.com/jplarocque/status/1563979289921478659?ref=nickrroberts.com) via Casey Newton)

> If you’re ever having a bad month, just remember that from Ellen Ripley’s perspective, Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3 took place over about six weeks.
> 
> — JP Larocque🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ (@jplarocque) [August 28, 2022](https://twitter.com/jplarocque/status/1563979289921478659?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

- Manufacturing [moving away](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/business/tech-companies-china.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) from China.
- A nice [throwback](https://archive.org/details/Microsoft%5FWindows%5F95%5FVideo%5FGuide%5F1995%5FUncut%5FVHS%5Fx264%5FAw.mkv) to Windows 95 featuring Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston (via Annie Rauwerda)
- Internet explorer 1.0 ad (also via Annie Rauwerda):
- Just a beautiful site that had me teary-eyed within two minutes:

[Dear Photographsubmit your own photo here![](https://64.media.tumblr.com/avatar_d523b8c0c144_128.pnj)Tumblr![](https://64.media.tumblr.com/avatar_d523b8c0c144_128.pnj)](https://dearphotograph.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

- A Scottish [home](https://www.reddit.com/r/Houseporn/comments/xez0el/traquair%5Fhouse%5Fin%5Fscotland%5Fhas%5Fbeen%5Fcontinuously/?ref=nickrroberts.com) that's been continuously occupied for over 500 years.
- One of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen (via my pal Greg):
- When body positivity [fails to apply](https://www.gq.com/story/leg-lengthening?ref=nickrroberts.com) to male height.
### Climbing Mt. Superior, Utah
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-mt-superior-utah/
Last updated: 2022-09-10T12:41:53.000Z
If you find yourself skiing the Alta or Snowbird resorts in Utah and you glance across the canyon, Mount Superior roars up in front of you. It’s a big, steep, and unforgiving member of the Wasatch range, topping out at 11,045ft.

I’ve always been impressed by the bold lines that backcountry skiers take down its south face. Number five on this picture is cheerfully named “Suicide Chute.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/09/Mt.-Superior--UT-Project.jpg)

But it hit me a few weeks ago that, in all my years of skiing Little Cottonwood Canyon, I’d never really set foot on the north side. It feels wrong to leave big summits in your backyard unbagged, so we set out to tackle Superior.

There are a couple popular routes to the top: The south ridge (which I’ve read involves low fifth class climbing, so ropes, harnesses, and cams are a good idea), or by Cardiff Pass (which is what we selected and which gets into scrambly fourth class terrain). Cardiff is definitely the easier route and what I’d recommend if, like us, you find yourself at the trailhead with no snacks and a few bottles of water.

I can’t recommend trekking poles enough. You’re looking at about 2500’ of gain, so the downs are massive, steep and hell on your knees otherwise.

We parked right in between Our Lady of the Snows Catholic Church and The Shallow Shaft restaurant. There are something like five spaces there, but if those are full, there’s tons of parking behind the white line most places along the road. To actually start the trail, you follow Michigan City road past the police station until it turns into gravel and, after Upper Guard Road, you keep hanging left at any turns you come across. After this, you switchback up to Cardiff Pass and then traverse west across the ridge, past the Hellgate cliffs, to get to Superior.

The ascent of Superior even from this non-technical angle gets a little scary at times and requires a bit of focus. One fall up here would probably be a bad time, if not be fatal. I kept thinking that I wanted my climbing helmet, since there’s a bunch of loose, sharp rock. Not the worst idea to throw that in your bag.

Upon reaching the summit, you’re rewarded with gorgeous, 360-degree views of Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, as well as the Salt Lake Valley. If you have the time, the Monte Cristo peak sits slightly to the West and adds something like 30 minutes roundtrip. However, I was extremely hungry at this point and all we could think about were garlic burgers and beers at Cotton Bottom. We’ll tackle Monte Cristo another day.

I noticed these more on the descent (since I get so summit-focused on the climb), but in the heart of the Wasatch summer, you hike through fields of purple Silvery Lupines and brilliant, yellow wildflowers.

There are many worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

See here for a good walkthrough of the approach:

[Climbing S. Ridge of Mount Superior - Little Cottonwood Canyon - Road Trip RyanThe south ridge of Mount Superior makes an excellent easy 5th class ridge scramble in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Here is the map, route description and gps waypoints needed for the route.![](https://www.roadtripryan.com/favicon.ico)Road Trip Ryan![](https://www.roadtripryan.com/go/static/images/roadtripryan-logo.svg)](https://www.roadtripryan.com/go/t/utah/wasatch/s.-ridge-of-mount-superior?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### July/August links: Psilocybin, Survival, Starfield
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/july-august-tidbits/
Last updated: 2023-02-21T13:38:19.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/08/IMG_7537.JPG)

Pangas Beach Club near Playa Grande, Costa Rica

Buenos días from Tamarindo, Costa Rica! Our nomading continues abroad this month and then it's to Austin, Texas (not the [other Austin](https://www.spam.com/museum?ref=nickrroberts.com)), for most of September/October. 

Well, right after developing [a plan](https://nickrroberts.com/june-tidbits/) in June to publish a monthly roundup of good internet finds, I missed July. My excuse: We decided to buy a house in Idaho next to the Teton range and that's been fairly time intensive. So, here's a twofer.

### Good stuff from the last month (and a half)

- I made some short vids about the [Tetons](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9Qhz6XxrBZg?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Ziplining](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bgEMMpDra%5FE?ref=nickrroberts.com) in Costa Rica, and summiting [Mt. Superior](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zpgz3LIN-jQ?ref=nickrroberts.com).
- Mormons [on mushrooms](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/psychedelics-mormon-church-divine-assembly-1375027/?ref=nickrroberts.com).
- The Royal United Services Institute [July report](https://static.rusi.org/special-report-202207-ukraine-final-web%5F0.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com) on how Ukraine might go on the offensive.
- From [ACX](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/): A very deep thread on this photo of a very heavy supposed Russian general that went viral but turned out to be bogus:

> Remember this "exclusive" story in the Daily Star about "general Pavel", who was supposedly "dragged out of retirement" by Putin and sent to Ukraine?  
>  
> So yeah, turns out that's total bullshit.[@Lotte\_Lambrecht](https://twitter.com/Lotte%5FLambrecht?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com) and I found out who's \_actually\_ in this photo. Follow along!  
>  
> 1/ [pic.twitter.com/JimbNj1B0A](https://t.co/JimbNj1B0A?ref=nickrroberts.com)
> 
> — Rien Emmery (@ArbiterOfTweets) [July 9, 2022](https://twitter.com/ArbiterOfTweets/status/1545651614253555712?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

- Earlier in August I binged the show *Alone*, of which season 8 is on Netflix. It's addictive because you bond with these random survivalists talking into GoPros like confessionals. As time goes on, you can feel their hunger and suffering build. It gave me so much anxiety on their behalves that I started cheering out loud when contestants found food.
- Short [video](https://www.outsideonline.com/video/henrys-fork-fly-fishing/?ref=nickrroberts.com) from *Outside* about Bryan Gregson, who photographs the beauty of fly fishing on Henry's Fork, near my new house in Idaho.
- A strange [website](http://www.horg.com/horg/?page%5Fid=2&ref=nickrroberts.com) dedicated to taxonimizing the artificial world, down to the little plastic things that hold your bread loaf wrappers closed.
- Generally, I like to stay out of this stuff, but I thought this piece perfectly articulated a set of problems (and some solutions) that I've noticed for years now, but couldn't express very well:

[Opinion | The Seven Deadly Sins of Politi-SpeakIf we want to bridge political divides, we can start by being mindful of the words we use.![](https://i2.wp.com/www.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/yes-favicon_128px.png?fit=128%2C128&quality=90&ssl=1)YES! MagazineErica Etelson![](https://i2.wp.com/www.yesmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/seven-deadly-sins-of-politispeak.jpg?fit=1400%2C840&quality=90&ssl=1)](https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2021/06/28/bridging-political-divides-progressive-jargon?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email)

- Fiona and I absolutely love [Joe Cappa](https://joecappa.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com):
- I wish I was at this wedding:

> awareness level: 0  
> drunkenness level: 98  
> fireproof superpowers: 100 [pic.twitter.com/41ivJDYUBZ](https://t.co/41ivJDYUBZ?ref=nickrroberts.com)
> 
> — Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) [July 3, 2022](https://twitter.com/SharpFootball/status/1543666631032930304?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

- I've been following the development of a Bethesda game called *Starfield*. I lock onto very specific types of open-world (open universe?), exploratory titles like this. I'll never forget the acute sense of wonder/terror playing through *Elder Scrolls: Skyrim* on Xbox in 2011\. I've never been as immersed as that in any other game. The level of depth and reward in playing *Skyrim* is still staggering (and it's 11 years old). I'm a tad late to this video (which dropped early June), but it looks exactly like "*Skyrim* meets space" which makes me very hopeful:
- I've been afflicted these past two days with a stomach bug I picked up here in Costa Rica. I go through bouts of fatigue where all I can do is lay down in bed and look at my phone. So, speaking of Bethesda and *Skyrim*, I started playing *[Elder Scrolls: Blades](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POsTRbmGdl8&ref=nickrroberts.com)* on my phone to take my mind off of the intestinal discomfort. I'm not really a mobile gamer, but it's alright! I can't believe how good it looks on my iPhone. But, after a couple hours, the game falls into a kind of predictable rhythm because the quests start to feel similar and a little grindy. It's also, markedly, *not* open world. Instead, you flip between movement-restricted dungeon levels or your hometown. I called mine Taintstead, in honor of my character, Fecalius Poopius. Last complaint is that there's no ranged combat or sneaking about. But for all this, it's very graphically impressive and does the job of passing sick time well.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/08/Screenshot-2022-08-18-at-3.55.41-PM.PNG)

- After climbing the Grand Teton, I'm developing grander visions for my amateur mountaineering career. I've been reading Ed Viesturs' *[No Shortcuts to the Top](https://www.amazon.com/No-Shortcuts-Top-Climbing-Highest/dp/0767924711?ref=nickrroberts.com)* along those lines. Viesturs was the first American to climb all 14 8,000 meter peaks and he did so without bottled oxygen on any of 'em! He's also happened to be present for events like the [1996 Everest disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996%5FMount%5FEverest%5Fdisaster?ref=nickrroberts.com), to which he dedicates a large section. *No Shortcuts* is often a gut-wrenching read, and puts high-risk, high-altitude alpinism into perspective. It's easy to think of the summit glories, but all those big mountains are littered with bodies.
- I like following blogrolls down rabbitholes since it's a good way to expand your known-smart-person constellation on the internet. After a good rabbitholing session the other day, I ended up on the sites of [Gwern Branwen](https://www.gwern.net/index?ref=nickrroberts.com) (interesting perspectives on psychology, machine learning, etc.) and [Alexey Guzey](https://guzey.com/links/?ref=nickrroberts.com) (interesting perspectives on sleep and other topics).
### Climbing the Grand Teton
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/climbing-the-grand-teton/
Last updated: 2022-09-18T20:19:50.000Z
**Podcast version on Spotify [here](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2XALOGJorDvw0KlLEL1tm2?si=aab3664c9e6f4913&ref=nickrroberts.com).**

In January of this year I read Jon Krakauer’s *Into Thin Air* which documents the tragedy on Mount Everest in May, 1996\. Krakauer happened to be part of a doomed expedition and recorded the disaster, wherein eight climbers died on the mountain over the span of 24 hours, in excruciating detail. I realize now that seeking out mountaineering challenges in the wake of that reading is probably a strange reaction, but most of the book is not about the tragedy itself, but the context and lead-up to it. A good chunk of *Into Thin Air* investigates why people become obsessed with mountain climbing. For many, including Krakauer, it’s about achievement in a very pure and physical sense. You either get the summit... or you don’t. That stark line between success and failure and the terrible beauty of big, deadly mountains have an allure that I cannot deny.

I’m not going to pretend that this expedition was anything akin to the rigor or peril of something like Everest, but it was my first, proper mountaineering expedition, and fraught with many of the same dangers one finds in any significant alpine endeavor. Nearly half of our party of twelve clients did not summit for one reason or another, though everyone returned to the trailhead safely.

The Grand Teton’s summit rises to 13,775 feet above sea level. It is immediately recognizable from fifty or more miles away. The towering mountain looks down on both Idaho and Wyoming, and it stands next to its siblings on the central massif: The Middle Teton, Mount Owen, Teewinot, and the South Teton. Together, they form a mighty sight, emerging sharply from the rolling plains.

I set out on this adventure with my Dad and my flight-instructor-turned-great-friend, Jason. In the days leading up to the climb, we camped out in Flat Creek, and put together some delicious meals.

The first guided day was prep. Our guide, “Weez” (short for Weasel, a nickname earned in his younger years), literally showed us the ropes. I’ve climbed plenty, but it had been a while, and I struggled on a slippery 5.7\. We recapped belay procedure and the shouted, staccato commands like “up rope,” “slack,” “off belay,” etc. You’re often separated from your climbing partner by a fair distance, so you have to be concise in what you yell. We also covered how to use “trad” (or “traditional”) protective equipment like cams and nuts, which you place into cracks and crevices in the mountain to act as anchor points if you fall.

We woke at 5:30am the next day and made maple bacon and eggs in the chilly morning air. We were next to an elk refuge, and we could hear them honking at each other during the night, which lent the whole place a really wild air.

The drive to Lupine Meadows got the butterflies in my stomach going. The whole approach to the trailhead you can see your objective, way up there, buffeted by severe winds, and caked with snow. It looks really unforgiving and mean.

We met up with Weez at 8am in the Lupine Meadows parking area. He was already there in his beige truck, suiting up. He handed us our food bags, containing dinner and snacks for two days at high camp. We did a final gear check and set off.

I lined up behind Weez on the ascent and I started pelting him with questions about climbing in the Tetons. Along the way, we got on the topic of lightning. The Tetons are famous for unpredictable and extremely hazardous thunderstorms. In 2010, 16 were injured and one person died in a fast-forming storm that reared up on the peak of the Grand. 

Weez had several tales of his experience with lightning from his twenty-plus years climbing in the area. During an ascent of one of the peaks in the central massif, Weez said the sky became overcast and he began to hear a persistent buzzing sound. He could tell there was a lot of static in the air but didn’t know where lightning might strike. The buzzing changed pitch and started to crescendo. Using the sound as a guide, he timed a jump into the air (so as not to be a conductor to the ground), and, just as he did this, a bolt struck in his vicinity and he was hit in the chest by a large air blast and knocked off his feet. Comforting.

On a large switchback section a few miles into the trail, we saw an adolescent brown bear rooting around in the bushes. It had absolutely no interest in us or our fellow hikers, but freaked out tourists kept clapping their hands and blowing whistles. The bear just continued to munch on vegetation.

We arrived at high camp after about six miles and 4,300 feet of elevation gain. With the exception of the guides, all of us were fairly hammered on arrival. The loungey chairs were a particularly welcome comfort. The Jackson Hole Mountain Guides high camp is spartan. A smattering of Mountain Hardware expedition tents amongst a boulder field above the glacial moraine below. The main feature is the tan-colored weatherport. Inside, a surprising array of cooking stoves, pots, steamers, and bins. One of the guides told me that they got most of it up here by schlepping. I had a hard time imagining the pain of lugging a full propane tank to camp. I realized then just how difficult guiding this mountain actually is. You do all the labor and unseen tasks so that clients can enjoy charcuterie at 11,000 feet.

After a dinner of bison meatballs and pasta, we chatted with the other guests. It was a delightful and surprising discovery that all were salt of the earth. They hailed from all over the place too: Les from Cincinatti who already had a very impressive summit record under his belt, Bailey and Polly from Michigan and Nebraska, another couple from San Diego, and so forth. The sense of camaraderie was immediate.

The guides briefed us that we’d be split into teams of one to two and our starts would be staggered the next morning. For Dad, Jason, and I, our assigned wake-up time was 3:00am and departure slated for 4:30am. We were last out. Others had starts much earlier. Everyone at camp went to bed around 8:30pm.

Since three dudes would have been a tight squeeze in the tent, I slept in what the guides call the “A-Frame” which is a cave formed by two boulders that smashed together probably hundreds of years ago. Over time, people had plugged up any holes with smaller rocks and pebbles. It was actually a very comfortable bivy and I didn’t suffer from the same overheating problems that folks in the tents did.

I was up at 2:00am with the voices and sounds of guides preparing breakfast and coffee in the weatherport, or “hut” as they call it. Weez told us not to congregate by the weatherport before our assigned time, so I stared up at the stars in the gaps in the roof of the A-Frame and took some footage of the cozy hut, illuminated orange against the night from within.

At 3:00am we broke our fast in the hut with bagels, bacon, and microwave burritos and washed it all down with mug after mug of black coffee. Weez informed us that he’d be taking Dad and Jason as a pair and that I would be buddied up with Nik, another of the guides. Three, he said, would just be too logistically complicated and slow to manage up on the peak. I understood this much better later.

Nik, my guide, is probably a year or two older than me but he has the stamina and physique of an Olympian. The day before, he soloed a 5.9 pitch below high camp, summited the Middle Teton, and then climbed Disappointment Peak for fun. Now, he was up at 3:00am with us and ready to guide me up the Grand.

At 4:30am, Nik and I set out, descending into the moraine and to the headwall below the Lower Saddle, which sits between the Middle and Grand Tetons. I discovered that Nik had a pretty serious, no-bullshit demeanor, probably due to the added amount of hazard. The day before, the National Park Service distributed an urgent message to all would-be climbers advising against the ascent to the Saddle, because a massive rockfall had wiped out the usual fixed line that people use to protect their climb up the headwall. The previous night, our guides found an alternate route straight up the middle of the wall. It was precarious since there was so much loose rock.

Nik and I hiked quickly to the headwall and stopped. We could see the headlamps of several teams ahead of us in the dark. It was strangely beautiful. We waited on the boulder field below for a long time, however. A big traffic jam had formed. “Rock! Rooock!” someone yelled frantically. A soccer-ball sized boulder flew off one of the ledges along the alternate route and thunked into the snow below. It gathered speed and rocketed like a missile some fifty yards to my left and slammed into the glacial ice far below. I heard a bit more commotion above; terse voices.

Nik, frustrated, called up to the other guides on the wall to get moving. In alpinism, big delays are usually bad news. You don’t want to give inclement weather a chance to develop. Finally, the route cleared and we began our ascent. After my guide led the rope up and began belaying me from above, I jammed his cam by accident as I tried to dislodge it. Having just met Nik, I found this extremely embarrassing and I was sure he thought I was a total klutz.

We got to the top of the saddle and one of the other guides approached Nik about the couple she was guiding. They were the ones who had kicked off several large rocks and didn’t warn climbers below. Apparently, they weren’t following instructions well, and they were climbing sloppily. She wanted to “spin” them (which means turn them around back to camp) and a heated argument ensued. The other guides backed her up. This pair could not be trusted higher on the peak, where the rock hazards and need to follow guide direction become even more severe. After a long and emotional discussion, the whole team turned back, all the way to the trailhead, and I never saw them again.

Nik and I continued up the saddle onto the flanks of the Grand. Our pace slowed with the steep terrain.

We arrived finally at the first pitch of the Pownall-Gilkey route. It was first climbed in 1948 by Richard Pownall and Art Gilkey (who later died on an American expedition to K2). The first pitch is a traverse up slabby rock. You’re roped in because it’s extremely exposed, with hundreds and hundreds of feet of open air off the ledge. The second pitch is graded 5.8, but there are straps you can grab onto that make the whole thing easier. I did this with relish. The third is a 5.6, straightforward ascent, followed by a few more fourth class scrambles to the summit ridge.

In five hours and eighteen minutes, we summited the Grand Teton alongside another team, Pete and Bailey. Pure, momentary euphoria. We all high-fived and sat on the summit for about ten or fifteen minutes. The sweeping views in 360-degrees were stunning. You could get a good sense of where the glaciers sat above Jackson and the surrounding plains, flattening the valley into a pancake.

The wind was cold, though, even through all of my layers. Our pace was such that, unfortunately, I was about an hour and half in front of Dad and Jason’s team. We had to move.

Our descent took us down the west face of the Grand, and Nik set me up on a 120-foot rappel, which is partially free-hanging. I haven’t actually rappelled that much in my climbing career and so this was probably the singularly most scary moment of the trip. Unfortunately, my GoPro battery died before you can really see the exposure.

The rest of our downclimb was largely uneventful, but hard. My knees were screaming in pain by the time we reached the saddle again and my triceps and shoulders hurt from all of the pressing on the rocks on the steeper sections.

At the saddle, we encountered a British man wearing a fluorescent yellow shirt. He was asking the best way to get down. Nik asked if he had a harness. Exum, another guide company, had by this point installed a new fixed line down the middle of the headwall, an easy rappel. The man said he didn’t have a harness. Nik asked if he had an ice axe. Again, the man said no. Nik, exasperated, asked if the man knew how dangerous it was to be here in these conditions without any equipment; if he had seen the National Park Service report on the rockfall. The man said no. Nik shook his head, “just don’t move until we’re out of the way, okay? We don’t want rocks coming down. You’ll have to glissade down the area where the rock slide happened. Highly dangerous, but it’s your only option.”

The man looked chastised and nervous. Nik and I rappelled down the headwall and marched quickly across the snow to the boulder field to get out of the way of any potential rock missiles. The British man slid on his butt down the dangerous section and arrived at the boulders safely.

We continued back down the Moraine and up into high camp by a path the guides call “the back door.” I plonked down into one of the lounge chairs, utterly spent. Nik, the olympian that he is, bid me farewell and continued back down to the trailhead. I demolished a cup of coffee and a huge plate of crackers, guacamole, and hummus. I practically dozed off in my chair while chatting with Les, who was first team and finished ahead of me, and a few of the guides.

Two hours went by before I finally saw my Dad and Jason rappelling and then glissading down the snow field below the headwall. They looked exhausted, so I went down the path and met them on the moraine to carry anything they wanted up the final stretch. We fist bumped and proceeded up the hill, not talking much. We all collapsed into chairs back at camp.

I was feeling terrible that we didn’t all get a picture together on the summit, but Dad and Jason brushed it off. I read somewhere, probably in a Krakauer book, that mountains and summits are incredibly personal. I have no way to explain what happened other than I went into a kind of trance on the Upper Saddle. I forgot about my summit mission entirely, in fact, and the idea that I was climbing with other people at all. I had a sense of being intensely present, trying not to fall, trying not to fuck up the protection gear retrievals, trying not to rain rocks on my fellow climbers, gripping the rappel line so hard that my arms hurt and my skin was stretched painfully taut over my knuckle bones.

The mood at camp was mixed that evening. Lots of revelry and fist bumping going around, but also some reservation among those who did not summit. I felt a kind of bone-tired I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced. It’s the sort of fatigue that can only be cured by several nights of good sleep.

I crawled back into the A-Frame after eating the leftovers of two other team’s appetizers along with my dinner, pot roast and mashed potatoes.

The next morning, after a fitful night of sleep in my cave, I awoke to the sunrise on the Nez Perce peak, its top-section illuminated orange.

We congregated around the hut for a final time, gulping enormous amounts of black coffee, eating weird combinations of blueberry bagels smeared with cream cheese and stuffed with bacon. We bid farewell to our fellow climbers. I truly do hope to see many of them again. We began our descent.

Toward the Lupine Meadows trailhead we noticed the crowd morph and change from climbers with big packs, ropes, helmets, and ice axes, to heavier-set day hikers seeking more modest destinations. We reached the cars and high-fived.

After packing up in the car and bidding farewell to Weez, Dad, Jason, and I settled into burgers and beers at Dornan’s, right outside the park. We stared up the peak of the Grand, still jagged, still foreboding. I resolved at that moment that I must continue. This experience was transformative. I feel stronger for it. Rainier, Denali, here I come.
### June links: Naval fascinations, Xi Jinping, a couple great Australians
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/june-tidbits/
Last updated: 2023-02-21T13:38:30.000Z
Hello from Driggs, Idaho! We're here for the next month to be wilderness bums.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/06/IMG_7020.JPG)

The road toward Driggs with the Tetons in the background.

One of my favorite things about this new Substack/indie publishing era is the window I get into the media diet of various writers I follow. It's a callback to an earlier time before algorithmic newsfeeds when web "surfers" would post link lists and expose their blog rolls so you can read the same sources and learn interesting things. Some of my favorites in the space are the monthly-ish link lists from [Astral Codex Ten](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april-644), Conor Friedersdorf's [Recommended Reading](https://thebestofjournalism.substack.com/) and the more-frequent Garbage Day [installments](https://www.garbageday.email/?ref=nickrroberts.com) (although most of it IS garbage and dumb internet phenomena, but there are gems in there). So, I've decided to straight-up steal this content format and make this monthly newsletter a link dump/roundup of all of the good content I've rallied in my notes app over the past 30 days or so. But first, a plug for my own stuff.

### Videos I came out with in the last month in case you missed them

We were staying on Alameda during the first half of June and I wandered around the old base to get some shots. The video turned into a kind of meditation on military bases and what happens when the funding tap turns off. 

---

Pete "Viper" Pettigrew shares his story of his air-to-air MiG kill (which needs a movie made about it) and his experience as technical advisor to the first Top Gun movie.

---

Continuing our *Top Gun: Maverick* theme, dad and I check out the USS Midway in San Diego.

---

Drone shots of Bisbee, Arizona, where my wife, Fiona, is from. It's a funky art town with a long and checkered mining history. 

### Valid links

[Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping...![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea93fb47-1a32-4bbd-bfe5-7550898f457b_531x408.png)](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/dictator-book-club-xi-jinping?s=r)

A riveting deep-dive into China's government and how Xi Jinping fits into it. 

---

[Field DaysThis space is all about having FUN!![](https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/592786db/img/favicon_144x144.png)YouTube![](https://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AKedOLSL3dsXRKMsHFuY32mbfTBgKcXVVk76TrVug_JsQQ=s900-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)](https://www.youtube.com/c/FieldDays?ref=nickrroberts.com)

My new favorite YouTube channel! It's all about fishing, survival, and watching this way-too-happy Australian guy subject himself to crazy dehydration ordeals. 

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[Waste Russian Time![](https://wasterussiantime.today/favicon.svg)](https://wasterussiantime.today/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

A funny concept. 

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As a runner, I found this really uplifting. 

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[Russia Military AnalysisA blog on the Russian military![](https://russianmilitaryanalysis.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/cropped-unnamed-1.jpg?w=192)Russia Military AnalysisMichael Kofman![](https://russianmilitaryanalysis.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/cropped-unnamed-1.jpg?w=200)](https://russianmilitaryanalysis.wordpress.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

With the Ukraine-Russian war going on, Michael Kofman is the man of the hour. If you look closely at the New York Times/CNN/WSJ's coverage of the conflict, they cite Kofman constantly. He's a frequent guest of the War on the Rocks podcast and director of the Russia Studies program at CNA (Center for Naval Analyses), a DC think tank. The link above is to his personal blog which it doesn't look like he's updated since September of '21 (I presume he got much more busy since then), but it's chock full of crazy insight into Russian force structure and equipment. It's also pretty damn funny. 

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I've plugged Perun (another Australian!) before, but he's really good so I'm doing it again. These are long, war-college-style lectures, but they're excellent and incredibly well-researched. 

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I'm not that great at fly fishing, but I'm currently in one of the greatest places to do it, so I'm trying to absorb everything I can. This is a really, really good and easily-comprehensible playlist covering all the basics. I watched all of them and, while I may not yet be catching many fish, I feel like I sound less like an idiot when I'm in the fly shop.
### Requiem for Naval Air Station Alameda
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/requiem-for-naval-air-station-alameda/
Last updated: 2022-07-21T23:48:16.000Z
Naval Air Station Alameda, now known as Alameda Point, sits quietly across the bay from San Francisco with stellar views of the Bay Bridge and downtown. It’s fascinated me for years.

I grew up on military bases with their spartan approach to construction. The long fences that run along the borders of these bases and the guards with automatic weapons make you feel like you’ve managed something really important when you pass through the gate. The storied old second and third generation jets mounted on pylons are a common sight. A nod to the service of previous generations and a reminder of this country’s boundless innovative capacity. There’s also the quintessential officer’s club, the commissary, and the minimalist base housing. On Alameda, so many of the decaying structures around this place, including the A-4 Skyhawk past the old main entrance, seem familiar to me and it’s very strange to see these buildings all boarded up and falling apart. The road just outside the main gate is chock full of people camping out in tents and RVs.

The base closed in 1997 after 57 years of operation. Another casualty of the Base Realignment and Closures act, which killed off over 350 installations in the wake of the Cold War over five rounds of closures between 1988 and 2005\. They don’t let you on the runways these days because that part of the island is home to an endangered bird called the California Least Tern. There are tire marks all over the place from people drifting their cars around on the acres and acres of concrete. Breweries, wineries and distilleries have moved into the old hangars overlooking the flight line. The old control tower still stands watch over the ramp.

In its heyday, NAS Alameda was home to many fleet carriers, including the USS Enterprise, the Midway, the Coral Sea, and even the USS Carl Vinson (which is a Nimitz-class carrier still in active service and currently homeported in San Diego). These days, only the USS Hornet sits in port as a museum ship and the ferries run out of terminal in the old seaplane lagoon, carrying tech workers and financiers to their jobs in the city.

Since the early 2000s, the city of Alameda has been slowly converting the former base into new housing projects and moved private companies into the historic structures, but the whole place still feels really empty and unfrequented. I’m not certain this part of the island will ever really get over the ghost of its former function.
### Admiral Pete "Viper" Pettigrew on killing MiGs, filming Top Gun
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/admiral-pete-pettigrew-on-shooting-down-migs-filming-top-gun/
Last updated: 2024-07-09T15:14:36.000Z
****Adm. Pettigrew passed away on 6/23/24\. I am very grateful we shared this conversation and for all the others over beers in San Diego. He was a shining example of patriotism and honor. Rest in peace Viper.**

Rear Admiral Pete Pettigrew, callsign "Viper," served in the US Navy from 1964 to 1998, completing 325 combat missions and 529 carrier landings along the way. In one of his bios he says “I am the only former Top Gun instructor with a confirmed kill”—a MiG-21 over Vietnam on May 6, 1972\. He’s also highly decorated, having received the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, three air medals, and 30 strike flight air medals for his service. Pete was technical advisor on the first Top Gun movie and designed a number of the flying scenes, including the whole scenario leading to Goose’s death.

Today, Dad and I chatted with him about his wild career and I sat back while they compared notes about the F-4 and life as fighter pilots.
### Exploring the USS Midway
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/exploring-the-uss-midway/
Last updated: 2022-06-21T16:16:32.000Z
After seeing *Top Gun: Maverick* in San Diego at the biggest IMAX theater I could find, Dad and I visited the USS Midway to continue the theme. This gigantic decommissioned aircraft carrier is named for the historic US naval victory at Midway Island against the Empire of Japan in World War II. U.S. planes sank four Japanese aircraft carriers in the span of a few days in June, 1942 and turned the tide decisively in the Pacific theater. At the time it steamed out of the shipyard, the Midway was the largest ship in the world and held the title until 1955\. It is also the longest-serving aircraft carrier of the 20th century—1945-1992.

The tour starts after you climb the stairs and enter the hangar bay, which is an enormous metal cavern housing aircraft from nearly every generation. The Douglas Dauntless dive-bomber is the first plane next to the entrance to the hangar deck. Its prominent location I can only assume is because it’s the plane type responsible for sinking those four Japanese carriers. As you continue, you pass by the heavyweights of naval aviation history: the TBM Avenger, F4F Wildcat, the Texan, A-1 Skyraider, and others.

Dad and I immediately gravitated to the line for the disembodied F-14 Tomcat cockpit. The whole museum was slammed with people for the Memorial Day weekend, but we felt we had to weather the crowds because we were so hopped up on Top Gun thrills. Inside the old Tomcat, we took turns pretending to be Maverick and Goose. All the surfaces were pretty grimy from thousands of gross kid hands, but it felt righteous all the same.

We headed up to the flight deck and strolled around the jets arranged along the length of the ship. We encountered some we’d never heard of before, like the RA-5 Vigilante, a nuclear bomber turned reconnaissance jet from the Vietnam era, and the F9F Panther, a carrier-based Korean War-era fighter. Beside a full-sized Hawkeye was another cockpit chopped off from some decommissioned E-2\. Dad and I clambered in and tried once more tried to imagine landing on a carrier. It was a little disconcerting that we couldn’t see any obvious way to eject.

One of the docents recommended we grab a tour of the island before the crowds swallowed it up and created a huge wait. We hitched onto a tour group and followed our guides, all former servicemen in the Navy or the Coast Guard, around the labyrinthian structure. It’s astounding the amount of stuff the Navy figured out how to cram in such a compact metal box.

After we weaved our way through the tiny metal doors and descended the impossibly steep stairs out of the island, Dad and I visited some of the jets we’d missed before on our first pass. My father flew both the F-4 and the F-15E during his Air Force career and he explained the various munitions, like the Mark-82 500lb bomb and the AIM-9 Sidewinder, along with design details on the carrier's resident F-4.

After we had our fill of the flight deck, we decided to make the loop through the Combat Information Center and the squadron ready rooms in the bowels of the ship.

Someone in the museum administration really likes to use creepy full-size dummies dressed as crew to give some better sense of what life was like on the carrier. But all I could think about was how eerie this whole place must be at night when the crowds are gone and it’s just these weird dolls inhabiting the silent darkness.
### Not showering for a week in southern Utah
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/not-showering-for-a-week/
Last updated: 2022-05-10T16:29:19.000Z
We took a week to meander through Escalante and Hole in the Rock Road, an almost 56-mile washboard dirt trail. It features some of Utah's most gorgeous wilderness, including Coyote Gulch where we backpacked through Crack in the Wall ingress. While in the area, we also hit up Hell's Backbone grill in Boulder and camped out near Singing Canyon.
### Great pieces on the war in Ukraine, April '22
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-few-more-excellent-sources-on-ukraine/
Last updated: 2022-09-23T14:22:13.000Z
In years past I swore off daily news (headlines generally make me feel sad and powerless), but here I am again like a lapsed junkie. After absorbing [so](https://nickrroberts.com/broken-arrows-and-almost-annihilations/) [much](https://nickrroberts.com/the-latest-1/) [material](https://nickrroberts.com/who-killed-the-soviet-union/) this last year or so about the Cold War for personal interest, particularly what it would have looked like for NATO to square off with the Soviet Union, it's unreal that we're now witnessing NATO square off with the USSR's pugilistic successor. Hell, my reading list even included *[Red Storm Rising](https://www.amazon.com/Red-Storm-Rising-Suspense-Thriller/dp/042510107X?ref=nickrroberts.com)* of which there are some weird parallels with current events. Just look at the false flag operations staged by Moscow. In the novel, the Soviets make it look like a West German operative bombs a building in the Kremlin as a pretext to war. In real life, Putin accused the Ukrainians of [terrorist attacks](https://tass.com/emergencies/1405995?ref=nickrroberts.com) against Russian facilities, among other contrived grievances, to justify his invasion on February 24th. Of course, there's no direct shooting confrontation as yet between NATO forces and the Russians, but Sergey Lavrov's opinion is that there's already a war "[in essence](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/26/russia-ukraine-war-lavrov-warns-of-risk-of-nuclear-conflict?ref=nickrroberts.com)" between them. 

The intense sense of injustice over the war's human costs, the constant gaslighting and jetstream of bullshit from the Russians, and the now-not-super-remote potential of a third world war get me stealing away in most of my free time to look at my phone for something new and original about the conflict. 

Continuing the junkie analogy, the play-by-play daily updates from the New York Times and others are fine, but the *analysis* and *sense-making* part is the "good shit." Like, sure, Kreminna was taken by the Russians, but where does this leave us in the larger picture? Why exactly did Putin's forces withdraw from the area surrounding Kyiv and renew the offensive in the Donbas? What are they now hoping to achieve?

For anyone else who can't kick the habit, here are a few great sources and individual pieces to check out for answers to these questions: 

### Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)

[HomepageRoyal United Services Institute![](https://rusi.org/icons/icon-512x512.png?v=0ffd3fafcafb82b941a238660cf259ea)190Years of defence and security thought leadership50New agenda-setting research projects and initiatives248Events, conferences and workshops ran in 2020-21150Partnerships and joint projects around the worldDr Jack Watling![](https://www.rusi.org/images/social.png)](https://rusi.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

A think-tank based in London, RUSI just published an excellent paper, *[Operation Z: Death Throes of an Imperial Delusion](https://static.rusi.org/special-report-202204-operation-z-web.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com)*, about the whole Russian shift to the Donbas, what it means, and where it comes from. What stuck out to me:

Putin's push for Kyiv failed for numerous reasons, but chief among them: A busted plan to seize Hostomel airbase (like literally busted *Cops-*style because Russian personnel were talking to each other about plans on unsecured phone lines or HAM radios lol), and the Russian's army's reliance on paved roads leading south from Belarus which made their movements predictable and vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery and anti-tank munitions. There's also the Russian military's huge dependence on rail transport and lack of "expeditionary" capability. Their army was designed more for territorial defense. This isn't in the report but it's in a video I've linked below from Perun: The United States by contrast IS an expeditionary military. Think: The gargantuan logistics emphasis, air mobility, and naval strike group capabilities. That's what you need to steam-roll opponents abroad, far away from your own territory. Russian units didn't have even a fraction of what was required to sustain their offensive in the north. 

The *Operation Z* report also suggests answers to many questions like: why are so many Russian generals dying near the front line? How has Russia fared in the propaganda/information war? What effect are the sanctions having on Russian war machine? Spoiler: Their precision-guided munitions rely heavily on US-manufactured chips and parts. You can't replace those things overnight. They lack the industrial base.

The report also speculates about various outcomes we may see if the conflict drags on and on into the summer, if Russia prevails over Ukraine (alarming), if Ukraine prevails over Russia.

### Institute for the Study of War (ISW)

[Institute for the Study of War![](https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/themes/isw/isw.ico)Institute for the Study of War![](https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/Ukraine%20Conflict%20Updates%20Thumbnail_13.png?itok=cqhyXRnw)](https://www.understandingwar.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

I watch for their daily updates and excellent conflict maps. They're great.

### Bellingcat

[Ukraine - bellingcat![](https://www.bellingcat.com/app/themes/bellingcat/assets/icons/favicons/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)bellingcat![](https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2022/04/q-anon_russia-300x218.jpg)](https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/ukraine/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

A very interesting open source journalism project I'd never heard about until it was mentioned on the podcast below. Generally, seems like a good way to get more plugged in is to go to the same sources journalists consistently reference. Ordinary do-gooders on Bellingcat spend a ton of time here compiling war maps and documenting atrocities. 

### Podcast: Ukraine: The Latest

[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/6cnkk1J0I1UqtxTYVUL4Fe?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ukraine-the-latest/id1612424182?ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/image-4.png)

The folks at the Telegraph just put out reliably good analysis. I've especially become a fan of the straightforward, no-bullshit personality of Dominic Nicholls, the Telegraph's Defense and Security editor. 

### Podcast: War on the Rocks

[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/5ec5TBvVh3w4aobgx0qgYj?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/war-on-the-rocks/id682478916?ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/image-3.png)

National security geeks rejoice. The [podcast](https://warontherocks.com/category/podcasts/war-on-the-rocks/?ref=nickrroberts.com), hosted by Ryan Evans, is "often recorded at bars in Washington and other world capitals, the original War on the Rocks podcast is for people who want to stay informed, with a drink in hand." It's terrific. Evans asks hard-hitting questions and doesn't let his guests, often senior government officials, get off easy. It's been a great resource for learning about the Washington insider perspective on the developments in Ukraine. 

### YouTube: Perun

These are lecture-style PowerPoint-driven videos but they are so well-researched and fascinating. 

### YouTube: Adam Something

Sometimes this guy's a bit of a loose cannon and a little grating, but I think he puts out good stuff. He was pretty much spot-on in [his prediction](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQXwreYzJ40&t=108s&ref=nickrroberts.com) about how the initial Russian offensive would go.

A more recent vid:
### Where we tow big trucks out of the mud with our RAV4
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/where-we-tow-big-trucks-out-of-the-mud-with-our-rav-4/
Last updated: 2022-04-20T02:19:38.000Z
We wended our way farther up Kolob Canyon (Zion National Park) than we’d been before, past the Left Fork trailhead where we dropped into the Subway hike last weekend. We found a random dirt road shooting off into the distance and decided to see where it went. It was obvious no one had even driven this for a long time. The deep, sandy ruts proved an interesting challenge for the RAV.

We get stuck in some mud...get bailed out...and have to bail out our buddies.
### Journey into The Subway, offroading near Zion
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/journey-into-the-subway/
Last updated: 2022-04-13T15:42:25.000Z
Last weekend we drove the RAV up to Gooseberry Mesa, immediately christened Dingleberry Mesa by our pals, for some camping and offroading with friends. Fiona and I also scored permits to hike the legendary Subway trail which is a 9-mile out-and-back on the west side of Zion. The land has an almost spiritual quality to it. It’s something about the undulating and impossibly-shaped red rock, set in sharp contrast to the blue of the sky, that makes it seem otherworldly. The wind pushes its way through the junipers, Pinyon pine, and manzanita, breaking the silence and bringing you the warm-sand smells of the desert. It’s no wonder that whomever named this place drew on religious references.
### March links: Our nomad year, report from Bozeman, war in Ukraine
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/nomadism-bozeman-ukraine/
Last updated: 2023-02-21T13:37:29.000Z
Good morning from La Verkin, Utah. We chose this town for our stay this month because it's strategically-located near many of southern Utah's famous red rock playgrounds, like Zion National Park. But what kind of name is La Verkin, you ask? The [city website](http://www.laverkin.org/history?ref=nickrroberts.com)'s section on the origin of its appellation is a paragraph of half-assed speculation: "There are several theories. One is that it was derived from the Spanish for The Virgin...LaVirgin. But there doesn't appear to be any Spanish influence in the area." Seems that no one actually knows for sure.

Like many rural Utah towns, which seem to attract preppers and edgy folk, it's got a few weird bits of history lurking below the surface. La Verkin was at one point the residence of neo-Nazi Johnny Bangerter (related to Utah governor Norman Bangerter, who has a highway named after him) and his "Army of Israel," whose outlook on the world, best I can tell, was a slimy blend of white supremacy and Mormon scripture. In the 1990s, [they declared Zion National Park](https://www.deseret.com/1992/10/1/19008092/skinheads-group-moves-in-near-zion-park?ref=nickrroberts.com) to be a future whites-only promised land. 

Also, in the 1980s, La Verkin was supposed to be the site of [Terrene Ark 1](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1981/05/10/condo-bomb-shelter-1-3-bdrms-no-vu/3fc1ce8c-f7df-441e-96e9-8d2391ee5e8c/?ref=nickrroberts.com), a ritzy nuclear bunker/condo development. Unfortunately, it was never built.

Anyhow, southern Utah is a very welcome relief from the colder, snowier climes of Montana, where we spent our March. More on that below. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/image-1.png)

La Verkin, Utah. Courtesy of http://www.laverkin.org/.

## Nomadin'

On December 23, 2021, on our way up Big Cottonwood Canyon, we got stuck in holiday ski traffic. Our intended target was Brighton Resort, but we set out too late and we became enclosed in the stop-and-go convoy of fellow late-rising goobers. Fiona and I were caffeinated and began musing about the longer-term trajectory of our lives. We lived in San Francisco and yet we were on our second month in Utah, working remotely and staying with my family. The longer we stayed and skied, the more our apartment in Noe Valley looked like an outrageously expensive storage unit.

"What if we just did this, but, like, other cities for all of next year?" Fiona wondered out loud. Everything about that idea suddenly clicked.

We'd batted this concept around before, like in 2020 when lots of other people were heading out on the road, but we weren't ready at that point. For most of the pandemic, we felt constantly under threat that our jobs would issue a "return to office" mandate and we'd once again find ourselves on the ol' Bay Area commute. But it didn't happen. And then it still hadn't happened nearly two years later. We learned to love working from home. Fiona transitioned to remote status to obviate any decree that she be in some office building by some time, and my company has always been friendly to distributed workers. Now was the time.

Two days after our conversation, I gave our landlord notice. We bought a car in early January, and we were on the road by the 20th.

The plan is roughly this: Do a giant loop around America for maybe 1-2 years and come back to the Bay Area for more stationary living. Allow for the possibility that we will fall madly in love with some other part of the country, or that we want to live nomadically for even longer.

So, there's no set end to our travel schedule, but this is what we've worked out so far:

🚗

City Sampler 2022 [schedule](https://nickrroberts.com/2022/)

## A chilly stay in Bozeman, Montana (our first stop)

You get the sense that the town is on the precipice of a big change. Maybe it's the blocks of pre-fabricated condo buildings popping up around the town in between the recently-$2 million Victorian-era houses. Or the fancy new San Francisco-style cocktail bars on Main near Schnee's, the storied old hunting store. Marijuana dispensaries now ply their trade in converted homes with neon green crosses in the windows. Our new-fangled apartment building looked down onto two classic dive bars (Hofbrau and The Molly Brown) that still charge $4 for a pint of something hazy.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/IMG_6141.JPG)

Our view out onto The Molly Brown bar.

A few conversations with bartenders or other passersby revealed that many denizens were transplants or fellow travelers. With remote work becoming so commonplace, you start to wonder whether we're becoming a country full of cities no one's actually from. 

There are real Bozemanians to be sure. You see them at Western Cafe. They're wearing work boots and cowboy hats, pants dirty from dealing with livestock out in the farms surrounding town. But even among this crowd, evidence of the inexorable march of internet culture: Pit Vipers. More than a few of the farm boys sport them with mullets to match.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/image.png)

Vipes.

We were clearly in Bozeman at the wrong time of year, though, multiple people said so. Truth be told, I think Fiona and I just wanted to go somewhere we hadn't been; someplace surrounded by wilderness. We weren't thinking too much about weather. For anyone who asked, skiing at Big Sky was our justification for being there in the middle of the Montana winter, with its harrowing chill. But the snow coverages were surprisingly crummy and yielded ice-sheet-laden runs, studded with rocks. Also pretty crowded. My guess is that the line for the Swift Current chair had to be the densest population per square mile anywhere in the state. We made the drive to Big Sky merely twice during our whole stay. 

The Bozeman summer, we are told, is lovely. The rivers are full of fish, the mountain snow melts away, opening them once more to recreators. Anglers and hunters come flocking. The town comes out of its hibernation. But while we were there, it was freezing and the sky consistently overcast. I started to feel an onset of mild seasonal sadness. One evening we clambered into the car to go someplace for dinner and the temperature gauge read -8F. Bozemanians also do not believe in plowing their roads after blizzards. It's a kind of Darwinian approach to traffic: Only the four-wheel drives survive. 

There's very little to do around town in winter if you're not skiing or drinking. So, we attempted to go to the bowling ally, Bozeman Bowl, on a Saturday. After three paces into the building, a lady marched up to me and announced that I had to turn around and get out. Bewildered, I looked around the place, which was packed with people. I noticed that several old men were staring at me territorially. "It's league day, you can't be here," she repeated. I was irritated that she hadn't even let me get to the front desk. I walked out, shaking my head. Two and a half stars [on Yelp](https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-bozeman-bowl-bozeman?ref=nickrroberts.com) says my experience was not unique.

We returned to Bozeman Bowl on a Tuesday night. I was excited. Being denied bowling before made me want it all the more. I'm not even that into it, normally. Once again, we parked and hurried inside out of the frigid air. The place was similarly packed and smelled like fries. This time, I got to the front desk, where I asked the guy whether we could grab a lane. The guy, who was distracted and spraying some chemical into brightly-colored bowling shoes, didn't even look up. "Nope," he said, "league night." 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/image-2.png)

If you're not a leaguer, get the fuck out. 

Despite the temps, I strapped on my Yaktrax (chains for running shoes) and ran around a lot of the town during our stay. One day, Fiona suggested we go for a hike after work near the local "College M" trail, which is perched atop a merciless incline on very south end of the Bridger Range. Since I'd recently come across [this piece](https://semi-rad.com/2022/02/one-segment-the-m-trail/?ref=nickrroberts.com) by Brendan Leonard about what I naively thought was the same College M trail, I declared to Fiona that I would also run it. I did, and it just about killed me. I was sore for the rest of the week and my lungs felt rough for days from the hyperventilating the cold air. Turns out that the College M referenced in that piece was the other "M" in Missoula. Still challenging, but not like its Bozeman counterpart, a 32% grade where you gain 800 feet over 0.46 miles.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/Screen-Shot-2022-04-05-at-8.23.23-AM.png)

Look at that grade-adjusted pace on mile 1.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/Screen-Shot-2022-04-05-at-8.26.27-AM.png)

Jim Walmsley, who I now follow on Strava, set the record in 2016.

We sampled essentially all of the breweries and restaurants in town during the remainder of our time in Bozeman. Recommended hit list if you find yourself in the area (as of April, 2022):

- Montana Ale Works
- Western Cafe (greasy spoon breakfast joint; can't recommend enough)
- Revelry
- The Crystal Bar
- Plonk (wine bar)
- Blackbird (decent Italian)
- Hofbrau (dive bar)
- The Molly Brown (dive bar)
- The Cat's Paw (dive-y poker/pool hall)
- McDonald's

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/IMG_6129.JPG)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/04/IMG_6119.JPG)

## Valid links

Some of the best daily reporting about Ukraine I've found is coming out of The Telegraph's podcast, [Ukraine: The Latest](https://open.spotify.com/show/6cnkk1J0I1UqtxTYVUL4Fe?ref=nickrroberts.com). 

Another good piece on the war:

[What the Russian Invasion Has Done to UkraineAfter thwarting a quick victory for Russia, Ukrainians are galvanized—and facing a punitive assault.![](https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico)The New YorkerCondé Nast![](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/622c1f41790b587b43a38c4d/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/220321_r40051.jpg)](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/21/what-the-russian-invasion-has-done-to-ukraine?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Good analysis of Russia's aggression:

This should have been in the January newsletter...oh well:

> The thing you need to understand about today's Zillow find is that it was built in 2010 in the United States of America. 1/ [pic.twitter.com/Rd5JrrsVgr](https://t.co/Rd5JrrsVgr?ref=nickrroberts.com)
> 
> — Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) [January 14, 2022](https://twitter.com/rebeccamakkai/status/1482049099717386240?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

This should have been in the February newsletter...oh well:

> happy feb who wanna hunker over a bowl of chili [pic.twitter.com/jSMbXR3u65](https://t.co/jSMbXR3u65?ref=nickrroberts.com)
> 
> — lillem dafoe (@\_lil\_i\_am) [February 1, 2022](https://twitter.com/%5Flil%5Fi%5Fam/status/1488540794784989184?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=nickrroberts.com)

A good series of ACX articles:

[Book Review: Sadly, Porn...![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbd196f43-527a-45f3-acfc-210d8506f836_514x347.png)](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn)

[Heuristics That Almost Always Work...![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5adbf108-fe67-4cd8-97a9-7c434c9a715b_736x526.jpeg)](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work?r=binh0&utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=email&s=r)

Linked from an ACX piece:

[Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives—But Why?Image SourceSeveral months ago someone on twitter asked the following question: which public thinker did you idolize ten or fifteen years ago but have little intellectual respect for today? \[1\] A s…![](https://i0.wp.com/scholars-stage.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-greer.png?fit=192%2C192&ssl=1)The Scholar's StageName \*![](https://i0.wp.com/scholars-stage.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/pubint.jpe?ssl=1)](https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

I read about Namche Bazaar in Jon Krakauer's *Into Thin Air* and I've wanted to visit ever since:

[Namche Bazaar Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty ImagesFind the perfect Namche Bazaar stock photos and editorial news pictures from Getty Images. Select from premium Namche Bazaar of the highest quality.Getty Images![](https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/woman-looking-at-namche-bazaar-from-above-mount-everest-national-park-picture-id1213430942?s=612x612)](https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/namche-bazaar?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### Cross-country skiing to Tower Falls, Yellowstone
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/cross-country-skiing-to-tower-falls-yellowstone/
Last updated: 2025-09-22T20:51:17.000Z
This weekend we rented some cross country gear from Round House Ski Shop in Bozeman and journeyed to Yellowstone National Park. After some scouting online, it seemed like the biggest bang for the buck for new cross country skiers, which we are, was the five-mile out-and-back to Tower Falls. The falls were caked in ice and incredibly beautiful. Upon our return, we made some buffalo friends near Mammoth Springs.
### Gallatin River
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/gallatin-river/
Last updated: 2025-09-22T20:52:40.000Z
_No content available._
### Keeping up with the situation in Ukraine, how to help
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/keeping-up-with-the-situation-in-ukraine/
Last updated: 2022-04-27T19:11:45.000Z
**Please forward this to people you know who might donate or share the "How to help" links below on social media.**

**Contents**

I'll be continuously updating this page as we find out more. 

### Why is this happening?

Like most of the world, I'm completely transfixed by the devolving situation in Ukraine. Russian forces have [manufactured reasons](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russia-uses-disinformation-on-ukraine-military-aggressions-as-a-pretext-for-war?ref=nickrroberts.com) to invade and, presumably, seek to [decapitate](https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-news-02-25-22/h%5F5660362eec383234a5adcb92bb815300?ref=nickrroberts.com) Kyiv's democratically-elected leadership. This is one of the most dangerous geopolitical developments in the last few decades, given the ease with which Russia or NATO, both large nuclear powers, could come to blows either through miscalculation or accidental entanglement. A doomsday kind of scenario here is [not as far-fetched](https://www.vox.com/22951004/nuclear-weapons-russia-ukraine-war-putin?ref=nickrroberts.com) as it was before the first Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border, though still unlikely. But, President Vladimir Putin has just today, February 28, placed his nuclear forces on "[high alert](https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-kyiv-business-europe-moscow-2e4e1cf784f22b6afbe5a2f936725550?ref=nickrroberts.com)" in an attempt to dissuade NATO from taking serious retaliatory action. Miscalculation in war happens precisely when one or both sides cannot understand the intentions of their opponent, or they seem, like Putin, sort of unhinged: 

> From a strategic standpoint, the experts said, there’s no reason for Russia to use nuclear weapons. But they said Putin himself was the biggest source of uncertainty. “The element of emotion and anger that’s crept into Putin’s statements in particular is striking,” said Hare. “Normally we’ve associated Russia’s diplomatic style with a kind of laconic, almost sarcastic manner...“\[Putin\] lives in a very small bubble, and he’s deeply paranoid,” Kristensen said. “He’s willing to do really not very rational things.”” --Vox "**[How to think about the risk of nuclear war, according to 3 experts](https://www.vox.com/22951004/nuclear-weapons-russia-ukraine-war-putin?ref=nickrroberts.com)"**

In Ukraine, Russian objectives appear to be:

- Permanently prevent another NATO member from forming on their border
- Return Ukraine to a client/buffer state role by removing Volodymyr Zelenskyy's government and replacing them with a set of Russian-friendly autocrats
- Make a lot of other countries think twice before messing with Russia; show strength

Of less certainty is Putin's long-game. U.S. President Joe Biden [speculates](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/02/24/remarks-by-president-biden-on-russias-unprovoked-and-unjustified-attack-on-ukraine/?ref=nickrroberts.com) that Putin's goal is a new Evil Empire: "It was always about naked aggression, about Putin’s desire for empire by any means necessary." But my understanding is that it's not exactly that. Putin is surely a detestable character with detestable intentions and a very evil-looking face, but his actions have historical precedent, much to do with geography and setting up buffer zones between hostile countries and the Russian heartland. Understanding the Russian security mindset (and realizing that it's a view held by a good deal of the Russian government's establishment, not just Putin) helped unlock some of this for me. This is a good breakdown of why Russia expanded so much over the past centuries:

Expanding at a rate of "one Belgium per year" in the first centuries of its existence as a modern nation-state was mostly in reaction to previous empires, such as the Mongols, brutally conquering the Rus people who lived on flat, difficult-to-defend terrain. And expansion worked. By developing such enormous amounts of space, the Russians gained sufficient territorial depth to draw in, encircle and defeat some of the most formidable invading forces in history, such as Napoleon's [Grande Armée](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande%5FArm%C3%A9e?ref=nickrroberts.com)and the Nazi Wehrmacht, each of whom bogged down with immensely long and constantly-harassed supply lines on the way to Moscow.

Given all this, it seems reasonable that all of these wars that Putin has started-- Ukraine, Georgia, Chechnya, the [stuff happening in Kazakhstan](https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/86298?ref=nickrroberts.com)\--are about preserving the sort of depth the Russian heartland requires to feel safe. But what is saddening and perplexing is why, instead of this very painful and very dramatic track he's put Russia on over the past two decades, Putin did not instead forge deep ties with the West, join NATO, and get under the very same security umbrella to which Russia's found itself opposed for so long. Why not use the resources of countries like the United States to guarantee its borders? If he really is evil, what better way to be evil than to work the system to your advantage from the inside? They [did this](https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/02/1112802?ref=nickrroberts.com) with the United Nations Security Council and made it impossible for the UN to condemn their actions officially. Seems like the Russian people would be far better off and more economically-integrated with Europe, too. Hell, [Nord Stream 2](https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/22/business/nord-stream-2-germany-russia/index.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) could've existed ages ago if everyone didn't try to slow it down because of bad relations and fears about Russian intentions! 

On the other hand, this very Russian lack of trust in NATO or foreign security guarantees has historical precedent, too. Joseph Stalin got burned big time by Hitler after the latter reneged on the [German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact](https://www.britannica.com/event/German-Soviet-Nonaggression-Pact?ref=nickrroberts.com) and got really aggressive. Still, it is a shame that the post-Soviet reset in Russia did not yield a less-suspicious foreign policy. Putin could have tried it again while everyone was wearing the rose-colored glasses and [history had just ended](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FEnd%5Fof%5FHistory%5Fand%5Fthe%5FLast%5FMan?ref=nickrroberts.com). There was a big window for that. One must also wonder why nuclear weapons, of which Russia has the largest stockpile in the world, aren't enough of a security guarantee even with NATO countries now bumping up against their border? Would anyone, even another mighty nuclear power like the United States, really press their luck with a conventional attack on Russia? Seems extremely unlikely.

Charging into sovereign nations to restore client statehood serves only now to isolate Russia from the world. The sanctions are already brutal, but, over the long run, they have the potential to bring the Russian economy to its knees and impoverish millions for decades. One has to wonder if this is all worth it to Putin and if he really meant to end up here. 

**Other theories or useful background**

There are racial and nationalistic components to Putin's motivations that could be driving some of this as well, discussed by Anatoly Karlin: "The capstone to the Nationalist Turn was laid by Putin in his seminal July 2021 article '[On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians](http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181?ref=nickrroberts.com)', in which \[he\] affirmed that the Ukrainians are a colorful and distinct, but nonetheless inseparable, part of the All-Russian nation"

[Regathering of the Russian LandsThe Empire, Long Divided, Must Unite![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8aa4cc30-7039-4769-bdd1-2358bc787238/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Powerful TakesAnatoly Karlin![](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa103f186-2326-453c-aaf9-14289141f6b1_2048x1536.jpeg)](https://akarlin.substack.com/p/regathering-of-the-russian-lands?s=r)

I recently came across Adam Something on Youtube and realized that this guy is seriously good at predictions and geopolitical analysis. One of my favorite bloggers, Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten, recently boosted Adam Something as well for the same reason. Two videos from him:

(Before the war started)

(After the war started)

An examination of the various pundits and their predictions on the war:

[Ukraine WarcastingMantic Monday 2/28/22: Predictions, market accountability, pundit accountability![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fabe54fa9-d868-4d8a-912b-f6ce1dfcf1f2_275x183.png)](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ukraine-warcasting)

### Getting the latest

**WarLeaks on Youtube**. Caution: I haven't independently verified all of these videos and sometimes it's not even clear which side you're seeing in action or if the story explained by the channel publisher is correct, so I'd take them with a grain of salt. It's clear that many of the videos with the 🔴 red circles are from Ukraine. I've seen some of them pop up on major outlets too. 

[WarLeaks - Military BlogWarLeaks - Military Blog is an independent, educational and documentary military channel for military enthusiasts from all around the world! Devoted to armed forces and military technologies this military archive brings you military videos on a regular basis! Join one of the biggest military cha…![](https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/ecd7151d/img/favicon_144x144.png)YouTube![](https://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AKedOLT7HWy7MCJf3p3otvjy6NUJJKJC9kaspdIauKbpDA=s900-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)](https://www.youtube.com/c/WarLeaker/videos?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**Vice News latest page (Vice seems to have some of the grittiest journalists I've seen)**

[UkraineEverything with the topic ‘Ukraine’ on VICE![](https://vice-web-statics-cdn.vice.com/favicons/vice/coast-228x228.png)VICEGreg Walters![](https://vice-web-statics-cdn.vice.com/images/vice-og.png)](https://www.vice.com/en/topic/ukraine?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**Aljazeera's latest page**

[Ukraine | Today’s latest from Al JazeeraStay on top of Ukraine latest developments on the ground with Al Jazeera’s fact-based news, exclusive video footage, photos and updated maps.![](https://www.aljazeera.com/favicon_aje.ico)Rus­sia-Ukraine talks due; Ze­len­skyy says next 24 hours ‘cru­cial’Ukraine’s mil­i­tary says Russ­ian forces are ‘con­tin­u­ing shelling in all di­rec­tions’ as Kyiv and Moscow pre­pare for talks.Published On 28 Feb 202228 Feb 2022Mar­wan Bishara![](https://www.aljazeera.com/images/logo_aje_social.png)](https://www.aljazeera.com/where/ukraine/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**BBC's latest page**

[Russia-Ukraine war - BBC NewsAll the latest news about Russia-Ukraine war from the BBC![](https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c1vw6q14rzqt/russia-ukraine-war#bb1919)BBC News![](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2015/newsspec_10857/bbc_news_logo.png?cb=1)](https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c1vw6q14rzqt/russia-ukraine-war?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**Global Conflict Tracker**

[Conflict in Ukraine | Global Conflict TrackerLearn about the world’s top hotspots with this interactive Global Conflict Tracker from the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.![](https://microsites-live-backend.cfr.org/themes/custom/gct/favicon-32x32.png)Global Conflict TrackerAlina Polyakova and Daniel Fried![](https://microsites-live-backend.cfr.org/cdn/ff/iZjYXkE-oF_crPq-nC7h6DM8r2Y0gt-xe6NVUQE8mgQ/1615823487/public/2019-07/RTX1F9M7%20Ukraine%20tattered%20Ukrainian%20national%20flag_0.jpg)](https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/conflict-ukraine?ref=nickrroberts.com)

## Ways to help the Ukrainian people

I used [this list](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/27/how-to-help-ukraine/?ref=nickrroberts.com) from the Washington Post to find validated charities or outlets that I could donate to. 

**Humanitarian organizations:**

[CARE - Fighting Global Poverty and World HungerCARE is an international humanitarian organization fighting global poverty and world hunger by working alongside women and girls. Help fight world hunger.![](https://www.care.org/wp-content/themes/careorg/assets/favicon/apple-touch-icon.png?v=1)CARE![](https://www.care.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RS61130_190719_CAM_MLE_Seung-PS_Doeun_JH_174-partners.jpg)](https://www.care.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

[Голоси дітей![](https://voices.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/cropped-favicon-270x270.png)Голоси дітей![](https://voices.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/voices.png)](https://voices.org.ua/en/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

[RazomTogether we are Ukraine![](https://razomforukraine.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/razom_icon-2-300x300.png)Razom![](https://razomforukraine.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Razom-First-Annual-meeting-by-Vadym-Guliuk.png)](https://razomforukraine.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

(I donated to [Razom Emergency Response](https://www.paypal.com/donate/?cmd=%5Fs-xclick&hosted%5Fbutton%5Fid=FYFZPVQN8J7YC&source=url))

**To donate to Ukrainian journalistic efforts:**

[Keep the Kyiv Independent going, organized by Jakub ParusinskiUkraine is facing an unprecedented attack. The Kyiv Independent continues to work, b… Jakub Parusinski needs your support for Keep the Kyiv Independent going![](https://www.gofundme.com/apple-touch-icon.png)gofundme.comJakub Parusinski is organizing this fundraiser on behalf of Kyiv Independent.![](https://d2g8igdw686xgo.cloudfront.net/61259125_1645714611640547_r.jpeg)](https://www.gofundme.com/f/kyivindependent-launch?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Kyiv Post: [https://www.kyivpost.com/subscription/yearly/website-yearly/try-the-kyiv-post-for-free-for-first-month](https://www.kyivpost.com/subscription/yearly/website-yearly/try-the-kyiv-post-for-free-for-first-month?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**To donate directly to Ukraine's central bank and support its military efforts against Russia, you can go here:**

[NBU Opens Special Account to Raise Funds for Ukraine’s Armed ForcesThe National Bank of Ukraine has decided to open a special fundraising account to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The central bank&rsquo;s decision comes after the Ukrainian government imposed...![](https://bank.gov.ua/apple-touch-icon.png?v=4)National Bank of Ukraine![](https://bank.gov.ua/admin_uploads/article/1280X720_%D0%90%D1%80%D0%BC%D1%96%D1%8F_en.jpg?v=4)](https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/natsionalniy-bank-vidkriv-spetsrahunok-dlya-zboru-koshtiv-na-potrebi-armiyi?ref=nickrroberts.com)

[Subscribe for more!](#/portal/signup/free)
### Scenes from Whistler Blackcomb
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/scenes-from-whistler-blackcomb/
Last updated: 2025-09-22T20:51:47.000Z
Headed to the mountains of British Columbia for my 30th birthday.
### Meditations at age 30
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/meditations-at-30/
Last updated: 2025-02-25T15:40:46.000Z
During my time alive, the world’s changed considerably, and faster than many prior 30-year segments of history. The internet, which mainstreamed around 1995, when I was three, is responsible for a lot of this acceleration. Newspapers foundered for the bulk of my teen years until institutions like the New York Times figured out how to become tech companies themselves. Modern journalism still seems to be finding its footing. We’ve seen many wars and conflicts. The planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, when I was nine. We went from welcoming each other at the airport gate to welcoming each other outside the security cordon. Smoking sections vanished from restaurants. We went into Iraq for a second time. The US deployed to and withdrew disastrously from Afghanistan. Cable TV got really popular and was subsequently displaced by streaming services. Video games became amazing, Hollywood-quality works of storytelling. We got iPhones. The US elected its first African-American president. Social media was great at first and then became pretty toxic. I went from being a Facebook power-user in 2008 to deleting my account in 2019\. I moved from various online platforms to text messages to keep up with friends and family. Who would’ve thought that plain old email newsletters would make such a comeback, eh? Blockchains and cryptocurrencies came into existence and we’re just now starting to scratch the surface of their potential. Electric cars over the last 10 years not only became viable to drive cross-country, they got *sexy*. America sent the first astronauts to space on a SpaceEx Crew Dragon two years ago, after discontinuing the space shuttle flights when I was 19\. And on and on.

I’ve compiled below a list of the people and things I’m grateful for, collected wisdom, and things I would have done differently over these past 30 years. I also made separate lists of my top [books, movies and media](https://nickrroberts.com/media), and [places I’ve been](https://nickrroberts.com/places/), so far.

## First, gratitude

I couldn’t be more thankful for:

- Meeting Fiona, my wife, at a funky art talk in a motorcycle garage in Salt Lake City. That one event was the starting point for some of the wildest adventures of my life yet. Fiona is the best companion I could’ve asked for. We have the same set of interests, the same hunger for awesome experiences, complementary life goals, and an identical sense of humor--crude and irreverent.
- A loving family who had the means to give me a great education and show me the world. As time has gone on, I’ve realized just how astonishingly lucky in the grand scheme of things I am to have been born to them in 1992, with all of the gifts of modern medicine and resources.
- Speaking of friends, Fiona and I have cultivated a core group that will last us to the end. They’re a key, daily part of our well-being.
- Having a sound mind, even if I’m a little crazy or paranoid sometimes.
- Not going off the deep-end with drugs or alcohol.
- Starting a goal tracking routine that I live by. I got obsessed with productivity right after college and read a lot of books about it. It may have gotten a little unhealthy at times, this fascination with “personal life operating systems,” but all of this trial and error and thinking boiled down to an effective set of habits that I stick to religiously. I set aspirations for who I want to be and what sort of lifestyle I want on a 5-10 year kind of horizon, I plan a year ahead more definitively, and then I set goals each week to get myself to those yearly goals. The key has been to build a bit of flexibility and forgiveness into the system. Life throws opportunities and curveballs at you left and right and you have to be able to adapt.
- Making it to 30\. Small as it may be, just getting to this point feels lucky. It’s more time on the Earth than a lot of people have had throughout history. For example, there’s a whole thing about how tons of famous people [die at the age of 27](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27%5FClub?wprov=sfti1&ref=nickrroberts.com).

## Key learnings over 30 years

I want to caveat here that I can’t take credit for most of these. You’ll find a lot of this stuff embedded in books both ancient and modern. I also don’t mean to say that these are all true all the time for all people, but they’re tenets that I’ve generally seen hold true. 

- You have limited energy. That is, the force that makes you act and push toward goals. Prioritization is essential if you want to achieve big, difficult things. Focus on the minimum number of things you can and de-prioritize the rest.
- Figure out what gives you energy and do more of that. For me, it’s making stuff (blogs, podcasts, videos, food, stuff for my job), achieving big, difficult things, and being outside.
- Build momentum toward a desired persona (“I am a writer,” “I am a runner.”) using routines and habits. If you simply do certain things enough, you become the persona you want to adopt. Run a few miles every day for a month and you will probably feel that you are now a runner. Stop doing the habit regularly, and you cease to be that persona. Just a note that this idea comes in large part from my reading of *Atomic Habits*, by James Clear, which I would recommend reading if you’re interested in Clear’s broader argument about the incredible power of repetition for good and ill.
- Value experiences over things. It’s better, and much more achievable, to build your life around a desired *lifestyle* than it is to aim your goals at acquiring specific and expensive possessions. E.g. wanting a yacht (hard) vs. wanting a life where you go boating frequently (achievable). Also, if you aim for a lifestyle of awesome experiences, you’re more likely to be happy than acquiring an object once, after which your enjoyment of it diminishes rapidly.
- Conflict most often comes down to poor communication and misunderstanding, rather than malevolence. Try as hard as possible to disagree with people in good faith and you’ll preserve more relationships and even make them better.
- There are few critics worth responding to, especially in the age of the internet. Ignore most people if they have something mean to say. Engaging with mean people transfers energy from you to them and makes you look and feel small.
- Rule of thumb: You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You’ll probably level up if you surround yourself with excellence.
- Hang out with artists, iconoclasts and hacker types who want to change the status quo. They tend to rub off in a positive way and show you a vision for how much more awesome your world can be.
- There’s a difference, though, between being iconoclastic and being a cynic. Be vigilant and ruthlessly cut out cynical people from your regular rotation. If you can’t cut them out entirely, do whatever you can to limit your exposure to protect your own well-being.
- There are few jobs (doctors, firefighters, EMTs, soldiers, etc. being obvious exceptions) worth being shackled to a geographic location for, particularly if you’re young with no responsibilities or much to lose. Aim for remote work to give yourself physical and mental flexibility. Go see the world. Long commutes to a generic office building suck your soul over time.
- People are much more willing to accept your boundaries and preferences if you clearly communicate them. Unless they’re sociopathic, those in your orbit generally want you to be happy because they want stability. But it’s dangerous to assume that other people can read your mind. Ask for what you want. In the job world, that could be the pay you want, boundaries around exercise, fewer meetings, or time for family. In the world of personal relationships: Alone time for creativity, declaring what annoys you, lifestyle goals with a partner (“let’s be digital nomads for a couple of years”), etc.
- Be authentic, but adaptable. You can’t talk to your coworkers like you would friends at a bar after six cocktails and expect good results. But in the opposite direction, refrain from virtue signaling. People are pretty good at detecting bullshit and posturing. Those things backfire.
- Condescension is the number one way to set people against you.
- Allies and coalitions are key to achieving big, difficult things. Learn how to point networks of people at the same goal and mediate between different views by trying it repeatedly.
- In finance, it’s generally prudent over the long-term to place your assets in diversified index funds to maximize returns and outperform inflation. Companies like Wealthfront help you do this cheaply. Investing in individual stocks and cryptocurrencies is gambling. Keeping some fiat cash on hand is good, but remember that it’s always evaporating value like dry ice.
- Formal degrees are meaningless without associated independent learning and initiative. A masters may get your foot in the door with an employer, but your ability to rapidly cultivate useful skills outside of a college class is something that actually sets you apart in the free market. Like a lot of other people in Silicon Valley, I now hold quite a bit of contempt for the College-Industrial Complex and the culture of job descriptions that stipulate “a four-year bachelor degree in \_\_\_ or relevant field” when what really matters is what you’ve actually built before and your drive to continue. I also hold a lot of contempt for the fetishization of Ivy League universities and how our culture still seems to teach kids they need to go into $250k of debt for an English degree. You don’t need credibility stamps, you need to feed your curiosity, take action, and make things of value.

## Do-overs

We’re shaped by our experiences, especially our mistakes, so wishing for a do-over is paradoxical. You wouldn’t be the same person if you had your way. You might have a completely different brain, or you might even be dead having selected other paths. There’s the butterfly effect to consider. One small change would cascade and you’d get to a present with crazy different outcomes. Since you can’t go back, it’s kind of pointless, even counterproductive, to ruminate on stuff you wish happened differently. All that said, it’s good to acknowledge these things in case they help you or others avoid mistakes in the future.

Do-overs:

- I probably should have signed up for the military right after college and served for a few years. Given the choice, it would’ve been the Air Force. Military service runs deep in my family, and I still feel a gap in my soul for not having participated. I haven’t ruled it out entirely at this point; I like to think that would volunteer in a heartbeat given a dire enough political situation. But short of that, life has taken me elsewhere.
- I would have studied computers more exclusively in my formal and informal education up to this point, since software is eating the world. I mucked about with some other pursuits in college.
- I wish I’d developed my thinking around routines and habits sooner.
- I’m also just generally plagued by this sense of having never given my all in…well, any endeavor in my whole life. I feel like I can’t point to any one achievement or success after which I had no more to give. It's something to think about in years ahead.

I recognize that is a somber note to end on, but any mistakes or omissions on my part are far outweighed by the all that has gone well. Like I said in the section on gratitude: I'm here, I'm healthy, and I'm surrounded by great folks. Cheers to 30 years! 

## Post-script from Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings)

Many thanks to my sister, Katie, for reaching out to him!

0:00 

/2:36 

1×
### A few thoughts on Everest
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-few-thoughts-on-everest/
Last updated: 2022-03-25T22:50:51.000Z
Available as a podcast on Spotify:

> We tell ourselves stories in order to live.… We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. --Joan Didion, *The White Album*. Quoted in chapter nine of *Into Thin Air.*

I finished reading *Into Thin Air* by Jon Krakauer a couple days ago. I'm about to give away some of the story, so there's my warning if you want to read it first. 

The book is Krakauer's account of the disaster on Mount Everest in May, 1996, where eight climbers died over the span of a day. The book is clearly and movingly written, but I was amazed while reading the postscript just how controversial it appeared to be (and probably still is) after its release. I expected a sober description of the tragedy and to get a sense of what it's like to go for the highest summit in the world, but the ending gives way to an acrimonious fight over the narrative. Like many arguments, the core of it is a disagreement on basic facts: Who was where when, who talked to whom, and whether conversations actually happened. The memories of each participant are made somewhat suspect by the pernicious effects of altitude, which does strange and terrible things to the human psyche. If there's a theme to *Into Thin Air*, it's delirium. 

Anatoli Boukreev, a guide for Scott Fischer's Mountain Madness expedition which attempted the summit on the same day as Krakauer's, hated his portrayal in the book. *Into Thin Air* suggests that Boukreev abandoned climbers he should have shepherded on the deadly descent from the summit. I will say that Krakauer doesn't lay all of the blame at Boukreev's feet and my main takeaway from his account was that many factors led to the fatal outcome. Perhaps most importantly, the decision of Rob Hall (leader of the Adventure Consultants expedition of which Krakauer was a member) not to turn his climbers back from the summit at the prearranged go-back time. There was also the traffic jam at Hillary Step, where three expeditions bottlenecked and frittered away precious time on summit day. All the same, Boukreev took his perspective to print through the author G. Weston DeWalt. Their book, *The Climb*, hit the shelves later in 1997\. Krakauer writes in his postscript “DeWalt—who oversaw the research, wrote *The Climb*, and has assumed the role of Boukreev’s spokesman—undertook the derogation of *Into Thin Air* with notable energy and enthusiasm. He has tirelessly expressed his view of my book—and my character—in print and radio interviews, on the Internet, and in personal letters to family members of those who died on the mountain.” DeWalt called into question Krakauers's journalistic integrity, saying that Boukreev's quick descent ahead of other, less-experienced climbers, some of whom died in the ensuing blizzard, was part of a plan he'd arranged with Fischer and that Krakauer hadn't bothered to mention this. Krakauer fires back that DeWalt talked to none of the people present who had critical views of Boukreev and who remembered no such conversation or plan. The whole thing is still more complicated and emotional, since Boukreev died in 1997 during an avalanche on Annapurna, just after he and Krakauer had begun to patch things up. 

But Krakauer doesn't let himself off the hook for some of the tragic events on the climb in 1996 either. The lack of oxygen at more 26,000 feet above sea level (the [Death Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death%5Fzone?ref=nickrroberts.com)) is so debilitating, even after weeks of acclimatization, that almost any exertion leaves you feeling drunk and clumsy. Krakauer faults himself for causing undue grief over his false initial statement that one of his fellow climbers, Andy Harris--a thirty-one year old guide on the Adventure Consultants expedition, had made it down to camp after summiting. Krakauer had been sitting on top of the final icy and steep descent off of the ridge on the route back to Camp Four (the highest camp at 26,000 feet) and claimed to have a brief conversation with Harris, who asked for directions back to the tents. Krakauer pointed them out and Harris attempted to descend the icy slope, lost control and tumbled to the bottom. Miraculously he was unhurt, and Krakauer saw him wobble back toward camp. When Jon made it back to camp too, he informed others present that Harris was safe. This report made it all the way back to Harris' partner in New Zealand. However, another member of the expedition woke Krakauer later to tell him that Harris was not in his tent. Confused and disoriented, Krakauer retraced the steps of the man he'd seen descend the icy incline off of the ridge. While searching, he found a lone set of tracks leading away from camp toward the edge of the Lhotse Face (a 4,000 foot drop) and assumed, in the whiteout conditions, that Harris may have, in fact, fallen to his death. This is what Krakauer reported in his initial article for *Outside* magazine.

Turns out this was all in error. In the aftermath, Krakauer determined that the man he spoke with on the ridge was not Harris at all, but another climber named Martin Adams, who described to Krakauer his conversation with an unknown climber on top of an icy sheet that sounded almost identical. Krakauer writes:

> “For two months I’d been telling people that Harris had walked off the edge of the South Col to his death, when he hadn’t done that at all. My error had greatly and unnecessarily compounded the pain of Fiona McPherson; Andy’s parents, Ron and Mary Harris; his brother, David Harris; and his many friends. Andy was a large man, over six feet tall and 200 pounds, who spoke with a sharp Kiwi lilt; Martin was at least six inches shorter, weighed maybe 130 pounds, and spoke in a thick Texas drawl. How had I made such an egregious mistake?”

Given Krakauer's utter exhaustion at that point in the trek and the stupefying effects of the altitude, it's easy to see how this could all happen. To this day, Harris' remains have not been found. 

Aside from the controversy arising over its version of the facts and timeline, I found *Into Thin Air* to be an inspiring read. Though bleak, Jon and the other surviving members of the expedition, such as Beck Weathers (who essentially [rose from the dead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck%5FWeathers?ref=nickrroberts.com)), overcame incredible despair and exhaustion to make it back home. Themes about overcoming adversity, especially circumstances this adverse, hold a special appeal for me. 

It might be the wrong takeaway, but *Into Thin Air* makes *me* want to join a mountaineering expedition. I'm not sure if Everest is in my future, but certainly something like the Grand Teton, Mount Rainier, Shasta, or even Denali. Mountain climbing has a hook to it that's easy to understand: It's achievement in a very distilled form, especially in places where humans weren't meant to survive. I've realized in flying airplanes, skiing and other similar endeavors that the risk gives the adventure meaning. Without it, there's no achievement. 

---

Also, in case you're wondering, you can still summit Everest with an [Adventure Consultants expedition](https://www.adventureconsultants.com/expeditions/seven-summits/everest/?ref=nickrroberts.com). This one runs $69,000 and spans 63 days. So, not for the faint of heart or thin of wallet.

Everest has also seen a [huge increase](https://www.statista.com/chart/1157/successful-mount-everest-ascents-per-year/?ref=nickrroberts.com) in climbers since Krakauer's ascent in 1996\. Tens of thousands of summits by some [6000+ individuals](https://haexpeditions.com/advice/how-many-people-have-climbed-mount-everest/?ref=nickrroberts.com). My guess is that *Into Thin Air* and the IMAX movie *Everest* had something to do with that. 

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### January links: I turned my dog into an NFT
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/i-turned-my-dog-into-an-nft/
Last updated: 2025-05-06T17:20:29.000Z
## This edition's rabbit-hole: NFT mania

A friend of mine described cryptocurrency speculation like playing slots, except without a maximum payout. His strategy is to put $10-$50 in a wide variety of tokens on an ongoing basis and just kick back, crack a beer and let the crypto hype machine 300x his principal on a few coins while the rest go to zero. Speculating on stupid pieces of digital art now works the same way.

The hype machine was all about fungible tokens at first: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Sushi, etc., where no one coin of a given currency is unique and each one has the same value as any other. Then, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which have been around [since 2015](https://www.one37pm.com/nft/tech/the-definitive-timeline-of-early-nfts-on-ethereum?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=1.,'claim'%20on%20the%20blockchain.), entered the public consciousness [last year](https://www.artnews.com/list/art-news/artists/2021-year-of-the-nft-1234614022/?ref=nickrroberts.com) and exploded. The main idea with NFTs is to store digital works (vector illustrations, photos, GIFs) on the blockchain, usually Ethereum–best I can tell, most use that protocol because that's just where most non-fungible projects started– and use digital contracts to prove ownership of the original pixels. 

I thought this sounded really dumb when I first heard about it. Like, why can't you just right-click and download someone's NFT of a [Bored Ape](https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub?ref=nickrroberts.com) or [CryptoPunk](https://opensea.io/collection/cryptopunks?ref=nickrroberts.com) and set it as your Twitter profile picture like you own it? The answer is that you could, but anyone could check the chain of ownership on Ethereum in a few seconds and reveal you as a poser. Having your name next to an entry on the public ledger that declares you the owner of a Zombie CryptoPunk makes it a scarce resource and thereby valuable to collectors. For this reason, many NFT collections have reached [insane valuations](https://www.yahoo.com/now/top-five-most-expensive-nft-150249487.html?ref=nickrroberts.com).

A good analogy for NFTs is the physical art market. There are tons of copies of famous sculptures or paintings like [*The Starry Night*](https://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/starry-night.html?ref=nickrroberts.com), but there's only one of the original. An actual Van Gogh goes (Goghs?) for millions because you know it's the one that the artist actually smeared with their paint brush and that has meaning to lots of people. But knowing that you have the original physical art is fraught with problems. To start, frauds are really good at making copies look like the O.G. So, the art world tends to rely on third-party validators to inspect and certify paintings if there is any doubt about the chain of title (which, especially for old paintings or sculptures, can be full of holes because of thievery and war). But the third-party validators [get fooled all the time](https://magazine.artland.com/the-art-of-forgery-art-forgers-duped-world/?ref=nickrroberts.com)! This is where blockchains can actually be quite useful. There are no unaccounted-for gaps. You can trace the transfers of the original pixels all the way back to their minting so you know that you have the real thing. 

That said, NFTs are far from perfect and there are many ways to scam people. One way is to simply [mint tokens with art that isn't yours](https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artists-opensea-rarible-marble-cards-fraud-art?ref=nickrroberts.com). Also, there isn't much to stop people from making [multiple listings](https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2021/12/20/nft-forgeries-arent-going-away/?ref=nickrroberts.com) of the same art on different platforms, which still forces buyers into due diligence to make sure the token is actually the original. The system still requires plenty of good old-fashioned trust!

> With NFTs, authenticity is entirely extrinsic. Rarible might bestow a “verified” checkmark on the page of a creator whose works it has deemed authentic, but the vast majority of artists on these platforms are unverified. And there’s nothing really stopping anyone from right-clicking a work by a verified artist, downloading it and re-uploading it to the same platform as another NFT... “Ownership,” in this context, is the process of recording addresses on the ledger. Through explorer websites like Etherscan, anyone can see who minted a token and who’s since paid for it. NFTs don’t come with a “[bundle of rights](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bundle-of-rights.asp?ref=nickrroberts.com),” since they involve no enforceable contracts. And while you can see the creator’s address, you’re always going to need external confirmation that X address actually belongs to Y creator. --[Coindesk](https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2021/12/20/nft-forgeries-arent-going-away/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

But these seem to me like problems that will get either fixed or mitigated over time by the global community of nerds pumping their brainpower into crypto. It appears entirely possible to analyze all the original works themselves on all of the major NFT platforms like Opensea and Rarible and use an algorithm to find where sets of pixels repeat identically to an original work to ferret out plagiarism. I'd guess something like this probably exists if I'm able to think of it and I'm totally new to NFTs, but it doesn't seem like it's achieved mass adoption or efficacy yet. 

☝️

Edit: After I originally published this newsletter, there was a funny episode where the rapper Vince Staples set [a CryptoPunk he didn't own](https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxVUsuOpDAM%5FJrmBsoTwiGH0UrzGygPQ2caEjYJ09Pz9Wua00qWXXFkl-OKMxWWlF96T6U2p5vqawcd4VlWqBVycxTIU%5FCajlz0hIjGa-GpkqoJZZozwGbCqms-oNkPuwZnakjxrBg5HZq7tvPMHR0JCGY9MMIlH6yRZJQUgaMXrTl8gOhAp7i-pt0E36z6Xutebvzjxj7RnI9dOWypxj06lzZMhc0sgHGG6u5nxD413difvxfgH0tKHs%5FzOu05LRlKCd-A-VIBdqy4KJg8SeRJg84e7gF4n1sg0lqnRGuN4a3gA7Q4tmqNt5xZGIZRia7wzmzmN0XzLNdc2OPaxRu-hyxvCH50UjjXulGaVhDAfs6R1koHM6GGScKmXpCfgYpuj0sTNCOMEUpHqoQStGOdhVlZKUAop4yVqmM%5FX89v-FpugmwL-29FTdYR0zG4R87JQq7vCU-lJozbEUN9TRCNXcFfItbrL7xlnRaIkPGP-MlUTXvBeqooQ-sv1VBlMfC-pwNpkNcnrIp6Mdnik715%5FQPbDccl) as his Twitter profile pic. If people did check to see if he owned it and called him out, they got buried beneath the warring factions of people who think NFTs are dumb and the semi-culty faction that thinks they're awesome. Just shows that even with all these fancy new blockchain ledgers, it's easy to get the wrong idea about who actually owns what. It's also a great example of the [wider culture war](https://nickrroberts.com/the-latest-5/) happening over Web3\. More about this on [Garbage Day](https://www.garbageday.email/p/zoombombing-the-italian-senate?ref=nickrroberts.com).

Anyhow, here are a few highlights from my survey of NFT mania if you'd like to go down the rabbit-hole as well:

- [What are NFTs?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFfzjWCO-SU&ref=nickrroberts.com) A broad overview of what they are and how to make, buy and sell them.
- Check out Kevin Rose's [podcast](https://podcast.kevinrose.com/nfts-blockchain-powered-art-trading-cards-music-and-more-introducing-my-new-podcast/?ref=nickrroberts.com) about NFTs and art.
- Not specifically about NFTs, but something I found cool along the way: [TokenSets](https://www.tokensets.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com). This service lets you buy shares in "sets," which are composites of different coins or projects focused on particular problems or themes.
- [What is MetaMask](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVgfHZMFFFQ&ref=nickrroberts.com)? Lots of decentralized apps (like TokenSets) ask you to use a wallet like MetaMask to manage your identity and interact with them.
- Check out [OpenSea](https://opensea.io/?ref=nickrroberts.com) to browse, create and sell NFTs.

## Links and media commentary

**James Clear's system for reading more**. Clear is all about self-improvement and I liked this little piece. I also read and would recommend Clear's book, *Atomic Habits*. It became the #1 bestseller on Amazon in 2021\. He's got a great newsletter too. Maybe even as good as this one. 

[How to Read More: The Simple System I’m Using to Read 30+ Books Per YearRead this article to learn the simple system I’m using to read more books. This reading habit has helped me finish 7 books in 10 weeks.![](https://jamesclear.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-icon-270x270.png)James ClearJames Clear![](https://jamesclear.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/read-more.jpg)](https://jamesclear.com/read-more?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**SurvivalBlog**. I've been reading a book [about bunkers](https://www.amazon.com/Bunker-What-Takes-Survive-Apocalypse/dp/1501188569?ref=nickrroberts.com) and the author makes a reference to this blog. It's really easy to get sucked into article after article if you have any predisposition to thinking apocalyptically. 

[SurvivalBlogThe Daily Web Log for Prepared Individuals Living in Uncertain Times![](https://survivalblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/cropped-logo-270x270.jpg)SurvivalBlog.comJames Wesley Rawles![](https://survivalblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/SB-Blog-FB-Share-sm.jpg)](https://survivalblog.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**Reading list from a Georgist video game designer**. Over the holidays, a blog I follow called [Astral Codex Ten](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/) published a series of guest posts from a video game designer named Lars Doucet [about Georgism](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really), which were intriguing if you're into alternative ideas for architecting society in ways that seem more fair. 

[Reading ListI’ve written a bunch of stuff over the years, so here’s an organized &quot;reading list&quot; of the most popular and important articles on this blog. &quot;So You Want To... &quot; series So You Want to Compete with Roblox So You Want To Compete With Steam So You![](https://www.fortressofdoors.com/favicon.ico)Fortress of DoorsLars Doucet![](https://www.fortressofdoors.com/assets/images/dq_80_white.png?v=b4071c2f88)](https://www.fortressofdoors.com/reading-list/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**\[Not a link\] But very cool**. I had no idea that the Wikipedia app contained a feature that lets you find entries around your geolocation. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/Screen-Shot-2022-01-16-at-11.43.34-AM.png)

**Making your digital life easier to manage for your loved ones if you unexpectedly die**. [Article on WireCutter](https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/get-your-digital-accounts-ready-in-case-of-death/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

**What it's like to fly the World's largest Airplane**. 

[What It’s Like to Fly the World’s Largest Airplane - FLYING MagazineStratolaunch’s chief pilot reveals Roc ’s fascinating flight dynamics and what’s next for the historic, twin-fuselage jet.![](https://flyingmag.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/flyingma/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/27093623/flying_favicon-300x300.png)FLYING MagazineThom Patterson![](https://flyingmag.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/flyingma/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/16083007/featured-strato.jpg)](https://www.flyingmag.com/what-its-like-to-fly-the-worlds-largest-airplane/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**Peacekeeper Rail Garrison**. A Cold War rail system for giant nuclear missiles that never really got rolling \[eh? eh?\].

[Peacekeeper Rail Garrison - Wikipedia![](https://en.wikipedia.org/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png)Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Peacekeeper_Rail_Garrison_Car_-_Dayton_-_kingsley_-_12-29-08.jpg/1200px-Peacekeeper_Rail_Garrison_Car_-_Dayton_-_kingsley_-_12-29-08.jpg)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacekeeper%5FRail%5FGarrison?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**What it takes to get a hamster drunk.** 

[You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Get a Hamster Drunk“You just put a bottle of unsweetened Everclear on the cage and they love it.”![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/apple-touch-icon-152x152-aafde20dd981a38fcd549b29b2b3b785.png)The AtlanticSarah Zhang![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/jfg58MF2CD_5VI5gXAy8d5GFjG4=/0x43:2000x1085/960x500/media/img/mt/2021/12/TheAtlantic_Hamsters_final-2/original.jpg)](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/12/alcohol-consumption-hamster-drunk/621125/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**First impressions of Web3.**

[My first impressions of web3Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...![](https://moxie.org/favicon.ico)Moxie Marlinspike![](https://moxie.org/blog/images/nft-opensea.png)](https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Good things from YouTube

**Q Shaman Prison Interview.** I've been a fan of Andrew Callaghan since I heard about [All Gas No Brakes](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtqxG9IrHFU%5FID1khGvx9sA?ref=nickrroberts.com). Some kerfuffle over the ownership of the show made Callaghan break away to start Channel 5 news, which is done in the same style and equally hilarious and crazy. In this one, Andrew interviews the Q Anon shaman guy who was part of the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021\. The interview starts out pretty tame and then moves into nutso territory.

**A documentary about the people who live in storm drains underneath Las Vegas**. Simultaneously heartbreaking and fascinating and also terrifying. Many thanks to Lucien B. for the referral. 

**How to open a door**. Just delightful and bizarre. 

**Beneath the Plains: The Minuteman Missile On Alert.** 

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### Notes from the Copper City
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/notes-from-copper-city/
Last updated: 2022-09-23T14:22:51.000Z
💡

I changed a few names because Bisbee is, after all, a small town.

"We don't throw food in the trash because javelinas will rip the bags apart," Fiona explains as we navigate her parent's kitchen. We're visiting her family in Bisbee, Arizona for Christmas. It's a beautiful and classic southwestern town nestled in the Mule Mountains, which are full of desert creatures. The first night of our stay, we toss scraps of Spam out the front door and wait. Not even five minutes go by when we begin to hear snuffling and a low growl in the bushes. A gigantic boar-like animal emerges from the scrub and starts vacuuming up the bits of pink meat. Its eyesight is bad enough that it can't see us watching it ten feet away. "That," Fiona gestures at the rumbling, Spam-devouring beast "is a javelina. They get into everyone's garbage and they're known to kill dogs."

Bisbee sits about 12 miles north of Naco, Mexico. The Copper City, as it's dubbed, sprang up around 1880 because of the mining concerns that found copper, gold, and silver in these hills. At one time, Bisbee grew faster than San Francisco, and at its peak held [around 20,000 people](https://www.discoverbisbee.com/history?ref=nickrroberts.com). Phelps Dodge, the company who owns the majority of the claims around the city, quit mining copper in 1975\. The town's numbers dwindled in the final decades of the mine's operations. When Fiona's dad, Mike, showed up, balls of tumbleweed ambled down the vacant streets. 

Mike and Joanne (Fiona's mom) were part of an influx of artists, hippies, and adventurers into Bisbee right after the miners and their families cleared out. Fiona's parents are originally from Ypsilanti, Michigan, but, after moving to town, found themselves in the midst of a wild and wide-ranging crowd from Haight-Ashbury and other far flung places across the nation. The eclectic horde of twenty/thirty somethings came for the semi-lawless environment and the abandoned miner's shacks which made for cheap real-estate or good places to squat. Betsy, Mike's sister, bought the lot and house for Mike for $300 in 1973\. 

Betsy herself is involved in a love affair with the ghost of George Sellers, a local painter and sculpter who died in 1964 and previously resided in her house. She never met him while he was alive, but "[she said](https://www.myheraldreview.com/a/socoae/two-artists-one-living-one-dead-make-an-impact-in-bisbee/article%5Fcc1c1084-6a22-11ea-ac20-27d8c84067ba.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) she feels his presence every night before she goes to sleep, tugging on the bed covers." She wrote an account of it called *[Sellers in the Kitchen: Romancing the Ghost of George Wiley Sellers](https://www.amazon.com/Sellers-Kitchen-Romancing-Ghost-George/dp/1986174603?ref=nickrroberts.com).* 

A couple days before Christmas, Mike and I walk into the Cochise County courthouse, a beautiful Art Deco with an adobe kind of flare that some call "[Pueblo Deco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo%5FDeco%5Farchitecture?ref=nickrroberts.com)." A lady outside recommends we go in and see the map. The map, which is a plaster three-dimensional representation of Cochise County, sits halfway up the stairs. Turns out George Sellers made it. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/12/72091323-35EA-48B1-893B-2BAC19CC07F2_1_102_o.jpeg)

The next day, Mike shows me around town and our first stop is the Buddhist shrine: a cave adorned with Tibetan prayer flags, pictures of the Dalai Lama and other trinkets. He tells me that Art, a man in his early eighties who lives nearby, built it. Apparently, Art has also willed his land to a local Buddhist monastery after he passes. The steps up to the hill to the shrine are painted in bright orange colors, like some kind of path of enlightenment one might find in the Himalayas.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/12/2B356D80-A3EC-43A6-BDFB-7315EAF31A8C_1_102_o.jpeg)

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Art also maintains the Bisbee Cross Shrine, which is up on the hill behind Mike and Joanne's house. Later, Fiona, Mike and I trek to the top. Various people over the years built it up, Mike tells us. They poured immense amounts of concrete over the rock to form shelving and small grottos for various devotions. Many of the small caves in the wall are occupied by the Virgin of Guadalupe and memorials to passed relatives or pets from folks all over town. We even find a mural of Che Guevara, of whom Art is a big fan. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/12/E99951DA-3585-4C39-8CA6-7F5EF06C9137_1_102_a-1.jpeg)

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As we survey the canyon that clutches Bisbee with all its corrugated-metal-roofed buildings, Mike fills us in on more characters in town. 

"Down there," he points at what looks like a garbage dump at the very top of the town, "was where Coyote used to live. Funny guy. He's passed away now, but he tried to recruit Joanne and I into his cult one time." He says this matter-of-factly. 

"How?" Fiona and I ask.

"Well he turned up at the house with a bag of weed to welcome us into town--this was right after we moved here--and we invited him inside. We drank a bunch of beer and he smoked nearly all of the marijuana and then told us that he and his *family* guided people through psychedelic journeys. Y'know 'shrooms and LSD and stuff. It was a kind of commune with a bunch of people living there in the garbage."

"Was it also some kind of weird sex thing like a lot of cults?" I ask.

"Not that I know of. But, anyhow, he invited us to his place to do mushrooms and join his little community and we just never went."

Mike tells us that some years later the fire department got called because of a blaze in the junkyard in the middle of all of the dwellings in Coyote's commune, and he came out with a rifle and warded them off. 

We wend our way down from Art's mountaintop shrine and we hunt for a cave where Jerry "Buckets" Barta used to live. Buckets, as he was known around town, was a drifter. He got his name because he would carry buckets of plant seeds across Bisbee and pop them into the ground where he thought they needed to go. Buckets was also a thief. 

"He was a pleasant enough guy to have over, but he'd leave and you'd realize that things were missing. Like your peanut butter, or other snacks. But he'd also return the favor in his own way...leaving gloves or other small items on our doorstep, " Mike says to us as we search the landscape. "One time, we had dinner at the house and he invited me back to his cave for a drink. We clambered up the hill and went in his cave, which is loaded with things, books and food. After hanging out for a little while inside, he made a pass at me and I said no. Then he got mad. As he bellowed at me for refusing him, the mule near Coyote's house started braying, which you can hear well across the canyon. Buckets screamed how even the mule heeded him and that I should too. I got out of there real quick."

We never find the cave. Mike thinks it's back further up the trail from where we looked and none of us are feeling especially like searching more after our hike. I ask what happened to Buckets and if he was still around. Mike says that, one day decades ago, the guy just drifted on and was never seen again.

We head back to the house. Fiona's parent's home sits at the top of a very long staircase that's been there for probably a hundred years. Mid-way up the stairs, we stop momentarily to look at the abandoned house on the left. 

"Our neighbor, who was not a kind man, used to live here until a few years ago, when he shot himself," Mike says regretfully. "It was a bad scene. He must have been in there for some time because the TV, which was one of those old ones, shorted out after being on for so long and got stuck on this red color. So, when they finally discovered the body, he was bathed in this satanic red light in his bedroom. Apparently he was a gun collector too, and the police carted loads of weapons out afterward."

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/DC009513-66F3-4A10-B08D-0292DE1CB382_1_105_c.jpeg)

Red light shone out of the left-most window for days.

We ascend the rest of the stairs to the house where Mike makes us an ad-libbed cocktail of Saguaro syrup and tequila. The syrup, which he watched a Native American woman concoct from the cactus in a pot in the desert, looks and tastes much like molasses. Though it's a deep brown and sort of viscous, the mixture is quite good. The sweetness blunts the edge of the Jose Cuervo. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/CC187B1D-399C-4FCF-AA73-300064C0213D_1_105_c.jpeg)

---

The night of Christmas Eve, we tour the city to see the lights. We stop into the Copper Queen Hotel (built in 1902) and the girl at the front desk, who has a tattooed face, beckons us inside to have a look around and see the architecture. It's gorgeously appointed. I really have the impression that "they don't build 'em like this anymore." It's absolutely haunted I am assured. The hallways sure seem like it. They're dimly-lit and extend to a vanishing point like something out of *The Shining*. The carpet is worn and stained. The door knob slides out of its socket when we try to go out on the balcony.

The hotel claims that every room has a story. There's a framed sign-in sheet next to one with John Wayne's scrawled signature on it. Other notable guests according to their site: "Lee Marvin, Lee Remick, Michelle Pfieffer, Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, Ollie North, First Lady Nancy Reagan, Jake Lamotta, Gabriel Giffords, John McCain, and family members of Linda Ronstadt."

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/image-2.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/CCA5CD5D-C48A-40D1-99EB-7C1123862FA6_1_105_c.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/1B2CF8B8-1DEC-4A83-AF1F-060848B3E468_1_105_c.jpeg)

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Top-left photo comes from https://www.copperqueen.com/

We exit the hotel and proceed to the main drag, which is adorned with charming lights zig-zagging the road. All of the shop windows are illuminated and full of unconventional stuff. Our stroll is very pleasant and quiet until we come up on the The Bisbee Grand, which has live music going. I think they're playing a cover of American Girl by Tom Petty. There's a homeless guy outside walking back and forth and belting along with the band's voices, but adding syncopated rap lyrics in between the verses. As we get closer, we see the singing-rapping guy yelling obscenities and harassing some other passersby, so we cross the street and he doesn't notice us.

The Jonquin Motel has a phone booth outside with a big, circular sign on top that reads "Poems." It alternates fluorescent colors. Upon inspection, we see that the phone inside lets you dial a specific set of numbers for poetry readings. A placard inside provides a legend for which number gets you which poem. Betsy, Fiona's aunt, has various poems listed next to the numbers and we try a few out. Unfortunately, none of them seemed to connect. We get a bit bummed out by this.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/BB348796-CB81-46C7-973A-C2B08C235478_1_105_c.jpeg)

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---

Christmas morning in Bisbee is lovely. Mike and Joanne go out before Fiona and I wake up and light a fire in one of the two hangout sites they've built in their backyard which extends far up the red-rock mountain. We join them at their spot and start a big cookout, complete with percolated coffee, bacon, charbroiled spam (which I would not recommend), and french toast from the cast iron. It's delicious and cozy. While listening to carols, we feed peanuts to the birds, who swoop down from their perches on giant agaves and other desert vegetation. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/6C307272-C311-4B4D-814C-E6E040E604F0_1_105_c.jpeg)

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Christmas morning.

As we sit by the fire sipping coffee after our feast, I ask Mike who lives in the purple-painted house next door. The family that lives there now has only been there a few months. Retirees from another part of the state. But Mike says that when he first came to Bisbee "it was occupied by a father and mother, whose names escape me, and two sons. There was Harry and then José."

Turns out that Harry was gay and dating a US soldier from Fort Huachuca on the down-low. José ran drugs over the border and the father, a minister in a one-room church in Star Canyon, was married to a sex worker he brought from Mexico. Harry invited Mike over one day to take Polaroids of him dressed in a bra in front of a giant American flag, which Mike did, presumably for Harry's boyfriend. But at some point, Harry got kicked out of the house and so Mike let him and his boyfriend live in the backroom of what is now Fiona's childhood home for a while. Around that same time, Mike says, a man named Grey Wolf, a wanderer who collected herbs across the American west and sold them in local markets in western towns, also stayed at the house. Grey Wolf always carried a rifle and shot game to survive. In one event, Mike was walking home and found Grey Wolf cooking a porcupine over a fire on a bend on Youngblood road.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/2FA6A7BC-FDCD-4D1E-8A49-AB4099F5559A_1_105_c.jpeg)

Where Harry and José lived.

---

My impression after leaving Bisbee is that it is so densely-packed with strange history that every rock has a story of note if you take the time to turn it over.

Mike's tales center around the people who came after the mines. But the days when Phelps Dodge's operations were in full swing were probably more crazy. There were brothels and saloons all over the place while the town boomed. Fiona and I saw a documentary called *Bisbee '17* four years ago in San Francisco which details the 100-year anniversary of when the mining corporation broke up a workers strike by forcibly loading them onto train cars and dumping them in the middle of the desert to die of starvation and thirst. Some of Fiona's relatives make acting appearances.

The town's mining past is still on-display everywhere. Big concrete concentrators sit idle, as do the giant metal headframes. But the biggest reminders are the vast pits.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/D0A55F3F-D3DE-411A-94A9-3136ACEF0C79_1_105_c.jpeg)

"The Lavender Pit," for example, ceased operation in the '70s and still sits dormant today, its access roads quietly eroding. The whole landscape is dotted with boarded-up mineshafts. There's occasional talk in town of Phelps-Dodge re-opening some operations. I doubt it, but the plan for all of this space is unclear.

If you walk east around the Lavender Pit, you get to the tiny town of Lowell, which is mostly deserted apart from a breakfast joint and a couple of shops. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/E76FCA8E-8C19-4A84-8F06-9210B67E235F_1_105_c.jpeg)

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---

Bisbee is a quiet town with a layered and complicated past, full of booms, busts, characters and ghosts. It reminds me of innumerable layers of paint on a wall. Peel back one sheet and you find some odd and unexpected color beneath.   

If you find yourself in Arizona near the border, it's worth stopping in for a pint at the Old Bisbee Brewing Company, swinging through the old town, and going for a hike in the copper-colored hills. Fiona's parents have been here for over thirty years and they're always uncovering something new in the red rock and crumbling miner's shanties. 

*Be sure to check out Mike Foster's work on [Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/sanpedroriver?ref=nickrroberts.com)!*
### A look back at 2021
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2021/
Last updated: 2023-01-03T20:33:26.000Z
Happy 2022! I compulsively track almost everything in my life and I've put together yearly personal scorecards since 2018\. Here are my 2021 totals. Here's [last year](https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2020/) for comparison.

## 💪 Fitness

**Came in about the same as 2020\. I cycled more and ran slightly less. I burned \~3,500 fewer calories, or about 6.21 Big Macs (my new favorite unit of measurement).**

Goals:

- ✅ **750.8/750**  miles ran
- ✅ **20,194/20,000** kilojoules output on Peloton
- ✅ **20,400/20,000** pushups completed

Other things I tracked:

- **108 hours 3 minutes** spent running
- **72,146ft** running vert
- **153** total runs
- **387.9** miles cycled on Peloton
- **67** highest Strava fitness level\*
- **140,847** calories burned between running and cycling

## 🥕 Health

**I slept worse in 2021 than 2020, but I was happier.**

Goals:

- ❌ **71.24%/75%** sleep quality\*
- ✅ **8:17/8:00** average nightly sleep length
- ✅ **2720/2500** minutes meditated

Other things I tracked:

- **84** happiness index average\*

## ❤️ Relationships

**I called my family a bit less, but I grew the number of active friendships in my life.**

No goals here

Things I tracked:

- **115** calls to immediate family
- **25** active friendships\* ([related](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/05/robin-dunbar-explains-circles-friendship-dunbars-number/618931/?ref=nickrroberts.com))
- **26** inactive friendships\*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2022/01/image.png)

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/05/robin-dunbar-explains-circles-friendship-dunbars-number/618931/ 

## 🧠 Brain

**I totally botched my podcasting goals, but I read and wrote just as much as 2020.**

Goals: 

- ✅ **17/15** books read\*
- ✅ **6/5** articles published (including newsletter issues)\*
- ❌ **0/5** podcasts created

Other things I tracked:

- **4** YouTube videos published\*

## ✈️ Other

**I got a pilot's license and flew a hell of a lot more.**

No goals here

Other things I tracked:

- **107** flight hours
- **0** countries visited outside of the United States

## Details

**Strava Fitness:** From their site: “While fitness is a complicated concept, it can be simplified to an accumulation of training. The Fitness Score is calculated using Training Load and/or Relative Effort to measure your daily training, and an impulse-response model to quantify its effect over time. This will intuitively capture the development of fitness from training, as well as the loss of fitness during a break.”

**Sleep Quality:** Source: [AutoSleep](http://autosleep.tantsissa.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com): "The Quality ring shows hours of quality sleep achieved. This makes it easier to compare with other days. This looks at the overall sleep time, how much light sleep, how much deep sleep, how restless and the nocturnal dip in heart rate and determines how much quality sleep you had. The ring completion target is 85% of your required sleep hours.”

**Happiness index:** Holistic spot-check of how good I feel psychologically and physically, based on my relationships, job satisfaction, financial well-being, goal completion, etc. on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being that life can’t get any better.

**Active friendships:** Someone outside of family. Close enough to consider a friend. Regular contact and good feelings.

**Inactive friendships:** Outside of family; a pal. Fallen out of touch or regular contact.

**Books (⭐-- means a stand-out book):**

- 2034, Ackerman & Stavridis
- Lone Survivor, Marcus Luttrell
- Empire of the Summer Moon, S. C. Gwynn **⭐**
- Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell
- With the Old Breed, Eugene B. Sledge **⭐**
- Skunk Works, Ben R. Rich
- Under the Banner of Heaven, John Krakauer
- Eagle against the Sun, Ronald H Spector **⭐**
- In the Woods, Tana French
- Memories, Jack Scrivener **⭐**
- Manhunt, Peter L. Bergen
- Ghost Wars, Steve Coll **⭐**
- Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts **⭐**
- Ghost Fleet, PW Singer
- Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton
- Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
- The Art of War, Stephen Coonts

**Books in various states of progress**

- Dune, Frank Herbert
- Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy
- Chaos Monkeys, Antonio Garcia Martinez
- The Overstory, Richard Powers

**Articles** 

- [The Latest #5](https://nickrroberts.com/the-latest-5/)
- [The Latest #4](https://nickrroberts.com/the-latest-4/)
- [On learning to fly part II](https://nickrroberts.com/on-learning-to-fly-ii/)
- [On learning to fly part I](https://nickrroberts.com/on-learning-to-fly-i/)
- [The Latest #3](https://nickrroberts.com/the-latest-3/)
- [A piece of the mosaic](https://nickrroberts.com/a-piece-of-the-mosaic/)

**Video**

Titan II Missile Complex

First aerobatics in a Pitts S-2B

Sheraton Caverns

First Solo

## Goals for 2022

- Maintain a sleep quality of 75%+, sleep time 8+ hours average for all of 2022
- Run 750+ miles
- Do 18,000 pushups
- Meditate 2000+ mins
- Read 15+ books
- Publish 10+ articles
- Publish 5+ podcasts
- Publish 5+ videos
- No more than 2 weeks below 40% goal completion
### A walk through the Titan II Missile Complex
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-walk-through-the-titan-ii-missile-complex/
Last updated: 2021-12-31T13:29:08.000Z
The Titan II Missile Museum sits about 26 miles south of Tucson in the community of Green Valley. Outside the complex sit peaceful groves of pecan trees, a bunch of retirement home developments, and then scrub and saguaros as far as the eye can see.

Being in an ICBM silo gives you a taste of the creepy psychology of the defense bureaucrats and also the mind-state of the soldiers stationed here. Of course, there was the intense boredom of waiting for endless hours on alert, punctuated by the terror of spontaneous training exercises. But also, when you’re in a silo, you’re cannon fodder. The Russians and the Chinese know exactly where you are and it was expected that you yourself would be a target. If you didn’t die in the initial explosion of a first strike, which, inside of a mile of the complex would kill you with almost 100% certainty, you had to contend with surviving in a smoldering wasteland with 30 days of rations.
### December links: Web3 and the third law of motion
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/web3-and-the-third-law-of-motion/
Last updated: 2025-05-06T17:23:12.000Z
Good morning from Salt Lake City. Fiona and I made our winter pilgrimage out here to visit my parents and enjoy actual seasons, which starkly contrast with San Francisco's year-round 60-degree fog. However, the promised snow has yet to materialize. My cozy tea, mug, and slippers are on strip alert.

## This edition's rabbit-hole: Web3 and its reactionaries

"Web3" is the hot new term for the recent wave of decentralized-everything coined by one of the cofounders of Ethereum, [Gavin Wood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin%5FWood?ref=nickrroberts.com). He runs the Web3 Foundation out of Switzerland and his view is basically that blockchain is an inherently political movement against the "centralized internet," or the 2.0-ers. Quick recap of the [internet generations](https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/web-1-0-web-2-0-and-web-3-0-with-their-difference/?ref=nickrroberts.com#:~:text=Web%201.0%20refers%20to%20the,the%20World%20Wide%20Web%20evolution.&text=Personal%20web%20pages%20were%20common,surfing%20the%20internet%20are%20banned.):

- **Web 1.0**: Mid-1990s. The Wild West. Static pages. Geocities. Golden age of cyberpunk. People handwriting lots of html and using...yuck...tables to move content around on pages. Yahoo hires professional "[surfers](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/technology/when-yahoo-ruled-the-valley-stories-of-the-original-surfers.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)" to index the internet. No algorithmic search engines. The idea of using websites on a phone is still like Star Trek.
- **Web 2.0**: Late 1990s through to about...now? People realize that writing html all the time is a pain in the ass. Blogging platforms emerge. Google explodes onto the scene with a new and really good search engine that crawls the internet automatically and indexes sites that match particular queries. Social media comes alive. People start ditching personalized websites and message-board-style forums for Facebook. People figure out that a really good way to make money on the internet is through advertising. A few companies figure out how to do content management and money-making really well and accrue immense amounts of power and wealth. We get the FANG stocks. By the mid-2010s, user data is the new oil. MOBILE FIRST. Privacy starts to become a concern. A few big companies get hacked and people's personal info gets leaked to the public. Someone invents [re-targeting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral%5Fretargeting?ref=nickrroberts.com). People start becoming pretty darn suspicious of this whole advertising thing. All big internet companies start talking about privacy in their marketing materials as a way to make people feel better about handing over every piece of information in their lives.
- **Web 3.0**: 2014ish - now. It's not totally clear what the universally-agreed-upon definition is because Web3 is being debated in the present moment. But, generally: AI! Machine learning! Blockchain! Bitcoin! Ethereum! NFTs! First, it's just the drug dealer at your high school who has Bitcoin. Bitcoin is really unique because there's no one person who has control over the money system and it's really hard to tell who is paying who and for what and so it's nice and private. It's cool too because it doesn't evaporate in value with inflation like US dollars. But it's stored on janky digital wallets in the beginning. Some of these early cryptocurrency exchanges are shady and run away with people's money. Entrepreneurs realize there's an audience for Bitcoin/blockchain but the protocols are fairly hard to use and they invent better wallets and more trustworthy exchanges. Mainstream, non-drug-dealer people start to like the privacy and decentralized aspects of blockchain. Big companies and investment firms start getting into crypto. Everyone starts talking about fucking NFTs even though they're not super well-understood and maybe kind of dumb. As we get to the present moment, a whole philosophical movement takes shape, as Gavin Wood claims, aimed against the internet hegemony of the Googles, Apples, Facebooks (ahem..sorry, Meta--which just frankly sounds more sinister and better to rally against), etc. here's a good explainer:

[What Is Web3, Anyway?Gavin Wood, who coined the term Web3 in 2014, believes decentralized technologies are the only hope of preserving liberal democracy.![](https://www.wired.com/verso/static/wired/assets/favicon.ico)WIREDCondé Nast![](https://media.wired.com/photos/619eb1d0d05a56e3ecdafbc7/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Business-Gavin-Wood-104148215.jpg)](https://www.wired.com/story/web3-gavin-wood-interview/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

But, now Newton's Third Law of Motion, the equal and opposite reaction:

[Keep the Web Free, Say No to Web3A look at what is wrong with Web3.![](https://yesterweb.org/img/laptop.gif)![](https://yesterweb.org/no-to-web3/img/no-to-web3.png)](https://yesterweb.org/no-to-web3/index.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Yesterweb.org is interesting because they're Web 1.0 marxists who seem to be against the profit-motive in all forms and think that Web3-ers are just the newest generation of snakeoil salesmen. Their online [zine](https://yesterweb.org/zine/?ref=nickrroberts.com) is pretty interesting if for nothing else than the nostalgia and creativity. I don't subscribe to the idea that making money online is bad in all forms and that we should revert the entire internet to a socialist regime of Web 1.0 servers where everyone has a right to a shitty Geocities site for free forever.

Moving on, anti-Web3-ers right-click and download other people's NFTs with no recourse:

[Right-clickers vs. the monkey JPG ownersRead to the end for a really good supercut![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/53326642-cb31-4ad1-b8c7-87771a4cc42c/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Garbage DayRyan Broderick![](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1200,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.substack.com%2Fmedia%2FFD8GIhOXwAYbx_E.jpg)](https://www.garbageday.email/p/right-clickers-vs-the-monkey-jpg?ref=nickrroberts.com)

And finally, why do some Web3 people seem like zealous cultists who want to build coin-shaped cities on Volcanos?

[Model City Monday 12/6/21How sinister do you have to be before you get to call your volcano-based structure a “volcano lair”?![](https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8c00a032-defa-44b7-9ab7-b7cc6d88db75/apple-touch-icon-1024x1024.png)Astral Codex TenScott Alexander![](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1200,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F23a32c5f-3a13-40d3-963c-09f664f6bab0_320x214.jpeg)](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/model-city-monday-12621)

I'm probably going to write a whole article on Web3 and its trends soon. 

## Links and media commentary

### Philosophizing

Some of the work of Naval Ravikant, one of the most interesting technologist-turned-thinkers I follow.

[Ideas Are the New OilHumans have a history of conquest because we fight for the same exact resources, but even in human history the first explorers were traders. They were going out there to find spices, gold, silk, new plants to domesticate, new animals. They weren’t going out there necessarily to conquer the land. Ev…![](https://149396263.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/themes/naval/images/favicon/android-chrome-512x512.png)Naval![](https://i0.wp.com/nav.al/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Navatar.png?fit=1080%2C1080&ssl=1)](https://nav.al/ideas?ref=nickrroberts.com)

[HappinessA collection of all my episodes on happiness. Live Long Enough and You’ll Become a Philosopher This podcast is a practical philosophy of health, wealth and happiness Let’s talk about why we’re doing this podcast. It’s really a discussion of highly practical philosophy. Philosophy, as we normally…![](https://149396263.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/themes/naval/images/favicon/android-chrome-512x512.png)Naval![](https://i0.wp.com/nav.al/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Navatar.png?fit=1080%2C1080&ssl=1)](https://nav.al/happiness?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Foreign policy

More stuff about China...and the weird stuff happening in Ukraine. Would highly recommend checking out the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) podcast. I've been listening to them on my runs and I think they're generally terrific.

[Taiwan commissions advanced new F-16s as China threat growsTaiwan President Tsai Ing-wen lauded military cooperation with Washington on Thursday as she commissioned the first combat wing of F-16 fighters upgraded with U.S. help to bolster the island’s defences during rising tensions between Taipei and Beijing.![](https://www.reuters.com/pf/resources/icons/favicon.ico?d=60)ReutersAnn Wang![](https://www.reuters.com/resizer/65sBeplb_UuIcfjsbSEv8lB6bSk=/1200x628/smart/filters:quality(80)/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/7ISWTREV4RIYJNAVLNOMAS7P2I.jpg)](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-commissions-advanced-new-f-16s-china-threat-grows-2021-11-18/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

[‎Western Way of War: Sam Cranny Evans: Chinese Ground Forces on Apple Podcasts‎Show Western Way of War, Ep Sam Cranny Evans: Chinese Ground Forces - Nov 25, 2021![](https://podcasts.apple.com/favicon.ico)Apple Podcasts![](https://is4-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts126/v4/a4/75/76/a4757625-8d99-86cb-5d25-6f3abdddb86b/mza_13020892163785929612.png/1200x630wp.png)](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/western-way-of-war/id1516837374?i=1000543043379&ref=nickrroberts.com)

[EXPLAINER: What’s behind Russia-Ukraine tensions? | AP NewsMOSCOW (AP) — Ukrainian and Western officials are worried that a Russian military buildup near Ukraine could signal plans by Moscow to invade its ex-Soviet neighbor.![](https://apnews.com/branding/favicon/256.png)Associated PressVLADIMIR ISACHENKOV![](https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/974b4e79694e4d7eac0be7497cd10ba9/2523.jpeg)](https://apnews.com/article/europe-russia-ukraine-vladimir-putin-moscow-1170930d07c3b41d227dbf44b062aa26?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Aviation: The sixth generation

What is it? No one is super sure yet. Do they even have pilots? Some programs seem like they will, others don't.

[Sixth-generation fighter - Wikipedia![](https://en.wikipedia.org/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png)Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/FCAS_NGF_mock-up_at_Paris_Air_Show_2019_(1).jpg/1200px-FCAS_NGF_mock-up_at_Paris_Air_Show_2019_(1).jpg)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth-generation%5Ffighter?wprov=sfti1&ref=nickrroberts.com)

**The Italian-UK collab version**:

[BAE Systems Tempest - Wikipedia![](https://en.wikipedia.org/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png)Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8a/Team_tempest.jpg)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE%5FSystems%5FTempest?wprov=sfti1&ref=nickrroberts.com)

**The US version**:

[The US Air Force’s radical plan for a future fighter could field a jet in 5 yearsThe U.S. Air Force is seeking rapid-fire plane production as it tries to surpass the capabilities of near-peer competitors like Russia and China.![](https://www.defensenews.com/pf/resources/img/favicons/def/apple-touch-icon.png?d=80)Defense NewsValerie Insinna![](https://www.defensenews.com/resizer/qdk3wUDpFxeB9zmZjigYCO6UhoA=/1024x0/filters:format(jpg):quality(70)/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/UQNIDVJ2RJADBHLNUYV3GU55I4.jpg)](https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/2019/09/16/the-us-air-forces-radical-plan-for-a-future-fighter-could-field-a-jet-in-5-years/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

**The Russian version** ("In an interview for Russia Today, the Director General of RSK MiG, Ilya Tarasenko, speculated that it would be a new construction capable of Mach number 4–4.3, equipped with an anti-missile laser"):

[Mikoyan PAK DP - Wikipedia![](https://en.wikipedia.org/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png)Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects![](https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/wikimedia-button.png)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan%5FPAK%5FDP?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Random

I affectionately remember these kinds of cheesy Lord of the Rings collectibles from the days of Skymall on the plane. 

[The Mace of Sauron And The One RingGet the massive powerful Lord of the Rings Mace of Sauron - Free Shipping with $149 order![](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-q1kruok83x/product_images/LOTR-favicon-32x32.png?t=1626726544)Lord of The Rings Store![](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-q1kruok83x/products/118/images/393/A05-UC3034__56858.1618933611.386.513.jpg?c=1)](https://lordoftheringsstore.com/the-mace-of-sauron-and-the-one-ring/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Good things from YouTube

Good old Utah.

Meal worms seem like the kind of horrifying and efficient things that would survive the apocalypse and consume the bodies everything else that died and end up the dominant life-form on Earth. 

Stay healthy,

Nick
### More November links: Blockfi, Flying the Pitts S-2B, US-China Tensions
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/blockfi-flying-the-pitts-s-2b-us-china-tensions/
Last updated: 2025-05-06T17:21:52.000Z
Yes, the design of this newsletter is different. Cleaner, one might say. I switched [my site](https://nickrroberts.com/) over to the self-hosted [Ghost](http://ghost.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com) platform which was a fun little diversion these last few days. Got to flex muscles I haven't used in a while: Lots of Linux server admin and such. Ghost is kind of like the open-source equivalent to Substack, but without all of the "PUBLISH ON SUBSTACK--DID YOU HEAR THAT OUR NAME IS SUBSTACK. SUBSTACK. SUBSTACK." branding. Ghost makes it easy to publish articles on a site and distro them to all the places you'd care to. Emailing to members is built right into the publishing system, which is pretty slick. Saves me a ton of time re-writing stuff in Mailchimp. Plus, I think it all looks pretty nice. Anyhow, not trying to shill, just proud of the new look. 

## This edition's rabbit-hole: [Blockfi](https://blockfi.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com). 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-15.png)

I've recently become a fan of The [All The Hacks](https://www.allthehacks.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) blog/podcast. This guy, Chris Hutchins, is power-nerd about luxury-maximization-for-less-or-no-money. Fiona and I liked [episode #20](https://www.allthehacks.com/listener-questions/?ref=nickrroberts.com), which is his no-fluff breakdown of essentially all of the low-hanging value fruit for credit cards and travel. Hutchins works at [Wealthfront](https://www.wealthfront.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com), of which I'm also a fan, and so he's pretty tuned into the Fintech space. He interviewed the CEO of Blockfi, which is essentially a company that provides super high-interest crypto checking accounts and also super high-interest crypto loans to...well, I'm not sure. More on that in a sec. The interview was good. You can tell that the guy, Zac Prince, is a crypto-optimist through and though and that he genuinely means well. The podcast gave me enough confidence to fund an account at Blockfi and it's actually been a great ride. At the time of this writing, they're offering 9% interest on "stablecoins" (cryptocurrencies with consistent values usually tied to the US Dollar). That's sort of unbelievable when you hear it for the first time, considering the cash I had in my USD savings account was earning a paltry 0.1%. Everyone I've spoken with about it usually has some line like "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." Well, I can see the interest I'm generating and I've also made a test withdrawal so as far as I can tell, it's legit. They're also based in the US and so it's harder to run away with people's money. Still, they're notably not FDIC-insured and there's definitely some risk. They have a big yellow banner on their site about all of the pending litigation brought against them in various US states. Lots of regulators want to regulate Blockfi like they're peddling securities and not cash. Despite that, I'm probably just going hold on until I have reason to believe this is a really bad idea. Still, I have lingering suspicions mostly about their lending operations that drive the high interest I'm enjoying. Who the hell is paying \~12-15% interest on a crypto loan when US Dollars are practically free money? The Fed, King Fiat, wants you to borrow and spend money like crazy right now to pull us out of the COVID economic nosedive. Liquidity is everywhere at essentially no cost. So...why? I haven't found a super compelling answer, but [this page](https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/personal-loans/what-is-a-crypto-loan?ref=nickrroberts.com) says it could be about taxes: "A crypto loan may make sense if someone holds a substantial amount of crypto and wants to liquidate it without having to sell and possibly pay taxes on it..." Also, there's no credit check for a Blockfi loan (you put up a lot of collateral instead is my understanding), so basically people with no other option could be the ones taking these loans. I don't love that idea. I worried for a while that maybe Blockfi and companies like them were funding Al Qaeda or foreign warlords, but I'm less certain because they have a pretty rigorous "Know Your Customer" flow prior to letting you deposit funds or take a loan. Anyhow, jury is still out (literally) on Blockfi, but the interest is terrific in the near-term. 

## Links and media commentary

### Video Games: [Doki Doki Literature Club](https://ddlc.moe/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-16.png)

I think I'm pretty late to this one, but it was advertised to me as "up there with Resident Evil on horror game lists." My friend Nic played through the whole thing on Halloween and was clearly affected by it. I thought it was hilarious that this innocent-looking anime game featuring Japanese high school girls could be so terrifying, so I tried it too. Calling it a game is a little generous, it's more like a visual novel where you tab through a bunch of text. And I wouldn't call it "horror" exactly. Like there aren't any monsters or jumpy moments, but it gets under your skin. It made me remember the dark undercurrents of high school and how people and crushes could be so cruel. 

### Foreign Policy: US-China War

[What Will Drive China to War?A cold war is already under way. The question is whether Washington can deter Beijing from initiating a hot one.![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/apple-touch-icon-152x152-aafde20dd981a38fcd549b29b2b3b785.png)The AtlanticMichael Beckley, Hal Brands![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ue36eRi4aq1Mj8Pd7E9iRIHj50M=/0x163:3834x2160/960x500/media/img/mt/2021/11/NotOneInch_A/original.jpg)](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/us-china-war/620571/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Aviation: There's a Su-75 now?

[Russia doesn’t seem sure the Su-75 Checkmate will be stealthEarlier this year, Russia unveiled their forthcoming ‘stealth fighter,’ the single-engine Su-75 Checkmate, with bold claims about its expected performance and capabilities. Now, as the fighter is being displayed on foreign soil for the first time at this week’s Dubai Air Show, formal statements from…![](https://www.sandboxx.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-iTunesArtwork-270x270.png)SandboxxAlex Hollings![](https://www.sandboxx.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/su-57-su-75-2-960x602-1.jpeg)](https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/russia-doesnt-seem-sure-the-su-75-checkmate-will-be-stealth/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Aviation: Swiss Air Force F-18 Hornet Demo...In the Alps (Courtesy of my Friend, Rob)

[AXALP 2021 The Greatest AvGeek Show on Earth!! Spectacular Swiss AirForce Live Firing!!: AIR.TV#AXALP #AXALP21 #LIVEFIRE #F18 THE GREATEST AVGEEK SHOW ON EARTH: SWITZERLAND’S AXALP LIVE-FIRE DEMO Axalp is, in my humble opinion, very likely the best air show on earth, although the Swiss Air Force will be quick to tell you that it’s not really an airshow, rather, it’s a live-fire training ex…![](https://www.air.tv/favicon/apple-touch-icon.png)AIR.TV![](https://cdn-sp-gcs.air.tv/thumbnails/EawR5ErkRiuOxbsMhH3aOQ/640x360-cropped/image-1636490815.jpeg)](https://www.air.tv/watch?v=EawR5ErkRiuOxbsMhH3aOQ&ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Random: Flesh-Eating Worms

[America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating WormsInside the U.S. and Panama’s long-running collaboration to rid an entire continent of a deadly disease![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/apple-touch-icon-152x152-aafde20dd981a38fcd549b29b2b3b785.png)The AtlanticSarah Zhang![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/5wMrXDLVAIIdEHFuoP60Teow8DU=/0x30:2995x1590/960x500/media/img/mt/2020/05/Screwworm_final/original.jpg)](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-eating-worms-disease-containment-america-panama/611026/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Good Things from YouTube

**Me, flying the Pitts S-2B:**

**The most insane ski run I've ever seen (courtesy of my friend Rob):**

**Jurassic Park, but with a cat:**

**Parasitoid wasps**. [This is the article](https://goodoptics.wordpress.com/2021/11/05/wawawa/?ref=nickrroberts.com) I read that led me to this video. It's about how Charles Darwin questioned his faith in god because of these things:

Stay healthy!

Nick
### On learning to fly, part II
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/on-learning-to-fly-ii/
Last updated: 2024-01-16T18:09:53.000Z
Continued from part one “[Aviation as craft and continuous improvement.](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/learning%5Fto%5Ffly1.html)” Below is a list of my most important lessons-learned while I fumbled my way to a Private Pilot certificate.

### 1\. Complete a ground-school curriculum and pass the FAA written exam before any serious flight training.

Getting acquainted academically with aerodynamics, weather, airport markings, flight procedures, instruments and so forth made the actual practice of flight much more familiar for me when I finally started in earnest. Plus, having all of that ground school and the written exam out of the way lets you actually focus on flight training when you get to it. I found the ground schooling to be a serious time commitment because of the sheer volume of material you need to internalize for the test.

The thing to know about the written exam is that the FAA pulls from a standard pool of questions. Most online ground schools will give you tests that use the exact wording from the question bank. If you do it right, you shouldn’t see a question on the FAA written exam that really surprises you. They may change a few of the parameters or details of a given question, but there’s a standard format.

To practice, I found tons of useful pre-made flash cards sets on Quizlet like [this one](https://quizlet.com/412619061/faa-private-pilot-written-flash-cards/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

### 2\. Start by getting to know your training plane inside and out.

**Buy a hard copy of the Pilot’s Operating Handbook (POH).** This will come in handy throughout your training and on your checkride. Since the practical test is open-book, examiners will gladly let you peruse it and I often found it faster and less clumsy than attempting to pull up the PDF on my iPad.

- I found [this series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPliABFEL0c&t=219s&ref=nickrroberts.com) from Embry Riddle on Youtube to be immensely helpful for understanding the basics of the Cessna 172.
- Be able to name every doohickey that sticks out of the plane. Examiners love to point at random things protruding from the wings or fuselage and ask you “what’s that and what does it do?” Things like the pitot tube, static port, auto-pilot static port, ELT antenna, GPS pucks, comms/nav antennas, etc. [This is a great little reference](https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/students/presolo/special/antennas?ref=nickrroberts.com).
- You’ll be asked to use all or most of the avionics in the plane during the practical test, so time invested learning those up front is well-spent. The key things to learn first: How to tune frequencies on the radio, how to use the GPS if you have one (be able to go “direct to” an airport code or find the nearest airport for a diversion), and how to use the ADSB-In (if you have one) to monitor other air traffic in your vicinity. If you can use those systems, you’ve covered \~90% of what you’ll need to know for an exam.

### 3\. Drill radio calls to learn them by heart.

One of the most intimidating things for me starting out was talking to air traffic control (ATC). There’s a lot of jargon involved and brevity is critical. There are three basic calls to master first if you train like I did at a towered airport.

- Call ground to taxi. “San Carlos Ground \[**who you’re talking to**\], Cessna 290TW \[**who you are**\], Fly Bay Area parking \[**where you are**\] ready for taxi to the runup, Oracle departure \[**what you want**\], with information alpha. \[**ATIS code**\]”
- Call tower for takeoff clearance. “San Carlos Tower, Cessna 290TW, runway 30 runup, ready for departure.”
- Call tower for re-entering the airspace. “San Carlos Tower, Cessna 290TW, Coyote Hills 2000 \[**where you are and your altitude**\], inbound full stop with alpha.”

I would practice them on my drive over to the field.

If you mess up or forget what to say next, know that you can always say “standby,” collect your thoughts, and then make the call again. This happened to me a ton when I’d forget the ATIS code.

### 4\. Get an iPad Mini, a yoke mount, and pay for the standard version of ForeFlight.

With the [G1000-equipped](https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/6420?ref=nickrroberts.com) planes this is probably less critical since you have traffic and a moving map on the multifunction display , but if you’re flying a “steam gauge” Cessna like I was, having an iPad mounted to the yoke as a nav aid and VFR chart reference was immeasurably helpful. I didn’t really know that this was such a hack until I failed my first attempt at a pre-solo stage check with the flight school owner. I was all over the place. I didn’t have my paper charts in the front seat with me (forgot them in my backpack). I wasn’t writing down any of the ATC instructions and would forget small details like the altimeter setting reported in the ATIS. He would ask me how high I could go before hitting the bravo airspace above us in our vicinity and I couldn’t remember. It all made me flustered and discombobulated. Not great.

I recommend getting the iPad Mini because of space reasons. The bigger iPads are pretty bulky in the cockpit of the Cessna 172 (even more so in the 152) and impede your view of important things like the RPM gauge. Plus, the Mini is cheaper.

ForeFlight is hands-down the best flight-assistance technology I came across during my Private Pilot training. If you’re unfamiliar, there’s a good walkthrough [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIkcIVvzG6g&t=1046s&ref=nickrroberts.com), but, generally, it’s an app that provides:

- Maps of all kinds (VFR, IFR).
- A digital scratch pad for ATIS readouts and ATC instructions (which can often be long and have lots of numbers in them — like frequencies and squawk codes for flight following). I just use my finger to write stuff on the fly here.
- A place to house common documents related to your flight. I created a folder called “Checkride” for all of the charts, airport diagrams and so forth that I needed for test day. Supremely helpful.
- Flight planning tools. They make cross-country planning a total breeze compared to writing navlogs by hand and it’s much more precise than an E6B “whizwheel.”
- Weather information and briefings.
- Flight plan filing and activation.
- Airport information at a tap (airport diagrams, frequencies, runway lengths, pattern information, local winds, etc.).
- Time, distance, fuel estimations.
- A heck of a lot more I probably don’t even know about.

It’s used by civilians and militaries alike around the world. In case it’s not obvious, I’m a huge fan.

Having ForeFlight ready on the iPad in front of you is a massive boost for your situational awareness. I found it cool that it connected to the wifi signal emitted by the plane’s L3 transponder and I could project other live traffic and my own location all on one screen. It makes navigation a cinch. In general, err on the side of whatever reduces your task load as a pilot, it’s safest that way.

I purchased [this yoke mount](https://www.marvgolden.com/ram-yoke-mount-for-ipads.html?ref=nickrroberts.com#663=2564).

### 5\. Hammer the pattern early in your training to fly the coveted “first solo.”

To clear you to fly by yourself, instructors need to make sure you can safely take off and land and that’s about it. Your radio calls should be passable, but they don’t have to be perfect. Performance maneuvers mostly come later (although you should know what a stall feels like and how to avoid one in the pattern — essentially, don’t fly around with a weird nose-up attitude or load up the wings in turns when you’re only 1,000ft AGL). So, a few tips for mastering the pattern:

- Develop the sight-picture for a good landing profile (illustrated below). Get a sense of what “high” and “low” feel like by asking your instructor to demo those.
- Airspeed is king. Drill crossing the threshold at 65 knots (Cessna 172) or equivalent for your aircraft. Other than keeping centerline and the longitudinal axis of the plane straight down the runway, airspeed is the critical component of the landing. It's what determines your floatiness in the flare. Too much and you float all the way down the runway and have to go around. Too little, say 5–8 knots slow, and you can’t really flare and you land harder.
- Practice flaring by just not letting the plane land. You don’t have to do anything crazy with the nose, just hold it about level with the horizon. One of my instructors would practice this with me and we’d count the seconds I was holding off the wheels from touching at an idle power setting just above the runway. We’d always aim for about six to eight. Flaring in this way when done well sets the plane down nice and easy. [A good demo of this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cadv4fkljZ8&ref=nickrroberts.com).
- One of the first things my instructor had me do was memorize the diagram below and “chair fly” it (sit in your home office chair, close your eyes, and go through the motions as you would in the aircraft). It really helps.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2400/1*CglW4W5Qm4hLDkJR348kjw.png)

- Practice this as many times as necessary in the simulator if you have one, more on that below.
- Schedule “pattern flights” with your instructor outside of the syllabus and go to an uncontrolled field for touch and goes. Do 10–15 normal landings and call it a day. A few days like that and you’ll be sticking landings routinely and developing your “feel.”

### 6\. Pepper “flying blitzes” into your training as often as you can manage.

At about ten-month mark, I was frustrated with my slow progress through the syllabus. I targeted two flights per week, but averaged fewer with vacations and time out of town. So, I tacked on two vacation days to Memorial Day weekend and flew for five consecutive days (my first “blitz”), busting out all of my cross-country and most of my night-flying in the process. This changed the game. My skills and confidence as a pilot skyrocketed with so much time behind the yoke packed into that short window.

Since flight and instructor hours drive your cost, the more of those you use to learn the required maneuvers or knowledge, the pricier your certificate will be. The tested way to reduce the number of hours to hit each milestone, such as your first solo or first solo cross-country, is to fly more often and condense your learning.

### 7\. Use sims to nail flows and maneuvers.

Use Microsoft Flight Simulator (MFS) and the sim at your flight school if they have one. There’s a good reason both the military and civilian airlines fully train pilots in simulators. These days, they’re incredibly realistic and cost-effective. A friend of mine at Skywest didn’t touch a real Embraer until his first flight with passengers!

While a home-built sim with MFS is much lower fidelity than those used to train commercial pilots (which have fake cockpits made to the exact specifications of actual aircraft), training on your PC works wonders for learning maneuvers. If you can swing it, I’d recommend grabbing a USB yoke, throttle, and rudder pedals. It’s a whole lot cheaper (and pretty transferrable to the real world) to practice stalls, steep turns, landings, realistic emergencies etc. at home than in the air.

There are also amazing plugins for MFS. [This is a walkthrough](https://support.foreflight.com/hc/en-us/articles/204115275-How-do-I-connect-Microsoft-Flight-Simulator-FS-X-or-FS-2004-to-ForeFlight-?ref=nickrroberts.com) to connect your virtual flight to ForeFlight.

The [yoke, throttle, rudder pedals pack](https://www.mypilotstore.com/mypilotstore/sep/13358?ref=nickrroberts.com) I purchased.

### 8\. Rack up all the style points you can on the checkride before you start the test.

You have to know your stuff, but the best way to get the examiner “on your side” psychologically and rooting for you is to show up looking prepared and ready with all required documentation. If you win them over, they may (possibly) look the other way if you trip the line on any airman certification standards…

Tips for test day:

- Make sure your documents are totally in order and you have them all with you: Student pilot certificate, medical, government photo ID. I keep everything in a plastic folder with dividers in it.
- Bring your aircraft’s maintenance logs and make sure you go through it with your instructor beforehand and identify all of the relevant annual and 100 hour inspection entries. Know how to prove your airplane is airworthy when asked!
- Bring a current terminal area chart and VFR sectional for your locale
- Bring your logbook and tab your night and cross-country flights. This and following bullets have a theme: Tabs = style points.
- Bring a current FAR/AIM that looks a little dog-eared. Make sure that you tab frequently-referenced regulations. I tabbed many of the same sections detailed in [this post](https://avidaviatrix.wixsite.com/website/post/what-to-tab-out-in-your-far-aim?ref=nickrroberts.com).
- Bring the POH hard copy and tab out the emergencies sections (engine fire, engine power loss, etc.) as well as fuel and electrical diagrams.
- Bring your iPad with ForeFlight and all documents related to the flight that the examiner had you plan in a special folder (airport diagrams, chart supplements — make sure to have bookmarks in the AFD for any hotspots in the airport diagrams at hand)
- Use the “airspace triangle” to memorize all of the cloud clearance and visibility requirements for each type of airspace. This one was super helpful for me.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*AWqtSaRAWQ3BNuTb.png)

- Get re-endorsed for solo in a way that supersedes any flight school limitations. My school’s standard solo policy had explicit prohibitions against touch and goes. So, my examiner made it very clear that I would fail immediately if I tried to do a touch and go and my latest endorsement said I couldn’t. I got a new one right before test day that stipulated my only limitation was 8 statute miles of visibility at home field.
- Eat a full meal beforehand.
- No alcohol in the preceding two days.
- Make sure you get 8+ hours of sleep on each of the preceding two nights.

#### **In conclusion**

This was one of the most grueling but worthwhile endeavors I’ve taken up in my life. The biggest reward for snagging your Private Pilot certificate, other than being able to fly yourself to cool places, is that you always have a card in your wallet that reminds you that you’re a total badass. It signifies that you can overcome hardship, stick to difficult pursuits, and face your fears.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if any of the above advice is unclear, or if you feel like I missed something big. Thanks for reading!
### First aerobatics in a Pitts S-2B
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/first-aerobatics-in-a-pitts-s-2b/
Last updated: 2022-02-06T20:48:39.000Z
Flew the Pitts Special out of Livermore, CA. Many thanks to John De Gennaro and XL Aviation for the opportunity! This was a gift-to-self for landing my Private Pilot certificate.
### On learning to fly, part I
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/on-learning-to-fly-i/
Last updated: 2024-01-16T17:47:05.000Z
The first installment of a two-part series on the philosophy and practice of learning to fly.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*3sHU83UlRO3GDTzobijU2Q.jpeg)

Cred: [Daria Sukhorukova](https://unsplash.com/@dariasukhorukova?ref=nickrroberts.com)

In March of 2020, San Francisco began its comprehensive lockdowns to stem the Coronavirus tide. Our usual sources of entertainment dried up faster than the moisture from the brief storms that sweep over Death Valley. I did what thousands of other nerds did with their pandemic free time and custom-built a PC. Something with enough horsepower to run an Oculus Rift with high-grade graphics and no dropped frames so I could get the hell out of reality for a while. It was escapism from weeks in the same room and neighborhood. Jumping on a flight with Fiona to go back to Utah, my home state, seemed dubious. All those enclosed and stifling spaces with hundreds of other people.

I’ve always been fascinated by airplanes, being an Air Force kid, raised on air shows and aviation museums. Something about those big, loud machines hanging in the air gives me goosebumps. Equipped with my Oculus and my souped-up computer, I started to wonder if I could use virtual reality to approximate a second life altogether: One where I decided be a pilot like my dad and not a Bay Area technologist. I moved on to VR flying games like *War Thunder*, *Ace Combat*, and others until I stumbled onto *Digital Combat Simulator* (DCS).

DCS is not for the faint of heart. It’s a way of life. My most [popular article thus far](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/dcs.html) is a beginners’ guide on how to get it up and running in VR. The learning curve is steep and the complexity of flying and combat mixed with all of the capricious technology intimidates even real fighter pilots. But the reward is its striking realism. I got in deep; acquired all kinds of fancy hardware. I upgraded my Rift and shelled out for the Logitech X-56 and rudder pedals. But after a while, I began to feel that at the core of all of this effort was a kind of emptiness. The same kind I get from binging on Netflix and popcorn for days on end. I was spending all of this time, energy, and money on high-grade simulation and yet I still would have no idea what to do if plonked in the cockpit of a real plane (*there’s no keyboard shortcut to start the engine?*).

I also began to have a sneaking suspicion that I was no closer to experiencing what my dad did in the Air Force than when I started. DCS, after all, is a game. Real flying comes with real risk. And that risk, I reasoned, was part of what makes flying meaningful. Your life is literally in your hands. G-forces, the occasional spurts of adrenaline, and thousands of other factors also make the *feel* of it impossible to fully replicate in a sim. It dawned on me that this digital second life, running like a [parallel Java thread](https://medium.com/@peterlee2068/concurrency-and-parallelism-in-java-f625bc9b0ca4?ref=nickrroberts.com), was not going to cut it if I wanted to satisfy my ingrained desire to know what it actually is to fly.

Many flight schools offer a no-strings-attached demo flight and I decided to do one. You don’t have to commit to lessons or a membership, but you go up for about 30 minutes with an instructor in something like a Cessna 172 or a Piper Archer. They do most of the flying, but you get a few precious moments to take control of the yoke and the throttle. The first time you steer a real plane is elating. The forces work on your body and you can feel all of the tiny imperfections of the air though the flight controls. The view offers an entirely new perspective on your city. During my demo flight, I was awed at just how unfamiliar everything felt after months of DCS. It was completely alien. I was humbled. After we returned, I decided right there on the ramp to continue the program.

After starting formal lessons, it became apparent that this was real work. The student materials package came with a stack of books, which focus on everything from flight physics to the particular fuel and electrical systems of your aircraft to more than you ever wanted to know about weather. It’s an enormous amount of information to ingest. On top of this, the practice of flying takes a lot of finesse, even seemingly simple tasks like taxiing. It took me many flight hours to figure out how to manipulate the rudder pedals to prevent the plane from swerving left and right in giant arcs. But as with most students, landing the plane was for me the most difficult task of the entry-level maneuvers. There is an art to the flare-and-settle that you can only develop from repeated tries. When a student pilot conducts all flight operations with no instructor assistance, it’s a massive achievement.

But where does this all lead if, as in my case, you’re not looking to make flying a career? After about ten flight hours and completing the ground school courses I felt like I had attained my initial objective, which was to become basically acquainted with what it means to be a pilot. I’d developed a sense for everything one needs to consider before takeoff, how to turn, climb and descend. I’d performed various kinds of stalls and other maneuvers. Why continue on to the full Private Pilot certificate? And even after that, why continue? Generally-speaking, it’s much more economical to fly coach on a Boeing 737 to get where you need to go.

In a similar vein, my father hasn’t flown regularly since leaving the Air Force and I’ve asked him why he doesn’t indulge in a little general aviation now and again. Imagine, he says, driving a Ferrari (the F-15E Strike Eagle) for a couple decades and then downgrading to a Ford Pinto (something like a Cessna 172). Why would you want to do that? My dad’s take makes me laugh, although I notice that there are plenty of other ex-Air Force types who adore flying the smaller, slower general aviation planes.

The answers to all of these questions depends on how you frame your value judgments. You can either see a practice, such as flying, as a utility; a means to an end (like flying for money or to get somewhere quickly), or you can view it as a craft, where you strive continuously to learn and you treat every improvement as an end in itself. For me, flying is a craft, like my relationships, my job, and writing. At the center of every one of these areas is a ritual or repetitive element of some kind. Developing relationships takes repeated acts of love and kindness. Long term success in a career takes daily, incremental refinements of certain skills. It’s rare to find anyone good at writing who hasn’t practiced extensively. And, importantly, there is no bottom. There is no point, even flying the same Cessna on the same route every day, where you’ve learned it all. You can only ever approximate perfection.

With flying, ritual is similarly integral to learning, but also a way to find meaning in the flight. We repeat maneuvers, checklists and radio calls. It is thrilling to nail them. And even within the parts I already grasp, there is always some aspect that I never knew or understood previously: New functions in my avionics, or dialing in my trim technique. That feeling is addictive. It reminds me sometimes of Catholic mass, which I grew up attending. You repeat the same genuflections and sacraments in the same order all while meditating on your connection to God. As a kid, I often felt tortured and bored sitting through that cycle. As an adult, I understand that the sameness is the point and that it is possible to look past the repetitions and find joy in looking at a scripture verse or a song in a new light.

A lot of the people I’ve come across at my flight school are very goal-oriented. Most are there to get certifications as a pilot or hours as a CFI (Certified Flight Instructor) to ultimately make a career out of it. They look at me funny when I say I’m flying for the love of the craft. But when I glance across the San Carlos ramp at the guy sitting on a lawn chair in his hangar next to his restored T-34 Mentor with bullet-hole stickers plastered to the canopy, I see a fellow traveler. The hangar is full of motorcycles and decorated with Air Force and miscellaneous flying paraphernalia. He doesn’t fly for money or hours; he brings family and friends out for joyrides. To me, he serves as a good reminder of the majesty of flight for its own sake next to the fleet of Cessnas purposed to train pilots for the airlines.

[Next: Part II, strategy and tactics for student pilots](https://nickrroberts.com/on-learning-to-fly-ii/)
### November links: US-China War Fiction, Drones, Far Cry 6
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/us-china-war-fiction-drones-far-cry-6/
Last updated: 2023-09-03T01:42:46.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-10.png)

  
After about April or so of this year when I posted the last article I shared publicly ([this one](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/piece%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fmosiac.html)) I made a promise to myself to stop bullshitting and juggling eight hobbies to focus on nabbing my Private Pilot certificate, which I just did this last Wednesday. It was a grueling 6-hour ordeal (which I'm told by some CFIs I know is a little crazy for the most basic pilot qualification) and I came out the other end of it exhausted and I practically wept when the FAA examiner handed me my "temporary airman certificate." It's been a year and four months since I started the journey, 106 flight hours, so it was elating to cross that finish line on my first checkride attempt.   
  
In the wake of that experience, I'm writing a two-part series on flying, starting with "why do it if you're not flying for a career" and then another piece on tactical advice for aspiring private pilots. Those should come out over the next week, so this installment of the newsletter is going to focus on media of interest.

## This edition's rabbit-hole: Taiwan and US-China war possibilities 

The geopolitics around Taiwan are crazy. Technically, neither Taiwan nor China have relinquished territorial claims on the other. Taiwan still claims mainland China as its illegally-occupied land and China considers Taiwan a rogue state. China overflies and incurs on Taiwan's airspace routinely with military planes. Xi Jinping consistently makes [aggressive noises](https://www.cfr.org/blog/what-xi-jinpings-major-speech-means-taiwan?ref=nickrroberts.com) about re-taking the country by force. To top it all, the United States has a policy of "strategic ambiguity" about whether they would actually come to Taiwan's defense if it were attacked, but yet our leaders, dating back to Nixon, [chose to endorse the One-China policy](https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL30341.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) as a way to normalize relations with Mao during the Cold War. It's confusing and a little scary.   
  
I recently read "[2034](https://www.amazon.com/2034-Novel-Next-World-War/dp/1984881256?ref=nickrroberts.com)" by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis and "[Ghost Fleet](https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World/dp/054470505X?ref=nickrroberts.com)" by P.W. Singer and August Cole, which are both fiction novels about a near-future US-China conflict and noticed some funny parallels and differences between the two.

- Both characterize the United States as basically in decline and have bleak views about the next ten or so years.
- In both, the Chinese employ [magical weapons](https://www.reddit.com/r/Military/comments/l5e8n6/comment/goazgwf/?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=web2x&context=3) (some absurd AI in **2034*'s case and US-reliance on Chinese microchips in **Ghost Fleet*'s case) to thwart US military technology like the F-35\. They both really shit on the F-35.
- Both seem to romanticize the "old" military tech: The mothballed ghost fleet and the F-18 Hornet. Strikes me as curmudgeonliness and fear of change.
- Both sets of authors reveal what I think is a staggering ignorance about cyberwarfare and how it actually works. **Ghost Fleet* features, among other things, hacking that is akin to dance-fighting in VR. Written like someone who took their cues from the movie **Hackers* from 1995.
- For some reason, the US's nearly 200 F-22 Raptors play absolutely no role in the fight in either book. Don't know if that's the US Navy bias coming through in the authors?
- **2034* was written after Trump was elected and has a noticeably darker view of America and its ability to be come together
- **Ghost Fleet* was written right before Trump was elected and features the United States pulling together and outsmarting and out-innovating the Chinese "Directorate" (which are basically a fascist replacement of the Communist Party and yet at odds with the US over resources, chiefly: Oil).
- While there was actually quite a bit of interesting military and strategic background in both books, they don't give the US military or US intelligence really any credit whatsoever in the early stages of these imaginary conflicts.
- **Ghost Fleet* features a lot more discussion of drones and how they will change warfare which I thought was actually prescient and interesting.

## Links and media commentary

****The most beautiful footage of an F-22 Raptor I have ever seen (courtesy of my friend Rob).** [Link](https://vimeo.com/639812245?ref=nickrroberts.com)  
  
****Counter-drone swarm technology.**[ Link](https://www.defensenews.com/land/2021/10/25/general-dynamics-epirus-team-up-to-integrate-counter-drone-swarm-system-on-combat-vehicles/?ref=nickrroberts.com)  
  
****You can learn to fly the original T-6 Texan in Palo Alto.**[ Link](https://www.bayareawarbirds.com/warbird%5Ftraining.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)  
  
****An interview with Stanley McChrystal.**[ Link](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-with-tyler/id983795625?i=1000539171121&ref=nickrroberts.com)  
  
****I've been playing Far Cry 6* on PC**. Thoughts:

- I guess open world video games need some repetition in their systems, but I felt at the end that I was slogging very similar go-here-kill-bad-guy or go-here-get-something missions to get to the next cutscene to see what the story did. I am very happy they didn’t detonate a nuke at the end like the last one. It’s also super beautiful and there were many moments where I paused to appreciate the virtual sunsets. There were lots of distracting side systems and missions that I just didn’t really care about—the bandidos operations, cockfighting, racing (all of their cars seem to handle like shit?), etc. I would have rather they invested in a killer main storyline that put more emphasis on Anton Castillo’s character (would have liked if they filled out his backstory a little more).
- Only real complaint I have is that I saw at various points what looked to be MiG-15s from Castillo’s air force flying over and I was pissed that you couldn’t fly jets and only shitty prop planes, but maybe I’m missing something

  
****The movie Dune* was fantastic**. I loved [this](https://youtu.be/00nnKL87EwE?ref=nickrroberts.com) bizarre, chilling scene. Like an idiot, I never read the book, so I'm doing that now.  
  
****A hilariously awful game trailer**. [Link](https://youtu.be/Qv2YBl9LL3s?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### First solo flight
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/first-solo/
Last updated: 2022-02-06T20:50:36.000Z
First solo flight in a Cessna 172 out of San Carlos, CA.
### A piece of the mosaic
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-piece-of-the-mosaic/
Last updated: 2021-11-17T04:20:23.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*9CpckrjQgVJPVN34_E-JOQ.jpeg)

British soldiers surrender to Japanese infantry.[ Source](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/08/04/15/2A97895700000578-3184786-image-a-135%5F1438698074929.jpg?ref=nickrroberts.com).

My early years were full of sporadic uprootings: The life of a military brat. I was born on Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. When I was four, the family moved to Virginia where my father worked at Langley, then onto Suffolk, England in the late 1990s, when he was assigned to fly fighter jets at RAF Lakenheath. We moved into a spacious Tudor-style house that our landlord, Nigel, built by hand with his son in Woodditton, a village sitting in the beautiful green fields of Cambridgeshire. I still dream about it.

Nigel was an unusual landlord in that he would show up to our house every day like he was going to work. He always had some project in process, whether it was mowing the lawn or something more ambitious like building a car port that resembled an aircraft hangar at the top of the driveway (he loved and admired aviation and desperately wanted a personal gyrocopter). My parents thought it was a little odd at first, but the sixty-something Nigel was easy to like and generous. He treated me like a grandson. “I’m going to turn you into an English boy yet,” he’d proclaim, acquainting me with British sweets, proper English tea, and lots of local history. He’d take me to wheat fields containing the overgrown remains of old B-17 airstrips, or down to Duxford Air Museum to clamber through the musty aircraft of every generation. These things sowed the seeds of my abiding interest in history and flying.

Nigel loved Americans, particularly those in the armed services, and, even more particularly, fighter pilots. He and his siblings lived through the worst of the privations of the Second World War. He would tell me stories about robbing the currant bushes of neighbors when he was a young lad. They had very little to eat as German U-boats crimped British supply lines in the Atlantic. For something to do, he’d go down with his pals to the internment camps set up on the Newmarket horse-racing course for captured Italian and German troops and barter packs of cigarettes for small toys they’d whittle out of scrap wood. The Americans, with their planes and [lend-lease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease?ref=nickrroberts.com), helped turn the tide and ultimately alleviated the rationing. He recounted to me often how magical it was the first time he had a banana after the allies “put it to the Jerries.”

Over our years in Woodditton, we met the village locals, many by Nigel’s introduction. There were the folks at The Three Blackbirds pub, Nigel’s sister Jill and her husband, Roy, whose grandson, Oliver, became one of my best friends. There was his brother, John, and his wife, Beryl, who lived right next door. Gradually, our network expanded up the road until we met a reserved but friendly couple named Jack and Doris Scrivener. It seemed as though they constantly tended to their vegetable gardens. Nigel mentioned in passing one day that Jack had fought the Japanese in the war and left it at that.

Two decades later, I was home at my parents’ house for Christmas and, in the process of cleaning out the closets in the basement, unearthed Jack’s spiral-bound book, **Memories: An account of life as a soldier and Far East POW during World War II*. I shirked my cleaning duties and sat down with it. I’ve since read it three times. The detail of Jack’s recollections was astonishing. He appeared to remember everyone he encountered, along with every meal (and bowel movement) during the war. The richness of his memories struck a strong chord with me because they animated an older version of a world that I knew. The lush, green landscape of Suffolk, with its rolling fields. The winding road through Woodditton. The cozy local pub. His memories mapped onto my own, and I could envision these places I knew as a kid but as if through a sepia tint, beset by menacing German bombers.

[Dan Carlin](https://www.dancarlin.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) covers various wars throughout history in minute detail in his podcast, **Hardcore History*. He says frequently that these events, especially the great wars of the twentieth century, spanned so much geography and involved so many people that they are impossible to fully comprehend. Every war is a vast mosaic of individual tales, and many of the pieces are lost. Professional historians compile a set of these accounts and the autobiographies of key players — generals, presidents, and prime ministers — to produce sweeping narratives and illustrate the grand strategies at work. But while these histories help us make sense of what happened on a broad scale, they remove us from the everyday heroism and suffering of the individuals who fought it. The long stretches of boredom, or persistent fights with disease, hunger, and despair. Jack refers to his story as “my war” as if to acknowledge that his experience was part of some enormous and unknowable fabric of memory.

---

Jack Scrivener was born in 1920 in Cambridgeshire. His father died when he was eight years old and he quickly found himself working the local farms after his secondary schooling to support himself and his family, but he hated farmwork and wanted badly to see the world:

“It was difficult for me to leave home as I was the only son at work and my mother needed my money badly to keep the wolf from the door. Lots of my pals had joined the army and with the likelihood of war in the near future I decided to join the Territorial Army. It was 1939 and Hitler was overrunning most of Europe so it seemed I would get my wish for adventure at last. How stupid young people are.”¹

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*p5wGdTvI_DZFyMNLuNkN4Q.png)

Jack, circa 1939.

The army assigned Jack to the First Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment and began his training in Newmarket. Here, they taught him to use a Lewis anti-aircraft machine gun and he began a stint guarding a now-defunct local airfield called RAF Stradishall.

“Sometimes we’d receive a message saying ‘Station Commander taking off shortly,’ and his little plane would be wheeled out, and away he went. A few hours later another message ‘Station Commander coming and don’t bloody well shoot him down.’”²

German forces launched their “Blitzkrieg,” or “lightning war.” Hitler’s panzers raced through a gap between allied armies at Sedan, in France, encircling the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and pushing them to the beach at Dunkirk in May of 1940\. After a fleet of thousands of small vessels and fishing boats heroically extracted BEF and French soldiers to the safety of England, the last major resistance to the German conquest of Europe was gone. The Battle of Britain began. At this point, Jack’s regiment moved to a coastal defense position between Cromer and Great Yarmouth, where they dug trenches and laid barbed wire, preparing for a full-scale German land invasion.

“At this stage of the war we stood with our Empire comrades waiting for the blow we knew would come. Sometimes at night I would be standing on the cliffs below Mundesley looking out to sea and thinking what a great period of history this will be. Although this small country was facing the mightiest military power on earth, not once did I think we would be defeated.”³

It helped some that the formidable Royal Navy, the largest in the world at the beginning of the war, also sat in the channel, but, as he saw later, airpower projection quickly became the new game in town.

Jack didn’t have to wait long. Soon, German Heinkel bombers appeared over the channel swooping inland to strike RAF airfields and civilian targets like London. In one episode, Jack, operating a Bren gun, exchanged fire with Luftwaffe bomber crews flying low over the beach.

After some weeks, Jack’s company rotated off the beach into different billeting near Norwich.

“I went with my mate Claude Starling but we had a bit of trouble getting out of the billet. A lance corporal barred our way out and told Claude he wasn’t allowed to go. Claude never hesitated. He hit him on the jaw and down he went….They sorted us out when we returned but it didn’t bother us a lot, our attitude was we might be dead in a few weeks.”⁴

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/0*6GpkyELfxPzhTxLN.jpg)

The "America" was converted into the USS West Point which carried Jack to South Africa. [Source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/USS%5FWest%5FPoint%5F%28AP-23%29%5Fbeing%5Frepainted%5Ffor%5Fnaval%5Fservice%2C%5F2%5FJune%5F1941%5F%2819-N-24561%29.jpg/440px-USS%5FWest%5FPoint%5F%28AP-23%29%5Fbeing%5Frepainted%5Ffor%5Fnaval%5Fservice%2C%5F2%5FJune%5F1941%5F%2819-N-24561%29.jpg?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Jack’s division moved up to Scotland for training in maneuvers and then back down to the Midlands for more drills, and finally boarded an American cruise liner called the **West Point* after learning they were being deployed somewhere in the Middle East. During the course of this training, Jack dated constantly like he was on [Rumspringa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa?ref=nickrroberts.com). One of the first things Sue Ecclestone, who transcribed Jack’s journals into digital form for printing, said to me was: “Jack always had an eye for the ladies.” In his introduction, Jack (80 years old) tells of sitting in his garden under his walnut tree when “sometimes a pretty young lady would go by and Jack would stir his old frame and think of the days long ago when he would have smartly tagged along after her.”⁵

To avoid German raiders in the North Atlantic, the **West Point* sailed to Halifax and turned south, linking up with a group of escorts in Trinidad in the Caribbean. “It was the famous cruiser ‘The Dorsetshire,’ the ship that had finished off the ‘Bismarck’ earlier in the year.”⁶ Their journey continued south to Cape Town, South Africa. It was December 1941\. As they were nearing port, they received word that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

“The crews of the **West Point* were stunned by the news. Japan, without declaring war, had dealt the Americans a shattering blow and the whole of the Pacific Ocean was theirs to control.”⁷

Further still “the \[Japanese\] had sunk the **Prince of Wales* and **Repulse* in an aerial attack off the coast of Malaya. In two hours they had done more damage to the Royal Navy than the Germans had done in two years.”⁸ The age of the aircraft carrier and airpower had arrived. The Japanese were early adopters to devastating effect.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*JDPfCNpVapT0evcU.jpg)

Crew fleeing the "The Prince of Wales" after the Japanese aerial attack. [Source.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/The%5FSinking%5Fof%5FHMS%5FPrince%5Fof%5FWales%5Fby%5FJapanese%5FAircraft%5FOff%5FMalaya%2C%5FDecember%5F1941%5FHU2675.jpg/220px-The%5FSinking%5Fof%5FHMS%5FPrince%5Fof%5FWales%5Fby%5FJapanese%5FAircraft%5FOff%5FMalaya%2C%5FDecember%5F1941%5FHU2675.jpg?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The **West Point* sailed on to Bombay, India, where Jack finally disembarked. They moved by train to the British base at Ahmednagar. But it was at this same time that the Japanese army struck Malaya hard and advanced quickly, routing British forces at each turn. Village by village, the Imperial Army hurled European colonial forces back, and the British withdrew to Singapore, regarded as a “great fortress and Far East base.”⁹ With these developments came new orders for Jack’s division: To reboard the **West Poin*t and other troop transports and dash to Singapore to shore up their defenses.

“Standing on the deck in the darkness as we neared our destination I would sometimes wonder how I would acquit myself in the fighting to come. I think everyone has these thoughts as the hour approaches for battle.”¹⁰

After disembarking, they were met by an Australian soldier who asked “‘What have you bastards come here for’, we answered ‘We’ve come here to help you mate.’ He replied, ‘We don’t want no bloody help, we’re getting out of here as soon as we can.’”¹¹

At the point that Jack arrived, the Japanese enjoyed absolute air superiority. The bombing and strafing was nearly constant. Jack’s unit set to work reinforcing Singapore’s defenses, digging trenches and preparing for a Japanese ground assault. But the fate of Singapore seemed a foregone conclusion.

“We saw the RAF abandoning Seletar aerodrome and lorry loads of personnel on their way to the docks. It was a strange feeling to witness \[it\], the air force had gone, the naval base was wrecked and on fire, all ships had left…It was with great bitterness we awaited the onslaught to come.”¹²

On the 8th of February, 1942 Jack caught wind that Japanese forces had landed on the island and that they were pushing forward against the Australians. His battalion took up positions in the center of the city. “We got very little news how the battle was going, but to my mind it seemed to be getting nearer which meant our troops were pulling back.”¹³

In the midst of the fighting, Jack lost his regiment, the First Cambridgeshires, and another commanding officer assigned him and his friend Charlie to guard some twenty-five pound guns at a strategic crossroad. On the 13th of February, Japanese planes attacked the gun site. Jack and other gunners opened up furiously to repel them.

“One lone \[Japanese\] plane came in very low and slow straight at us. I said to Charlie, ‘this one’s mine,’ and opened fire. Almost immediately, six bombs came out and I knew they were right on target. Charlie fell backwards into a shallow trench and I dived on top of him. The next second there was a tremendous explosion and then darkness. Coming round a few minutes later I could hear Charlie groaning in pain under me and we were partially buried…For the rest of the day I was very careful not to fire at any plane coming straight towards me.”¹⁴

By the 15th of February, the British and Australians were overcome. “Around four o’clock the firing seemed to die down with only occasional bursts and the big guns had stopped firing. An officer came to me and said, ‘It’s over lad, unconditional surrender lay down your arms.’ I was amazed and said stupidly ‘Who has surrendered?’ He said very close to tears ‘We have,’ and turned away.”¹⁵

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*xKuMG2VsGhZ7AV3A.jpg)

Japanese soldiers enter Fullerton Square, Singapore. [Source.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/QgBoZfgTPC2qt8xuqyAV7ShzZU4yE29sytIi-iwDQkti-xoalLIbaZPXf-JXcVIQbNmZybvkeGyL5QRlGPJsjah-5A?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Jack fell in with a long column of British troops marching up to Changi.

“The \[Japanese\] made the most of their glorious victory by ordering all prisoners to parade alongside the main road. For miles, fifty thousand troops were strung out and after some hours the top \[Japanese\] general were driven slowly past followed by a film crew in the back of a lorry.”¹⁶

The Japanese moved many British soldiers who fought in Singapore north to Thailand to construct a railway. Jack pressed into a tightly-packed train car with the other prisoners. As they were in route, one of their Japanese guards started shouting and ran to the door of the car — he had diarrhea.

“The lad was saying ‘Benjo,’ which meant he wanted a crap. It was most embarrassing for the lad as two of us had to hold him while he got busy. All through the night this was repeated several times and in one case \[the\] lad didn’t make it and some feces deposited near \[his\] bed space. He went bloody crazy lashing out, while the stench of tightly packed bodies and excreta on the floor was enough to make anyone vomit.”¹⁷

Camp conditions in Thailand were abysmal. After their long, grueling train ride, plagued by roasting heat and thirst, they arrived at Kanchanaburi and proceeded to Chong Kai, the prisoner camp situated on the banks of the Kwai Noi River (which may sound familiar if you’ve seen the movie **The Bridge on the River Kwai* starring, among others, Alec Guinness, and which features the same events that Jack describes here).

“One morning I awoke and on slipping off the end if the platform in the darkness went up to my waist in filthy water. The river had burst its banks during the night and silently flooded the camp…the latrine trenches had naturally filled and sewage was floating everywhere.”¹⁸

The Japanese tasked their new prisoners with building an embankment for the future railway. The project seemed to be running behind and so the guards beat and harassed their captives. Since active resistance was likely to get one killed, Jack and his fellows attempted to slow their work down.

“It was a scorching hot day in mid-afternoon they increased the length of banking for us to do. This really got our backs up and we started to slow down and play them at their own game….We were saying ‘they will have to let us go when it gets dark,’ but just before darkness fell new guards came out carrying large acetylene lamps…the bright lights seemed to attract every moth and insect from miles around…still we slogged away and at 3am the job was completed…Arriving back at \[camp\] we just threw ourselves down hoping to get at least three hours sleep before we started again.”¹⁹

Thievery in the camp also abounded. Thai traders would come by to sell fruit and other foods and some prisoners stole precious clothing or blankets from their would-be comrades and hocked them through the fence.

“One old friend of mine was very ill and in the early hours of one morning felt his blanket being pulled off of him. He was too weak to hold onto it and on calling for help to the orderly it was too late. The blanket had gone and \[was\] flogged in minutes. My friend died at 0800 hours that morning.”²⁰

The prisoners spent Christmas of 1942 and the New Year a world apart from the comforts of home and loved ones in the bug-infested, stinking camp at Chong Kai. Jack was laid up for nearly a week in early December recovering from a bout of malaria; his delirium made him forget all sense of time. So, when Christmas arrived and their guards let them have the day off, the camp was overjoyed.

“I was awakened before dawn by a choir singing ‘Christians Awake,’ and hearing that coming from a small church opposite was magic. I am sure many a married man shed a tear and thought of their wives and children so far away on this special day. I went down the river \[and\] had a good soak…I felt a new man and thought God is on the banks of the River Kwai today.”²¹

Jack’s work crew continued to build embankments for the railway for almost all of 1943, moving from camp to camp: Bankao, Tarsao, Wan Lung, Pukai, Hindate, Tonchan, Kinsaiyok, Takanun. Atrocities repeated themselves in each place: Thievery, cruelty by the guards, disease, pests, death. In one camp the crew was working beside a large rock face:

“One day a lad going to the cliff edge to deposit his rocks turned dizzy and toppled over the edge crashing down about twenty feet onto rocks below. Lying badly injured unable to move, his mated start to get down to help, but the \[Japanese\] stopped them and one ugly bastard picked up a basket of rocks and hurled it down at the poor lad. Feelings ran very high at that moment and only \[Japanese\] guards with rifles held us back. The poor lad…died later.”²²

By 1944, the tide of war was turning against the Japanese. The Americans started a vast island-hopping campaign in the direction of Japan itself. In June, Saipan and the Marianas would be in the control of the United States. In October, General Douglas MacArthur would triumphantly return to the Philippines. In response to labor shortages at home, caused by increasing numbers of men sent to fight, the Japanese began importing prisoners of war to their home islands to assist with the war effort. Captured allied troops were [put to work](https://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/prisoners-of-war-of-the-japanese-1939-1945?ref=nickrroberts.com) in construction, mining, munitions factories and other areas.

“Around March…rumours were heard that parties of the fittest men would soon be on the move to Japan. Many of the lads were thinking up plans to dodge this one…I thought hard about it and decided to go along whatever fate decided. A few weeks later a party of 750 men was picked out at Takanun and told we were to go down country and be kitted out ready to go to Japan.”²³

Jack and others given this assignment piled into a train car and rode on the railway they helped build back down to southern Thailand and then on to Singapore. In June, they boarded the **Asaka Maru*, which was a merchant vessel purchased by Japan in between the first and second world wars. The voyage would be long and terrifying. And in many ways, being on board a ship was a setback in quality of life compared to Chong Kai and the other camps. Food, water, and supplies quickly ran short, and one morning the ship found itself in the midst of a developing typhoon somewhere north of the Philippines.

“As the day wore on conditions got much worse and by late afternoon huge waves were breaking over us and we were really in danger of being swept overboard…Myself and a young Scotsman were clinging to a thick rope on the forward hatch cover…All the deck cargo was carried away, the old shitboxes had long gone and two giant iceboxes on the stern were sliding from side to side smashing everything in their paths. Daylight saw us hard on rocks \[the ship had beached in the night during the storm\]…We decided to see if we could find something to eat. We knew the \[Japanese\] crew were saving all the burnt rice off the boiler to take back to Japan so we smashed down a door and inside were some sacks. The rats were everywhere they had torn great holes in the sacks and slabs of burnt rice were gnawed. It was a battle between us and the rats, which we won. It wasn’t long before we were all busy wolfing a few mouthfuls. Someone said, ‘It stinks of rats shit and piss.’ Another said, ‘If you don’t want it sling it over here.’”²⁴

Two Japanese destroyers appeared the next day and towed the **Asaka Maru* off of the rocks and all of the prisoners of war aboard transferred to one of the destroyers, where hundreds of them were made to sit on the deck. The warship sped through the cold wind and lashing rain through the night (“this was one of the most horrendous nights I have ever spent”²⁵) until they linked up with another merchant vessel called the **Hakusan Maru* and transferred the prisoners. Aboard their new transport, the Japanese gave them their first food in five days — rice and beans. The ship began the last leg of the journey north to Japan. This time, rather than being allowed to wander the deck, nearly seven hundred POWs were forced into the ship’s hold. None of the assortment of Brits and Scots had any idea how far there was to go, and they were crammed together with other men suffering from dysentery. The heat and lack of fresh air in the hold was unbearable. Then, more chaos struck. American submarines had found the convoy.

“The third night around ten pm a tremendous explosion reverberated through the vessel. In an instant everyone was awake and running footsteps overhead proclaimed the convoy was under attack. At that moment the large watertight doors closed sealing us in and the one single bulb we had went out leaving in pitch-blackness. Knowing the doors were closed I though the bastards are not going to let us out if we get torpedoed. Lying beside Jack Armstrong I whispered to him ‘If we get hit let’s hope it’s right here so we get blown to bits. We don’t want to go to the bottom still alive.’ The attack last some hours and next morning some men were taken out into a sick bay, more dead than alive.”²⁶

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*JbaPW9peWDmPDTWV.jpg)

The Hakusan Maru. [Source.](https://ww2db.com/images/ship%5Fhakusanmaru1.jpg?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Unlike so many others, the **Hakusan Maru*, remaining intact, found the port of Moji on the Japanese home island of Kyushu. Guards herded the POWs into a large building, where the haggard prisoners stripped off their clothing and were made to bathe in a large, shallow pool. “What a wonderful feeling to immerse oneself in hot waters. It was the first hot bath I had been in since 1941 on my way abroad.”²⁷ Old Japanese women issued the prisoners new clothes, which were ill-fitting, but a big upgrade from the filthy rags they wore on the journey to Japan.

The prisoners were marched to the town center where their captors divided them up into work gangs. Jack, still with his friend Jack Armstrong, managed to stay together. They learned they were destined for the Ube POW camp, on Honshu, where detainees mined coal for the war effort. Several of the men in the work detail groaned. Mining coal was notoriously hard and dangerous labor. But upon arrival at Ube, they were pleasantly surprised by the quality of their accommodations. The huts were clean, and Jack was issued a blanket, a possession he never had in Thailand, and given a straw mat to sleep on. Rations were plentiful. Discipline in the camp, however, was tough.

“We had to get used to a system whereby every move we made outside our hut had to registered on a board outside every room. A wooden disc with one’s number on it had to be moved to the appropriate nail showing your destination. Failure to do this meant a smack across the face or a long period out of bed in the middle of the night standing maybe on one leg with arms outstretched.”²⁸

Work in the coal mines was tough going. Cave-ins were a constant concern, and the height of the mine ceiling where Jack spent much of the day was no more than three feet high. As the war went on, the camp overseers provided fewer amenities as, on a national-scale, resources dwindled. Word came that the Americans were getting closer.

“The \[Japanese\] were really running short of everything, my rubber plimsolls fell apart one day down in the pit on a late shift and I had to carry on barefoot…Just imagine working at a coalface with bare feet. I stubbed my toes continuously and by the end of the shift could hardly hobble to the surface.”²⁹

In the summer of 1945, the first American B-29 bombers roared overhead, marking the start of a massive, ongoing strategic bombing campaign.

“It caused us a lot of problems, as any raid on the \[Japanese\] mainland meant the \[guards\] would get us into the shelter and make sure we got no sleep…The…civilians began to turn nasty as they got a pasting.”³⁰

The Japanese crew leaders lost family members in the night raids and their resentment became clear. While the mine itself was largely untouched, much of the town surrounding Ube Camp was incinerated with the continuous bombing.

“Our leader turned really nasty and one day for no apparent reason…knocked me down whilst I was busy hacking away at the coal face. I leaped up in a temper, pick in hand and for a second was going to smash his face in. He also got a pick and we stood facing each other snarling like two wild animals.”³¹

Jack’s crew mates jumped in and managed to defuse the situation. Punishment for disobedience in the mine could be severe, or fatal.

The morning of the sixth of August, Jack was loading props for the mine when the air raid siren sounded. Some high-altitude aircraft passed over. A short while later:

“there was a brilliant flash and long rumbling roar the like of which I had never heard before. ‘Christ they have hit something big somewhere ,’ said a voice, ‘must be a big arsenal down at Moji.’…we marched down the road \[and\] there before us was a huge plume of cloud shaped like a mushroom, which seemed to be sucking everything up thousands of feet into the atmosphere.”³²

They wouldn’t know it until later, but between [70,000–80,000](http://www.hiroshimacommittee.org/Facts%5FNagasakiAndHiroshimaBombing.htm?ref=nickrroberts.com) people died instantly in that moment.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*12WNVWHcu670WSL4.jpg)

[Source.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Firestorm%5Fcloud%5Fover%5FHiroshima%2C%5Fnear%5Flocal%5Fnoon.%5FAug%5F6%5F1945.jpg?ref=nickrroberts.com)

An aside: I find it astonishing that Jack, among all of the sights and terrors he experienced, also witnessed the explosion of the bomb at Hiroshima. Out of curiosity, I found the [records and location](http://www.mansell.com/pow%5Fresources/camplists/hiroshima/hiro%5F7%5FUbe/hiro%5F7b%5Fube%5Fmain.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) of the camp at Ube and confirmed that Jack was a POW here since his name appears on the spreadsheet roster provided on the camp report.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*gEG9IbOsKO7hDPcT9WU_xw.png)

Jack was about 77 miles away from the blast.

It is approximately 77 miles on a straight line from the camp’s location to Hiroshima. So, it seems possible that Jack could have seen the flash and plume, which grew to [approximately 7km](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&hob%5Fopt=2&psi=20,5,1&linked=1&cloud=1&kt=15&lat=34.39468&lng=132.45462&hob%5Fpsi=5&hob%5Fft=1968&zm=8&ref=nickrroberts.com) tall. But I’m not as sure about the rumbling sound he claimed he heard, but I don’t have good evidence to show otherwise. And though Jack described seeing and hearing the blast at Hiroshima (15 kilotons), I find it curious that he did not mention the explosion at Nagasaki, which sat approximately 115 miles away from his camp, on which the United States dropped an even larger yield weapon (20 kilotons) three days later. One other odd aspect of the account is that someone thought the bombers had hit the arsenal at Moji port, which is in the opposite direction of Hiroshima relative to Ube. I’m not sure what to make of that.

As for the reference to the high-altitude planes passing overhead prior to the bombing, it is unlikely this was the Enola Gay (the B-29 carrying “Little Boy”) and its escorts. The flight path was at least 70–80 miles away from Ube both to and from the target.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*T1ZhUCbvkI0LUGyOaL0QNQ.png)

Path of the "Enola Gay." [Source.](https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/maps/enola-gay-flight.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)

I have no doubt that Jack’s account, so full of specific and personal detail, is accurate, but memories like this one can [morph and embellish over time](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/smarter-living/why-we-romanticize-the-past.html?ref=nickrroberts.com), especially with all of media attention given to Hiroshima in the aftermath of the war.

Anyhow, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, life in the mines at Ube continued mostly as usual. But on the 15th of August, the Japanese workforce and camp guards were nowhere to be seen. With no one forcing them into the coal pit, the POWs just dropped their tools and laid out in the sun.

“Around 3:30pm the guard returned and \[motioned that they all return to camp\]…I was strolling along on my own when a small Japanese lad came out of his small little house and putting his arms up said, ‘Japan finish.’ Turning to the next chap to me, I said this kid says the war’s over. He looked at me and said ‘Oh yes?’ and we walked on unconcerned.”³³

At camp, the guards performed the evening role call. No one at Ube gave any indication that the surrender had occurred.

“I did have my doubts about victory…we all lay down to sleep and soon the normal sounds were heard…all I was dreading was the \[air raid\] siren going off. If that happened I should have gone made as all my hopes would have been dashed to pieces.”³⁴

The night passed free of air raids and screeching sirens. Unusual. The next morning, no one rounded up the prisoners for coal mine work. As with the next day. With all of new-found the time on their hands, the prisoners depleted their stock of cigarettes and some began agitating to break into the Red Cross rations the guards stored in the mine in case of invasion. Lots of cigarettes there. A group of the POW officers went to the Japanese commander to request the use of the rations. After some initial resistance, the commander relented and admitted that Japan had surrendered, so there was no point to conserving the supplies. It was official. “I felt so content all the pressure that had built up over the past months had gone and putting my hands together I thanked God for my deliverance.”³⁵

Japan was so ravaged by the persistent allied bombing throughout most of 1945, that the local population had trouble feeding themselves, not to mention prisoners of war. Aware of this situation, the US military started running supply drops for POWs with the same B-29s that previously laid waste to Japanese cities. Jack and his comrades at Ube painted “POW” in huge white letters on the roofs of their camp houses to attract the drops.

“It was a wonderful sight, dropping down to us \[were\] all of the things we had only dream about all those years…soon we were busy rolling forty-gallon drums full of food and medicines into camp…Some drums came down with the chutes unopened and crashed like bombs onto the small \[Japanese\] houses and caused some casualties…I entered one house where a large drum full of tinned fruit had smashed through the roof and trapped a woman by the legs…We hastily rolled the drum off her and while a doctor was sent for we dished out some tins of fruit to the kids.”³⁶

In mid-September, the prisoners finally moved out. They loaded onto trucks and solemnly departed Ube camp for a local train station. The trains this time were unlike the cattle-car style transports they had been subjected to in previous transfers. These ones contained tables and comfortable sitting areas.

“Stopping at one station I noticed a large banner across a footbridge that said \[in English\] ‘Welcome to Totori,” but the lads just ignored it and the announcer who was talking to us in English. We wanted no more bullshit.”³⁷

Upon reaching Wakayama, a Japanese port city, they boarded a US hospital ship and set off for Manila harbor, in the Philippines, where the Royal Navy waited to take them home.

“It was the aircraft carrier HMS Glory, what a magnificent sight, which brought a lump to my throat. Soon after boarding she weighed anchor and we were on our way across the Pacific. At the ned of hostilities the Glory had got rid of all her planes and take a load of Australian POWs home to Sydney then back to Philippines for us. The Navy did us proud, nothing was too much trouble on that long voyage…It was sunshine all the way and any sign of a storm the skipper would change course to avoid it.”³⁸

The journey home took Jack to stops in Pearl Harbor, Victoria (British Columbia), and New York, where they boarded the Queen Mary for the final leg across the Atlantic.

“Came the dawn of Sunday 18th November 1945, coming up on deck with the sight we had dream of all those years, the shores of good old Blighty…At the back of my mind I wondered what sort of reception we would receive, what news from our families…Would we be able to settle down in civilian life after all the horrors of the past four years?”³⁹

They disembarked and trucked to a camp at Southampton for a round of medical examinations. This was particularly frustrating, since many former-POWs were judged in need of medical care and forced to stay in the hospital. Jack, however, escaped delay and, on the 20th of November made his way home via train. Upon reaching his stop in Cambridge, a porter approached Jack:

“‘Someone is going to pick you up shortly.’ Standing outside the station in the darkness all sorts of emotions came over me, excitement, fear of what might have happened while I had been away. At last a car came into the yard. It was my old employer, Lionel Long…As we neared Woodditton I asked Lionel if my mother was still alive or if any of my brothers had been killed. He said, ‘I think think they are all still alive’…Pulling up in front of the house I saw my poor old mum hurrying down the path, she looked so much older than. she did four years ago with all the worry she had endured…We spent the evening catching up with all the news, sorting all my kit out, giving the kiddies some American chocolate sweets, \[which\] were still rationed for some years to come.”⁴⁰

Jack closes his account with a short epilogue.

“I entered the war a young teenager full of excitement, thinking of seeing strange lands and strange people also the added thrill of doing some fighting…I came home a vastly different person. As a prisoner I reached the depths of depravity and despair…all I wished for \[were\] the basic necessities of life instead of the lust and greed we all have for money and possessions in the present day…I am still very bitter and will never make friends with the Japanese. Some people say I am wrong, but they don’t know, they did not witness the things I saw, lucky for them. I will finish now with the ‘Burma epitaph’: ‘When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today.’”⁴¹

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*br4oCxTflqp50v9Ls3t9eg.jpeg)

Jack, 1944.

**Many thanks to* **[Sue Ecclestone](https://www.ecclestoneartagency.com/aboutus.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)* **for all of the photos of Jack in the piece and for the original transcription of Jack’s journals.*

****Quote references**1\. Jack Scrivener, **Memories: An account of life as a soldier and Far East POW during World War II* (Published by Sue Ecclestone, 2000), 1.  
2\. Ibid, 2.  
3\. Ibid, 8–9.  
4\. Ibid, 11.  
5\. Ibid, 1.  
6\. Ibid, 25.  
7\. Ibid, 26.  
8\. Ibid, 26.  
9\. Ibid, 29.  
10\. Ibid, 29.  
11\. Ibid, 30.  
12\. Ibid, 32.  
13\. Ibid, 33.  
14\. Ibid, 35.  
15\. Ibid, 36.16\. Ibid, 39.  
17\. Ibid, 46.  
18\. Ibid, 49.  
19\. Ibid, 49.  
20\. Ibid, 51.  
21\. Ibid, 50.  
22\. Ibid, 61.  
23\. Ibid, 69.  
24\. Ibid, 74.  
25\. Ibid, 76.  
26\. Ibid, 78.  
27\. Ibid, 80.  
28\. Ibid, 81.  
29\. Ibid, 84.  
30\. Ibid, 85.31\. Ibid, 86.  
32\. Ibid, 88.  
33\. Ibid, 88.  
34\. Ibid, 88–89.  
35\. Ibid, 89.  
36\. Ibid, 91.  
37\. Ibid, 93.  
38\. Ibid, 94.  
39\. Ibid, 96.  
40\. Ibid, 96.  
41\. Ibid, 99
### Quick take: F-15E pilot on the new F-15EX
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/quick-take-f-15e-pilot-on-the-new-f-15ex/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:43:59.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/76y4mZ6iQ3gVtP7GIe6tcB?si=JTd5QlxWR72RQ7ow2OpPWA&ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/quick-take-f-15e-pilot-on-the-new-f-15ex/id1504736472?i=1000503991257&ref=nickrroberts.com), or [Google](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNjhhNmFmNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==?ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jul/14/2002456273/-1/-1/0/200713-F-XZ000-001.JPG)

### ****Aviation episode**

Scott Roberts is a previous guest of this show. He is a retired Lieutenant Colonel, a former F-15E fighter pilot, and my father. Today, we have a short chat about his reaction to the brand-new F-15EX, the most capable fourth generation fighter plane on the market. We talk about the controversy it has engendered, the new features it brings to the fight, and the what the next decades look like for the fighter business. I hope you enjoy today’s quick take.
### A look back at 2020
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2020/
Last updated: 2022-04-29T14:17:37.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-9.png)

## 💪 Fitness

- **752.5** Miles run
- **144,311** Calories burned on runs and cycling
- **486** Peloton miles ridden
- **203.6** Average wattage on Peloton rides
- **69** Highest Strava Fitness Level\*
- **17,052** Kj of Peloton cycling output
- **23,500** Pushups completed

## 🥕 Health

- **75.19%** Average sleep quality\*
- **8:20** Average nightly sleep length
- **2,770** Minutes meditated
- **80** Average happiness index\*

## ❤️ Relationships

- **194** Phone calls to immediate family
- **19** Active friendships\*
- **29** Inactive friendships\*

## 💵 Finance

- **45.35** Percent increase in net worth from end of previous year

## 🧠 Brain

- **17** Books read\*
- **5** Articles published\* (including this one)
- **10** Podcasts created\*

## ✈️ Other

- **31.5** Flight hours in a Cessna 172
- **0 -** Number of countries visited outside of United States

## Details

****Strava Fitness:** From their site: “While fitness is a complicated concept, it can be simplified to an accumulation of training. The Fitness Score is calculated using Training Load and/or Relative Effort to measure your daily training, and an impulse-response model to quantify its effect over time. This will intuitively capture the development of fitness from training, as well as the loss of fitness during a break.”

****Sleep Quality:** Source: [AutoSleep](http://autosleep.tantsissa.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com): "The Quality ring shows hours of quality sleep achieved. This makes it easier to compare with other days. This looks at the overall sleep time, how much light sleep, how much deep sleep, how restless and the nocturnal dip in heart rate and determines how much quality sleep you had. The ring completion target is 85% of your required sleep hours.”

****Happiness index:** Holistic spot-check of how good I feel psychologically and physically, based on my relationships, job satisfaction, financial well-being, goal completion, etc. on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being that life can’t get any better.

****Active friendships:** Someone outside of family. Close enough to consider a friend. Regular contact and good feelings.

****Inactive friendships:** Outside of family; a pal. Fallen out of touch or regular contact.

****Books**

- Hogs in the Sand, Buck Wyndam
- For the Soul of Mankind, Melvyn Leffler
- The Odyssey, Homer
- The Bhagavad Gita, Eknath Eswaran
- So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal Newport
- How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
- Shoe Dog, Phil Knight
- The End is Always Near, Dan Carlin
- Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Eric Schlosser
- The Bomb: Presidents, generals, and the secret history of nuclear war, Fred Kaplan
- Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy
- On Writing, Stephen King
- The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
- The Stand, Stephen King
- The Cold War: A New History, John Lewis Gaddis
- Return with Honor, Scott O'Grady
- The Searcher, Tana French
- ****Other books in various states of progress**
- Ghost Wars, Steve Coll
- Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss
- Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey

****Articles**

- [Broken Arrows and Almost-Annihilations](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/brokenarrows.html)
- [The machinations of the Federal Reserve in the Coronavirus economy](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/thefed.html)
- [A beginner's startup guide to DCS World in VR](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/dcs.html)
- [Who killed the Soviet Union?](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/who%5Fkilled%5Fsoviet%5Funion.html)

****Podcasts**

- [Broken Arrows and Almost-Annihilations](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/brokenarrows.html)
- [F-15E Fighter Pilot Interview: My Dad](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/f-15e-interview.html)
- [From 0 to Delta First Officer in Three Years](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/laura-interview.html)
- [Shot down over hostile country](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/shot%5Fdown.html)
- [The vagabond data scientist](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/vagabond%5Fdata%5Fscientist.html)
- [B-1B and B-52H: Stories from the nuclear mission](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/b1%5Fb52.html)
- [From AH-1W SuperCobra pilot to Google product manager](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/supercobra%5Fgoogle.html)
- [Around the world with "Guru"](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/around%5Fworld%5Fguru.html)
- [Machine minds, human minds](https://nickrroberts.com/posts/machine%5Fminds%5Fhuman%5Fminds.html)
- Quick take: F-15E pilot on the new F-15EX
### Machine minds, human minds
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/machine-minds-human-minds/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:44:52.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6K5QfEOZKTCO9ajhzWbZQC?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/machine-minds-human-minds/id1504736472?i=1000503840428&ref=nickrroberts.com), or [Google](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNjhhNmFmNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### ****Technology episode**

Katie Roberts, my sister, works as a research scientist at BBN Technologies, a subsidiary of Raytheon, the defense contractor, in Boston Massachusetts. BBN, incidentally, was selected by ARPA in 1968 to create the ARPAnet—the precursor to the internet we know today. Another little-known fact is that it created the first person-to-person network email in 1971 and the use of the “@“ symbol in email addresses.

Today we speak about a wide variety of topics, but focus the first half of our conversation on teaching machines to produce text from speech, otherwise known as automatic speech recognition. What’s crazy is that Katie develops machine learning models every day, but she hails from an entirely nontechnical background. She studied Italian and linguistics at the University of Southern California. We discuss her transition into computational linguistics through a masters at Tulane University and a few her speech recognition projects, one of which included analyzing phone calls from inmates at Rikers Island prison.

In the second half, we get into a very candid discussion of mental health, particularly as it relates to food and body image. Katie is forthcoming about own experience with an eating disorder.

### ****References**

[Studies on red meat and cancer](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/red-meat-and-colon-cancer?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Book: [The Fuck It Diet](https://thefuckitdiet.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Book: [The Anti-Diet](https://christyharrison.com/book-anti-diet-intuitive-eating-christy-harrison?ref=nickrroberts.com)

[National Eating Disorders Association](https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### Around the world with "Guru"
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/around-the-world-with-guru/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:45:50.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3zIs5YcB5FslrQbqfhfkwy?si=7acKJV7eS0G4QFxio8mz4w&ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/around-the-world-with-guru-c-130-c-17-hjt-16-and-more/id1504736472?i=1000502791233&ref=nickrroberts.com), or [Google](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNjhhNmFmNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/NDhlYzBkYTQtMzhiMi00ZjBiLTljZTgtZThkMDQ5OTIzOTgw?sa=X&ved=0CA0QkfYCahcKEwjIstCWvfTtAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ&ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-7.png)

### ****Aviation episode**

Lieutenant Colonel Jason Brightman is a former US Air Force pilot with one of the wildest careers I’ve heard of. He also happens to be my flight instructor, bringing me up to speed on the Cessna 172\. Jason and I were put together by chance (and by COVID) at our flight school. Ordinarily, he flies for a major airline, but found himself with a whole lot of time on his hands during the summer when coronavirus almost completely shut down travel. So, he started teaching, as is his habit. His military pilot students nicknamed him Guru.

Jason initially served with the Army’s First Infantry Division combat engineers before transitioning into the Air Force, but he went through pilot training with the Navy. This guy’s spent time with essentially every branch except Space Force—although, we could have just not gotten to that story yet. He’s full of them.

While in Iraq, Jason and his team cleared the way for American and British tank battalions, who came rushing through Kuwait during the famous 100-hour ground war in 1991.

After pilot training, he flew the C-130 for a tour. But then he took an instructor pilot exchange with the Indian Air Force, where he trained a cohort of pilots that would go on to fly planes like the Sukhoi 30 - known by NATO as the Flanker C. One student would even be shot down in operations near Pakistan, yet end up in a Pakistani tea commercial. More on that later.

Jason then flew combat operations in a C-17 in the Iraq War, delivering Humvees, and ferrying racks of wounded US soldiers to safety.

As if this was not enough action, he then took an opportunity with the US Central Command’s intelligence unit and spent a lot of time in Kabul, Afghanistan, trying to patch together alliances against the Taliban. We talk about all of this and more.

### ****References**

Hogs in the Sand, Buck Wyndham: [https://www.amazon.com/Hogs-Sand-10-Pilots-Journal/dp/1646631609](https://www.amazon.com/Hogs-Sand-10-Pilots-Journal/dp/1646631609?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Ghost Wars, Steve Coll: [https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669](https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Pakistani tea commercial featuring downed Indian Air Force pilot, Abhinandan Varthaman: [https://twitter.com/VishnuNDTV/status/1102871131197980672?s=20](https://twitter.com/VishnuNDTV/status/1102871131197980672?s=20&ref=nickrroberts.com)
### No instruments landing challenge
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/no-instruments-landing-challenge/
Last updated: 2022-02-06T20:51:34.000Z
Cessna 172 based out of San Carlos (SQL).
### Who killed the Soviet Union?
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/who-killed-the-soviet-union/
Last updated: 2021-11-17T04:12:37.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*O8Rxp_TWrx9mWgTg5xlrrg.png)

For 45 years, generations of Americans and Europeans struggled with and ultimately accepted a nuclear-laden and bellicose Communist bloc, the United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the borders of Austria. For a time, it seemed inevitable that this gargantuan amalgam of nations would only **expand*. Marxist revolutionary governments sprang up in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia in the decades following the Second World War. Nikita Krushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, [declared](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP73B00296R000200040087-1.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com) in 1956 “whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” in reference to capitalist nations.

Now, the presence of such a hostile and massive power, with economic and political systems opposed fundamentally to the West, seems unthinkable. Even Communist China, despite its authoritarian bent and “[President for Life](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43361276?ref=nickrroberts.com),” has, since the days of Deng Xiaoping, embraced a mostly market-driven economy. How did such an enormous coalition, the USSR, materialize and then fade away within the 20th century?

A number of titanic structural problems plagued the Soviet system and portended its destruction. Its command economy and vampiric defense sector siphoned [enormous resources](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/10/17/would-the-soviet-union-have-collapsed-without-mikhail-gorbachev/?ref=nickrroberts.com) away from consumer goods and raw materials production. Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow and the chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center writes:

> …In the 1970s, the USSR produced 20 times more tanks than the United States. To a high degree, this was dictated not by military necessity but the need to maintain employment at manufacturing sites. A country that spent its entire existence preparing for war was ruined in an arms race and dragged down by its support for satellite states and “fraternal” communist parties. ([Source](https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/05/07/did-gorbachev-want-to-destroy-the-ussr-could-the-soviet-union-still-exist-today-might-putinism-end-in-reforms?ref=nickrroberts.com)).

External forces also worked against the USSR. Falling oil prices in the 1980s layered on massive stress, since Russia was almost [solely dependent](https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/05/07/did-gorbachev-want-to-destroy-the-ussr-could-the-soviet-union-still-exist-today-might-putinism-end-in-reforms?ref=nickrroberts.com) on revenues from oil exports. The scale of its commitments to other Soviet nations, as well as an ill-advised invasion of Afghanistan made it difficult to cut spending. Moscow’s [limited access to credit](https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/21/could-mikhail-gorbachev-have-saved-the-soviet-union/?ref=nickrroberts.com) forced the government to print rubles and devalue the currency.

Even with no other intervening factors, it is doubtful that the USSR would have lasted into the 21st century. But it was the well-intentioned thinking of one man in the Politburo that outright killed the Bolshevik project in the early 1990s. He refused to use force to crack down on dissent and hoped to encourage enterprise by haphazardly decentralizing the planned economy.

Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985\. During Ronald Reagan’s first term in office, the United States dealt with three consecutive Soviet heads of state: Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko — each one aged and ephemeral. Reagan would quip at one point that he wanted badly to engage the Soviet leaders in arms negotiations, but “[they kept dying on me](https://time.com/3858793/ronald-reagan-history/?ref=nickrroberts.com).” By contrast, Gorbachev was a vigorous 54 years old, the youngest to assume the position of General Secretary since Joseph Stalin. He brought a fresh perspective and sought to depart from the ossified attitudes of his predecessors. In **The Cold War, A New History*, John Lewis Gaddis explains:

> “\[Gorbachev\] had been aware from his travels outside the Soviet Union before assuming the leadership, that ‘people there…were better off than in our country.’ It seemed that ‘our aged leaders were not especially worried about our undeniably lower living standards, our unsatisfactory way of life, and our falling behind in the field of advanced technologies.’”

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*eU5V5SSBwQQZGU22.jpg)

Gorbachev, left, with President Ronald Reagan, 1987\. [Source](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/08/cold-war-russia-putin-reagan-trump/535728/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Gorbachev’s cognizance of the dire economic situation led him to a policy of “Perestroika,” or “overhaul.” His goal was to align economic growth incentives with a socialist vision. Perhaps, he thought, there was something to the spontaneity and efficient resource allocation inherent in markets. He allowed some state-owned enterprises[ to choose](https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/perestroika-and-glasnost?ref=nickrroberts.com) which products to make and how much to charge for them. By 1988, the Russian people were even allowed some small, privately-owned businesses. Gorbachev attempted to blend Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” principles into a Leninist economic framework, though to disastrous results. But this was not all.

For decades, the relationship between Moscow and the populations of its clients in Eastern Europe had grown more poisonous as the Kremlin repressed dissent and reform. In 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and crushed a widely-popular democratic movement. The leader of Hungary’s new, short-lived liberal government, Imre Nagy, was given a short trial and executed.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*tkNxsqGSXhKtz9Lr.jpg)

Imre Nagy. [Source](http://moneyweek.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*YhiHI2YVb7gqZfXl.jpg)

Prague Spring. Libor Hajsky — CTK/AP Images

1968 brought the [Prague Spring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague%5FSpring?ref=nickrroberts.com), a reformist movement in Czechoslovakia, a member of the USSR, led by Alexander Dubček. His government [ended censorship](https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/soviet-invasion-czechoslavkia?ref=nickrroberts.com) and relaxed restrictions on its people’s freedom of movement. Without limitations on their speech, the Czech people began to openly debate and criticize government policy. This was too much for the leadership in Moscow, who saw such trends [as counterrevolutionary](https://www.britannica.com/event/Prague-Spring?ref=nickrroberts.com). Once the people could speak their minds, who knew what else they’d get up to. Once more, Soviet troops stormed into a sovereign country and ended its liberal experiment, for a time. By the 1980s, Reagan’s caricature of the USSR as an “[evil empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil%5FEmpire%5Fspeech?ref=nickrroberts.com)” held special sway in a post-Star Wars world.

Gorbachev sensed this acutely. The USSR had a brand problem. This toxic image, he observed, worked against the Soviet people’s quality of life. Western fears of a Moscow hell-bent on a world socialist revolution fed into an arms race that in turn diverted massive sums [away from consumer goods and into weapons](https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/21/archives/soviet-union-continues-to-debate-old-issue-of-guns-vs-butter-old.html?ref=nickrroberts.com). Kolesnikov goes on to say:

> Rhetoric about the need for NTP — **nauchno-tekhnicheskii progress* (scientific and technological progress) — came to nothing. In practice, this boiled down to copying Western technologies and producing the most advanced missiles instead of the most advanced shoes and the best guns instead of butter.

If many of these quality-of-life problems could be traced to bad publicity, Gorbachev figured rehabilitating the world’s perception of the USSR would be the solution. “Glasnost” (“openness” or “publicity”), was his policy initiative to transform the world’s perception of the Soviet Union into one of peace, prosperity, and liberty. What this meant in practice was an opening of free speech and elections in member nations and a refusal to use troops to quell protests against the Communist power structure. It also meant massive, unilateral troop reductions, such as in December, 1988, when Gorbachev announced to the United Nations that he would withdraw [half a million](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/12/08/gorbachev-announces-troop-cut-of-500000/0da97a00-27ad-41e0-a7a3-24e7a8935c94/?ref=nickrroberts.com) troops from Eastern Europe.

Both of these policies, Perestroika and Glasnost, emanated from Gorbachev’s earnest hopefulness that the USSR need not use such a heavy hand in its economy or in its foreign policy to hold the Soviet system together. In fact, he thought, the only way to forge a sustainable future for Communism was to give people the freedom to choose. Gaddis quotes Gorbachev from \*Perestroika: \* “One could always ‘suppress, compel, bribe, break or blast…but only for a certain period. From the point of view of long-term, big-time politics, no one will be able to subordinate others…Let everyone make his own choice, and let us all respect that choice.” His calculation was that the populations of countries like Poland, Hungary, and others, would still choose the Communist party, even if elections were opened to competitors. On the economic front, he thought the injection of profit-seeking enterprise into a system managed by the party bureaucracy would give way to prosperity and individual initiative. In both, he was terribly wrong.

Perestroika was in practice a half-hearted attempt to galvanize growth with free market principles. It left price controls in place, restricted employment opportunities, and left much of the economy in the hands of regional administrators. It also meant less oversight of the cooperatives that ran the state’s many industries. Corruption skyrocketed. Many cooperative managers chose not reinvest profits and instead extract personal wealth. But Kolesnikov says that the key problem with Gorbachev’s reforms was that command over the economy ran against single-party, socialist control. Many of Gorbachev’s colleagues resisted liberalization and he soon found himself [on an island](https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/perestroika-and-glasnost?ref=nickrroberts.com) between factions of the Politburo who wanted central planning gone altogether and officials who felt their power over various economic sectors threatened. Because state industries were also free to charge more for goods like food, which the people could ill-afford, the economy crunched further. Inflation spiked as the government printed more money to meet the costs of its newly mixed economy.

But the nail in the coffin for the Soviet Union was something less tangible than shortages of grain, or how many bottles of soap Soviet grocery stores stocked. Its biggest problem lay in the high-pressure resentment for authoritarian socialist control building for decades in the populaces of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. Glasnost led not to a more easy-going Communism, but fueled the drive to destroy it altogether.

This drive gathered much strength in 1975, when Brezhnev signed the Helsinki accords, of which the USSR, US, East and West Germany and others were party. Among other things, the accords committed the USSR in principle to “equal rights and self-determination of all peoples” as well as “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.” Still, until his death, Brezhnev restrained movements for freedom in places like Poland, where the Solidarity party (\*Solidarność) \*championed by [Lech Wałęsa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lech%5FWa%C5%82%C4%99sa?ref=nickrroberts.com), an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, sought an independent trade union, more rights for workers, lower food prices and more. In 1981, the Polish government, with the threat looming of a Soviet military intervention, declared martial law, outlawed Solidarity, and imprisoned Wałęsa for nearly a year.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/0*CgJTKrxxpOPdIKMY.jpg)

Lech Wałęsa. [Source](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lech-Walesa?ref=nickrroberts.com).

In 1988, a fresh wave of strikes and unrest swept over Poland. The movement’s chief concern was that the government recognize Solidarity as a party again. By April, 1989, the Polish government capitulated and allowed members of Solidarity to run for the legislature in quasi-free elections, albeit while retaining a quota of socialist party representation. Solidarity took almost all available seats. In the aftermath, all looked anxiously to Gorbachev. The threat of a Soviet invasion eight years earlier cast a long shadow. But in keeping with his embrace of self-determination, Gorbachev chose to do nothing in a remarkable departure from the policies of all of his predecessors.

With this, the Polish example served as a rallying cry for other Soviet clients, such as Hungary and East Germany, where Communist party influence crashed in a spectacular deluge of free elections and press. Throughout 1989, the Hungarian government increasingly relaxed restrictions on its people’s freedom of movement. In August, it rolled up the fence that separated it from Austria. East Germans, who could freely travel to other countries in the USSR, began to “vacation” en masse to Hungary, where they, quoting Gaddis, “\[drove\] their tiny wheezing polluting Trabants through Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the border, abandoning them there, and walking across…By September, there were 130,000 East Germans in Hungary and the government announced that, for ‘humanitarian’ reasons, it would not try to stop their emigration to the West.”

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*PCYqlI8secQ-lN-u.jpg)

Tears of joy: East Germans crossing into Austria, 1989\. Getty Images.

Finally, on the dramatic evening of November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The East German border guards, lacking instruction from their superiors in the wake of a strange press conference given by Gunter Schabowski (an official in the East German Socialist Unity Party) where he flatly declared that citizens could travel without prior approval to the West, took it upon themselves to open the gates and let the growing crowds pass unobstructed. Drunken revelry ensued. People from both sides set to work almost immediately with sledge hammers and chisels to dismantle the spray-painted concrete that symbolized decades of painful division. Things progressed quickly from there. Within a year, reunification efforts for the two German states were underway. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria opened up to free elections. The Romanian Communist leader Nicolai Ceauşescu and his wife were executed by Romanian soldiers on Christmas Day, 1989\. Gorbachev, meanwhile, did nothing to impede the regime changes happening within the 15 states in the Soviet Union.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*B7DC5tYZOaVZweb8.jpg)

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/0*nuQiCSKNmFO7FHU4.jpg)

Above: The wall. [Source](https://theculturetrip.com/europe/germany/articles/10-iconic-murals-on-the-berlin-wall/?ref=nickrroberts.com). Below source: Getty Images.

At home, however, he was deeply unpopular. In contrast to his liberalizing foreign image, he was seen as presiding over the complete diminution of Soviet and Russian power. The Russian economy was dysfunctional, quality of life slipped ever lower, and alcoholism ran rampant. His reforms to remove censorship opened the floodgates to domestic criticism. Newspapers and networks lambasted him relentlessly.

On August 19, 1991, a group of Politburo members cut Gorbachev’s lines of communication and arrested him. They installed guards to keep him and his family prisoner in a government residence in Foros, on the Black Sea. Only when Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, intervened with the support of the police and military, did the coup fail. Gorbachev’s captors released him peacefully. It was Yeltsin who finally dismantled the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and dissolved the USSR entirely shortly thereafter.

Although Yeltsin carried Russia into a new age of democracy and a formal transition to capitalism, it was Gorbachev who, intentionally or not, set these events into motion. For this, he [received the Nobel Peace Prize](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1990/gorbachev/facts/?ref=nickrroberts.com) in 1990.

---

China stirs a lot of fuss these days: F[orcing](https://www.wsj.com/articles/forced-tech-transfers-are-on-the-rise-in-china-european-firms-say-11558344240?ref=nickrroberts.com) American and European companies into technology transfers, [posturing ](https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/territorial-disputes-south-china-sea?ref=nickrroberts.com)in the South China Sea; its [maltreatment](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22278037?ref=nickrroberts.com) of resident Uighurs. Trump launched a war on the Chinese-American trade imbalance and levied huge tariffs on imports. Despite these headlines, the world’s last remaining Communist superpower is not locked in an ideological death struggle with the US and its allies. The Soviet Union was a different animal. Europeans no longer watch in horror as two sides position intermediate range nuclear missiles on their land. American [B-52s no longer make their rounds over the Arctic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation%5FChrome%5FDome?ref=nickrroberts.com), waiting for the call to deliver their thermonuclear payloads to Communist cities and military bases. Berlin, once thought to be the flashpoint for a third world war, is no longer sliced up into militarized quadrants. Pieces of its infamous wall litter museums and weight paper on desks around the world.

Much of this credit is due to Gorbachev. His refusal to use force and intimidation to ensure Communist rulers remained in power in Eastern European and the Baltic Soviet states, as had been standard operating procedure for Soviet General Secretaries going back to Stalin, along with his willingness to entertain capitalist economic tendencies prompted the USSR to calve and break apart like a glacier. The Soviet system was ailing when he assumed power, but his policies ushered it more quickly into the dustbin of history. Krushchev’s ominous prediction was exactly wrong.
### November links: The fall of the Soviet Union, Ghost Wars, Dan Carlin
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/the-fall-of-the-soviet-union-ghost-wars-dan-carlin/
Last updated: 2023-02-21T13:41:49.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-6.png)

I'm fascinated by the idea that such a colossal power like Soviet Union could loom so large and vanish so quickly. Though it's been dead for about thirty years, it still casts a long shadow. The Cold War flavored movies, spy novels, comics, and TV to this day. Think of [Red Son](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman:%5FRed%5FSon?ref=nickrroberts.com), or [The Americans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FAmericans?ref=nickrroberts.com), or James Bond throughout the decades. The threat of Communist expansion also spurred into existence all of the military machines I love to watch at air shows, fleet weeks, or see in museums. The internet came to be through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) which was founded by Eisenhower to get a leg up on the Soviets.  
  
"What happened?" is the question I found myself asking. Was it Reagan, equipped with magical traits acquired in cowboy westerns, who finally wrestled the Soviet Bear into submission? I've been imbued with that assumption for as long as I can remember. But why did it happen in the late 1980s/early 90s? Why would Reagan be able to do what no US president for decades had been able to? As I delved into this more, reading several books along the way, I came to realize that, as with most things, the picture is complicated. Macro-economic trends, incremental diplomatic steps, and individuals all played a part in sending the USSR to its grave.   
  
But if we are going to focus on the impact of specific individuals on this outcome, no one person had a larger role than the young General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who came to power in 1985.

[Read about it](https://nickrroberts.com/who-killed-the-soviet-union/)

## Links and media commentary
  
  
****Ghost Wars, Steve Coll:** The secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001\. My friend, a retired USAF Lt. Col. who worked intelligence for the Air Force in this region, recommended this to me. (I'm hopefully soon to have him on the podcast). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, it details the astonishing and machiavellian--as well as remarkably short-sighted--tactics of the CIA in Afghanistan against its Soviet occupiers in 1980s. What could possibly go wrong dumping money and guns with abandon into the hands of people with questionable attitudes toward the United States? ([Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?%5Fencoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&ref=nickrroberts.com))  
  
****Hogs in the Sand, Buck Wyndam**: The first Gulf War from the perspective of an A-10 pilot. Crazy stories about blowing stuff up and near misses with surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery. ([Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Hogs-Sand-10-Pilots-Journal/dp/1646631609?ref=nickrroberts.com))  
  
****\[Podcast\] Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East**: This is the best audio-based portrayal of the Pacific Theater of the Second World War bar none. What's more, it's told with an emphasis on the Japanese view of the war. Strap yourself in for absolutely brutal and riveting depictions of some of the largest naval battles and nastiest jungle warfare in history as told by Carlin. ([YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oErYYBNCHh4&ref=nickrroberts.com))
### A day at Hill AFB
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-day-at-hill-afb/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T19:39:58.000Z
We were extremely lucky. My friend from college flies the F-35A. He drove us in the squadron golf cart (yes, they have one) down to the flight line. We got permission from the guys in the tower to stand some 100 feet from the runway.

Pictured in order: F-16C, F-22A, F-35A, KC-135, F-35A
### July-October links: New podcasts, more than you wanted to know about the Cold War
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/new-podcasts-more-than-you-wanted-to-know-about-the-cold-war/
Last updated: 2023-02-21T13:42:52.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-5.png)

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/posts/b1.jpg)

****It's been a little while...**  
  
Since my last roundup, I recorded four podcasts with some fascinating characters, well-worth a listen if you missed them.  
  
****From AH-1W SuperCobra pilot to Google Product Manager** \- With Mike Christman. Working a desk job as an analyst at the CIA, Mike decided he wanted to do more in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001\. He joined up with the Marines. His journey led him to pilot the Bell AH-1W attack helicopter in Afghanistan, where he and his compatriots "hooked and jabbed'" daily with Taliban fighters. After his time with the military, he received an MBA and landed a job as a product manager on the Google Store team.   
  
****B-1B and B-52H: Stories from the nuclear mission** \- With Lt. Col. Ken Peterson (AF retired). Ken is chock full of stories from the Cold War and encounters with legendary historical figures. In 1979, he was on alert near his B-52 when NORAD reported a massive inbound Soviet missile attack. Klaxons screamed. He jumped into the cockpit. The engines were hot...false alarm. Later in his career, he briefed the Air Force's Scientific Advisory board, outlining the need for the B-1B Lancer, which he ultimately piloted. He also tells me about the time Neil Armstrong dropped by for a quick run in the base simulator. 

  
****The vagabond data scientist** \- With Nic Bertagnolli. For years after college, Nic has been my pal who lives in a van. He's one of the most avid lifestyle-crafters I know and lives exactly as he means to. We had a wide-ranging (and fairly technical) discussion around what he does for work: Programming machines to learn from data. As all conversations about machine intelligence seem to go, we also talk through potential futures and his view of the way humans will relate to their machine creations over coming decades.   
  
****Shot down over hostile country** \- With Lt. Col. Scott Roberts (AF retired). Dad and I talk planes for a good while before getting to the topic at hand, Scott O'Grady. In 1995, O'Grady was flying a routine patrol in his F-16 over a no-fly zone in Bosnia when a Soviet-built surface-to-air missile smacked into his aircraft. Thus began his crazy survival odyssey. We talk about where my Dad was at the time, how the military responded, and the cascading effects of the O'Grady incident to every pilot in the Air Force.   
  
****Current books and media**  
  
I'm gearing up for an article and a series of podcasts about the end of the Cold War. Stay tuned.   
  
****For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War**, Melvyn P Leffler   
  
****The Cold War, a New History**, John Lewis Gaddis   
  
****Cold War** documentary series, CNN, narrated by Kenneth Branagh. It's from 1998, but the primary source accounts are astounding: Aides to Truman and people who knew Stalin directly. It's a mammoth series (24 episodes), but goes into so much interesting detail.
### From AH-1W SuperCobra pilot to Google product manager
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/from-ah-1w-supercobra-pilot-to-google-product-manager/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:46:11.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1E9JYNfsFlN9DOT9JL3hzW?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/from-ah-1w-supercobra-pilot-to-google-product-manager/id1504736472?i=1000487610336&ref=nickrroberts.com), or [Google](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNjhhNmFmNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/MjI3NjQ1MGUtN2RkNi00MzlmLWJhYmUtZjg0NDk3NTEyZWI1?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifytTtmI%5FrAhUHq54KHf-qBSEQkfYCegQIARAF&ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-4.png)

AH-1 SuperCobra attack helicopter

### ****Technology/aviation episode**

Mike Christman is a product manager at Google and, previously, a CIA intelligence analyst turned Marine AH-1 attack helicopter pilot. With the Marines, he served two tours in Afghanistan and three total. On his first, he flew regular combat missions against the Taliban in the Helmand Valley. On his next, he became a forward air controller, guiding close air support onto targets while embedded with infantry. He was selected as a 2014 Tillman Military Scholar by the Pat Tillman Foundation. I’d encourage you to check out some of his articles linked below.

Today, we speak about his nine years with the Marines engaging in faraway firefights, and then his big transition to business school and ultimately Google. We also discuss product management, our mutual career, the finer points of anticipating user and business needs, and how to build great products.

### ****References**

"[Shades of Green](https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/shades-green?ref=nickrroberts.com)" by Mike Christman

"[Inside the Box](http://www.thegiddysummit.com/inside-the-box/?ref=nickrroberts.com)" by Mike Christman

Music: "Carved From Stone" by TrackTribe
### B-1B and B-52H: Stories from the nuclear mission
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/b-1b-and-b-52h-stories-from-the-nuclear-mission/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:46:32.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1UH1NMzo6XkIxqlQpoIR0b?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b-1b-and-b-52h-stories-from-the-nuclear-mission/id1504736472?i=1000486835684&ref=nickrroberts.com), or [Google](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNjhhNmFmNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/OTZlOGExMzQtMGUzNy00NDY0LWJlYzktZTg4MTE4YzgxYWFm?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjA4viDg%5F3qAhUQlJ4KHTYuCh0QkfYCegQIARAF&ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-3.png)

Left: Ken Peterson, Right: Neil Armstrong. Circa 1989.

### ****Aviation episode**

Lieutenant Colonel Ken Peterson flew the B-52H Stratofortress and the B-1B Lancer bombers during some of the most tense moments of the Cold War. Today we talk about his experience while on alert, ready to take flight with terrifyingly powerful weapons in tow. We also cover the time Ken briefed the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Board which recommended the B-1 program to President Reagan.

Aside from flying one of the fastest bombers in the world, Ken is full of stories about crossing paths with legendary historical figures, like General James Doolittle, who led the first strike on the Japanese homeland after the Pearl Harbor attack in World War II, or Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon.

Buzz One Four Documentary: [https://www.amazon.com/Buzz-One-Four-David-Woodhouse/dp/B0795BZ3F3](https://www.amazon.com/Buzz-One-Four-David-Woodhouse/dp/B0795BZ3F3?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Music: “Get Tough” by TrackTribe
### The vagabond data scientist
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/the-vagabond-data-scientist/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:47:02.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/15UXMr7fsN8Ji0d4Z64Vwv?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nick-roberts/id1504736472?ref=nickrroberts.com#episodeGuid=fd9d4b50-90ba-43fa-93b3-b2e41f33713f), or [Google](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNjhhNmFmNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/ZmQ5ZDRiNTAtOTBiYS00M2ZhLTkzYjMtYjJlNDFmMzM3MTNm?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjC4vTDgvPqAhWWmJ4KHV1hBPgQkfYCegQIARAF&ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-14.png)

### ****Technology episode**

Nic Bertagnolli is an itinerant data scientist who lives almost full-time from his van with his partner, Laura McNerney, a previous guest of this show. He’s also mathematician, tinkerer, and, though he may not admit it, a futurist and philosopher. Outside of this, Nic enjoys mountain biking, rock climbing, and mountaineering. He’s worked for the likes of 3M, a series of startups, and even Verily, a health research company in Alphabet, as he travels the world with little more than a laptop on his mission for adventure and high accuracy, precision, and recall.

I speak to him about the state of machine learning and his areas of research. We also discuss the evolving relationship between humans and machines, potential futures, and how to keep current in one of the most dynamic domains of human knowledge.

### ****References**

Jeremy Howard's Fast AI class: [https://www.fast.ai/about/](https://www.fast.ai/about/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The Morning Paper with Adrian Colyer: [https://blog.acolyer.org/](https://blog.acolyer.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Music: "Morpho Diana" by the Rachel K. Collier
### Shot down over hostile country
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/shot-down-over-hostile-country/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:47:16.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0RbmD225eMiP3EPLkHJref?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nick-roberts/id1504736472?ref=nickrroberts.com#episodeGuid=a8af9729-b478-4c3a-86ef-f2ae6bf3de4b), or [Google](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNjhhNmFmNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/YThhZjk3MjktYjQ3OC00YzNhLTg2ZWYtZjJhZTZiZjNkZTRi?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjd79O29PLqAhUQlJ4KHWG-BsEQkfYCegQIARAF&ref=nickrroberts.com)

### ****Aviation episode**

Father’s Day was just a couple weeks ago and to show my appreciation to my dad, I made him read a book with me. It’s called Return with Honor and it’s by Captain Scott O’Grady, U.S. Air Force retired. The reason I chose this story in particular is because his and my father’s histories overlap somewhat. They were contemporaries in the Air Force, they both did some time in the 555th fighter squadron, also known as “The Triple Nickel,” which was reconstituted from an F-15 to an F-16 squadron in 1994\. But where things get interesting is that they both served in Italy during the same NATO operations over Bosnia in the mid-nineties. On June 2, 1995, O’Grady was flying a patrol in the NATO no-fly zone when an SA-6 soviet-built surface-to-air missile smacked into his F-16, severing the nose completely from the rest of the fuselage. O’Grady was traveling at 350 knots, or a bit over 400 miles per hour, at 27,000 feet when he was hit. Miraculously, O’Grady survived the explosion, ejected, and began a six-day survival odyssey in hostile Bosnian-serb country. Today, I speak with my dad, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Roberts, a former F-15E Strike Eagle pilot, about his view of O’Grady’s experience and how it changed things for the whole Air Force, from what they carry in the ejection seat to the survival training every pilot receives to this day.

Before we get into the meat of the topic, we start off with some regular old father-son plane talk, so either bear with me on that or skip forward to about 18-20 mins.

Music: "Controlled distress" by Biz Baz Studio
### From 0 to Delta First Officer in Three Years
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/from-0-to-delta-first-officer-in-three-years/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:47:40.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/71iMARPaJEDi1jiYgzGKzf?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/from-0-to-delta-first-officer-in-three-years/id1504736472?i=1000480026200&ref=nickrroberts.com), or [Google](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNjhhNmFmNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### ****Aviation episode**

Laura McNerney is a pilot, engineer, skier, climber, mountaineerer, kite-surfer, van-lifer, mountain biker, and the textbook definition of a badass. She ranks among the youngest women ever to join Delta Airlines as a pilot. Today I speak with her about her experience going from building components for intercontinental ballistic missile systems, and having no piloting experience, to becoming a first officer with Delta in merely three years. We also talk about her love for the outdoors, along with the joys and perils of climbing mountains and glaciers.

I find her story of relentless, singular focus on her goals to be very inspiring and I think it needs to be heard. Laura is a model for folks who want to make a career pivot into something they love.

Music: “The Big Guns” by Silent Partner.
### F-15E Fighter Pilot Interview: My Dad
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/f-15e-fighter-pilot-interview-my-dad/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:48:21.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/25QAqPUYvdUTEAYQ5iwplF?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nick-roberts/id1504736472?ref=nickrroberts.com#episodeGuid=eeb114b4-cb38-4899-9097-28b584d8fd2c), or [Google](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNjhhNmFmNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/ZWViMTE0YjQtY2IzOC00ODk5LTkwOTctMjhiNTg0ZDhmZDJj?ved=0CAcQ38oDahcKEwignsHQko7qAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ&ref=nickrroberts.com)

### ****Aviation episode**

Today I bring you an interview with my dad, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Roberts. As I’ve mentioned before, this podcast is going to jump around a bit between focuses on technology, history, aviation, and travel, as I come across interesting topics and interesting people. I know, it’s somewhat low-hanging fruit to interview your own father, but he’s had a storied career and gotten a chance to fly some of the world’s premier fighter aircraft, including the F-4 Phantom II and the F-15E Strike Eagle, something only a tiny fraction of men and women get to do. With my eyesight there’s probably little chance I could have emulated my dad’s path. Not to mention the obstruction presented by my fear of death.

One apology in advance: We pick up quite a bit of background noise in the house during the interview. Somebody was putting dishes away and occasionally the drone of the laundry machine kicks in, so, sorry for that. But, overall, it’s clear and I think it’s a great rundown of what it’s like to be in the seat of a fighter jet.

Music: "Burnt" by the Jingle Punks
### The machinations of the Federal Reserve in the Coronavirus economy
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/the-machinations-of-the-federal-reserve-in-the-coronavirus-economy/
Last updated: 2021-11-17T03:59:51.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2400/1*InpfjEAWvGr-Dd6151sUjg.jpeg)

The beating heart of the financial system is liquidity: Simply, the amount of money available to banks to lend and borrowers to spend. When times are good, there’s enough liquidity that banks lend can lend at attractive interest rates. Borrowers perceive less cost and risk to pay back these loans so they borrow more to fund new businesses, to employ more people, or to buy assets, growing the economy.

The flipside of growth is inflation. When buyers across the economy have more cash to spend, businesses charge more for the same amount of goods to maximize their earnings. A little inflation is generally a sign of a healthy economy, generally [1–2%](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/inflation%5Ftargeting.asp?ref=nickrroberts.com) year-over-year, but high inflation means that there’s something awry. Either consumers have lots of cash to spend, driving up prices, or something increases the cost of goods, like a natural disaster or a big supply cut, which makes them more expensive.

The Federal Reserve‘s job is to manage these inflation patterns and stabilize the U.S. financial system to keep the economy humming. One of the Fed’s main levers on inflation is the “Fed Funds Rate,” which is the interest rate commercial banks charge each other for loans to meet reserve requirements.

The Fed’s reserve requirements force US banks to keep a percentage of their deposits in cash, rather than lend them out. This is to ensure that they’re solvent in a financial panic. If a bank doesn’t have enough cash because it’s loaned out too much and too many people demand their deposits back at the same time, the bank can collapse. If banks go bust on a large scale, as they did during the Great Depression, the economic harm can be enormous and long-lasting. It’s like a financial cancer that metastasizes though the system, drying up cash. So, when banks are short of their reserve requirement, which they have to meet at the close of each business day, they borrow from one another at the Fed Funds Rate, or, in a last resort, borrow from the Fed itself at the [Discount Window](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discountwindow.asp?ref=nickrroberts.com) rate, which is slightly higher.

Many other interest rates like those for mortgages, checking accounts, credit cards, auto loans, and others [benchmark off of the Fed Funds Rate](https://www.bankrate.com/banking/federal-reserve/how-fed-interest-rate-decisions-impact-your-money/?ref=nickrroberts.com), making it a uniquely powerful number.

But just because the Fed declares a new Fed Funds Rate doesn’t necessarily mean that banks start charging each other that amount of interest and that mortgages and credit cards suddenly adjust their short-term rates. The Fed has to take action to drive rates where it wants using [Open Market Operations](https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst%5Fopenmarketops.htm), meaning that it either buys or sells government securities to banks.

If the Fed wants to increase liquidity and heat up the economy, it lowers the target Fed Funds rate and buys US government securities (US Treasury bonds, notes, bills) from US commercial banks and deposits funds into their reserve accounts (which are held at Federal Reserve banks across America). With this influx of new cash, banks compete to lend money to one another to meet reserve requirements and rates go down.

If the Fed wants to decrease liquidity and pump the brakes on inflation, it increases the Fed Funds rate and sells US bonds to banks. This process extracts cash from the economy in exchange for a debt obligation from the US Treasury.

#### ****The Fed pulled out all the stops to fight the Corona-slump**

In response to the economic chaos brought on by COVID-19, the Fed made several dramatic moves to flood the market with dirt-cheap credit and increase liquidity for lenders. It dropped the Fed Funds Rate target to between 0% and 0.25%, slashed the discount window rate to 0.25%, greatly expanded open market purchase and repurchase operations, and **eliminated* reserve requirements for US banks, among [other things](https://www.brookings.edu/research/fed-response-to-covid19/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

A 0%-ish Fed Funds target means that banks will be able to borrow Fed Funds from one another at essentially no cost, with rates falling somewhere underneath the 0.25% discount window. We should also expect to see interest rates for mortgages, savings accounts, credit cards, and other loans fall as well.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*d2q3espjvTVP-FNCt4vppg.png)

Mortgage rates show a downward trend after The Fed’s March announcements. Source:[ Nerdwallet.](https://www.nerdwallet.com/mortgages/refinance-rates/30-year-fixed?ref=nickrroberts.com)

The Fed [said](https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/opolicy/operating%5Fpolicy%5F200323?ref=nickrroberts.com) it would purchase $75 billion in US Treasury securities and $50 billion in mortgage-backed securities from banks **daily* to pump cash into the system. It’s also using a similar tool called repurchase operations to infuse even more.

Security repurchase agreements happen because banks and hedge funds don’t like to hold cash, since it doesn’t generate a return on its own. So, to raise liquid funds for a short time period to finance investments or loans, they’ll offer to sell securities (like US treasury bonds) to other banks (or the Fed)and agree to buy them back later at a higher price. According to the [Brookings Institution](https://www.brookings.edu/research/fed-response-to-covid19/?ref=nickrroberts.com): “Before coronavirus turmoil hit the market, the Fed was offering $100 billion in overnight repo and $20 billion in two-week repo. It has greatly expanded the program — both in the amounts offered and the length of the loans. It is offering $1 trillion in daily overnight repo, and $500 billion in one month and $500 billion in three-month repo.”

The Fed [removed reserve requirements](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20200315b.htm) completely, reasoning that most banks hold reserves far in excess of what they need to. One of the causes of this is that the Fed started offering [interest on excess reserves](https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reqresbalances.htm) after the financial crisis began in 2008\. But it also relaxed other capital buffer requirements like the [Total Loss Absorbing Capacity](https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/bcreg20200323a.htm) (TLAC) regulation.

Despite these big policy changes and the $2 trillion [CARES act](https://www.npr.org/2020/03/26/821457551/whats-inside-the-senate-s-2-trillion-coronavirus-aid-package?ref=nickrroberts.com) payout to households and corporations in the US, we’ll likely have to make our way through some rough seas. It’s difficult to grow an economy under quarantine, even with basically unlimited access to credit.

****Sources**:

- [https://www.brookings.edu/research/fed-response-to-covid19/](https://www.brookings.edu/research/fed-response-to-covid19/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/01/28/what-is-the-repo-market-and-why-does-it-matter/](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/01/28/what-is-the-repo-market-and-why-does-it-matter/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [https://www.frbsf.org/education/publications/doctor-econ/2006/august/libor-federal-funds-rate-short-term/](https://www.frbsf.org/education/publications/doctor-econ/2006/august/libor-federal-funds-rate-short-term/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [https://www.thebalance.com/fed-funds-rate-definition-impact-and-how-it-works-3306122](https://www.thebalance.com/fed-funds-rate-definition-impact-and-how-it-works-3306122?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- <https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20200315b.htm>
- [https://www.stlouisfed.org/in-plain-english/a-closer-look-at-open-market-operations](https://www.stlouisfed.org/in-plain-english/a-closer-look-at-open-market-operations?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### Broken Arrows and Almost-Annihilations
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/broken-arrows-and-almost-annihilations/
Last updated: 2022-01-06T23:49:18.000Z
Available on: [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5ffRIiI6cj3aJUqIt9n9PT?ref=nickrroberts.com), or [Apple](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/broken-arrows-and-almost-annihilations/id1504736472?i=1000477902542&ref=nickrroberts.com)

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/0*iEtrwiAkpHSSzJGl.JPG)

Titan II Missile Complex. Source: [Defense.gov](https://www.defense.gov/Explore/Features/story/Article/1701728/we-visited-a-nuclear-missile-bunker/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

We still live beneath the [sword of Damacles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles?ref=nickrroberts.com), though we tend to forget it. The generation of humanity who knew a world without nuclear weapons before 1945 is fast disappearing and the last time humanity seriously stared down armageddon seems long ago.

[Dan Carlin](https://www.dancarlin.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) thinks that our forgetfulness is natural. Perhaps, he wonders, this is a kind of evolutionary advantage. It’s debilitating to maintain a state of peak fear. It takes you out of the present. Prevents you from enjoying your stay on Earth. To many of us, nuclear weapons are too abstract, too distant to remain top-of-mind.

But now and again, we’re reminded of what’s at stake. Fred Kaplan points out in his introduction to **The Bomb: Presidents, Generals and the Secret History of Nuclear Wa*r that current events, such as the recent tensions with a nuclear North Korea, thrust us into remembering what unchecked, maniacally destructive power rests solely in the hands of the US president. [As of March 1, 2019](https://www.state.gov/new-start-treaty-aggregate-numbers-of-strategic-offensive-arms/?ref=nickrroberts.com), the United States has a combined 656 deployed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs), and heavy bombers. This amounts to 1365 individual nuclear warheads of variable power, inclusive of the [B83 thermonuclear bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B83%5Fnuclear%5Fbomb?ref=nickrroberts.com), with a blast yield 80 times more powerful than the weapon detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. The Russian Federation, the United States’ counterpart in the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction) treaty, possesses similar numbers of deployed launch platforms and warheads.

When we wake up to these facts again, it is helpful to remember that these numbers are merely a fraction of what they [once were](https://www.armscontrol.org/files/images/US%5FStockpile%5F2017.png?ref=nickrroberts.com). And though the current US relationship with Russia and certain other nuclear players remains icy, we haven’t come close to the crises of the Cold War in recent years, where the survival of humanity was in question minute-to-minute, and the probability of accidental detonations surged. Below are several, particularly unnerving examples of each, sampled from much larger lists.

### ****A quiver of Broken Arrows**

Unexploded nuclear bombs still lay unfound [off American coasts](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18587608&ref=nickrroberts.com), [embedded in swamps](https://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-bomb-accident-goldsboro-nc-swamp-2017-5?ref=nickrroberts.com), 16,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, and elsewhere. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as the Cold War went into full swing, increasing tensions caused both sides to ratchet up military activity in an effort to stay ready for making or countering a nuclear attack. With so many planes, ships, missiles, and submarines deploying, accidents began to happen. A lot of them. Submarines [malfunctioned and sank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project%5FAzorian?ref=nickrroberts.com). Planes crashed, or [fell off carriers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965%5FPhilippine%5FSea%5FA-4%5Fincident?ref=nickrroberts.com). In the process, nuclear ordnance began to go missing or very nearly detonate by accident. The US military refers to these as events as [Broken Arrows](http://www.nukestrat.com/us/CDI%5FBrokenArrowMonitor1981.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com). Specifically, the “accidental or unauthorized detonation” or “seizure, theft, or loss of a nuclear weapon or component (including jettisoning).”

#### ****Chrome Dome**

When the Soviet Union launched “Sputnik,” the world’s first satellite, into orbit, the US Air Force panicked. According to Matt McCormick in \*Buzz One Four, \*leaders like General Curtis LeMay of Strategic Air Command (SAC) reasoned that if the Soviets could launch satellites into space, they could also lob nuclear warheads at the US mainland without the use of manned aircraft.

The Air Force launched “Operation Chrome Dome.” This put twelve B-52 thermonuclear-laden bombers on pre-planned attack vectors aimed at the Soviet Union 24 hours a day, seven days a week from 1960 to 1968\. The mission was to enforce deterrence by looping near Soviet airspace over the Arctic and the Mediterranean. If the Soviets were to destroy US missile, bomber, and submarine bases with a missile attack, SAC wanted enough bombers airborne to threaten enormous damage in retaliation.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*AMg4wygzLK1PLjNpiiWkBw.png)

Insignia and patch of the US Strategic Air Command, meant to symbolize peace-keeping with the threat of godlike force.

Such a massive and ongoing procedure led to problems almost immediately. During the years Chrome Dome ran, five B-52s crashed with thermonuclear weapons on board:

- ****1961: Goldsboro, North Carolina**. A B-52G broke up in mid-air, jettisoning its two thermonuclear bombs and killing three out of eight crew members in the process. One of the Mark 39 3.8 megaton bombs completed \*all but one \*arming step [required for detonation](https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/20/goldsboro-revisited-declassified-document?ref=nickrroberts.com).
- ****1961: Yuba City, California**. Four crew members ejected. Four thermonuclear bombs were recovered from the crash site.
- ****1964: Savage Mountain, Maryland**. The basis for **Buzz One Four*. Three out of five crew members died when the tail of their B-52 broke off in high turbulence over Maryland (a known issue with early models of the bomber). Its two thermonuclear bombs, each with a 9-megaton yield, were found in the center of the fuselage wreckage.
- ****1966: Palomares, Spain**. A B-52 collided with a KC-135 at 31,000 feet during a mid-air refueling operation. All crew members on the KC-135 perished. Three of seven B-52 crew members died. Four bombs scattered near Palomares, two of the bombs’ conventional explosives detonated, contaminating a large area with plutonium debris.
- ****1968: Thule Air Base, Greenland**. A cabin fire caused the crew of the B-52G to eject, resulting in one fatality. The plane crashed with four Mark 28 bombs on board. The conventional munitions exploded causing radioactive contamination as pieces of the nuclear bombs were strewn around the crash area and a joint clean-up effort with Denmark ensued.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*BMnp2SsBbZONVuv-d20d-A.png)

Chrome Dome flight routes. [Source.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Operation%5FChrome%5FDome.png?ref=nickrroberts.com)

#### ****Titanic troubles**

By 1980, the Titan II missiles, then 18 years old, showed their age. Airmen at the time complained frequently about fuel leaks and faulty vapor detectors in the silos. These were the first missiles that the Air Force could fire from an underground silo, unlike their above-ground launched predecessors, and which, when capped with a 740-ton blast door, made them very useful as a counter-strike weapon. The missiles carried the largest-yield warhead ever mounted on an ICBM by the United States: The 9-megaton [W-53](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53%5Fnuclear%5Fbomb?ref=nickrroberts.com).

On September 18, 1980, at missile complex 374–7, Damascus, Arkansas, Senior Airman David Powell, a 21-year old missile repairman from the 308th Strategic Air Wing’s Propellant Transfer System (PTS) team, began a routine maintenance procedure to restore pressure to the second stage oxidizer tank. The Titan’s engines relied on a hypergolic reaction between Aerozine-50 and the oxidizer, nitrogen tetroxide, to create an immense amount of thrust.

As Powell unscrewed the pressure cap in order to add ordinary nitrogen gas to increase pressure on the oxidizer, he dropped the nine-pound socket attached to the wrench. It fell through the small gap between the maintenance platform and the missile’s skin 70 feet down the silo, ricocheted, and punctured the first stage fuel tank, causing a jet of Aerozine to spew into the silo.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*plVYwA0EuItBm5uV1q99ZA.jpeg)

The launch duct at the Titan II Missile Museum, AZ. [Source.](https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g31338-d103133-i299181109-Titan%5FMissile%5FMuseum-Sahuarita%5FArizona.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)

After many attempts to diagnose and fix the situation, the missile crew and PTS teams evacuated the complex. They were worried the decreasing pressure of the fuel tank would cause the entire structure of the first stage to collapse with the weight of the second stage and the warhead sitting on top. If this happened, it was almost certain that the oxidizer and fuel would mix, setting off a massive, uncontrolled explosion. And the warhead…no one knew for certain what it would do.

Another airman, David Livingston, attempted to re-enter the silo in order to switch on an exhaust fan to vent the fuel vapors. However, during this process the fuel flooding the complex ignited, causing a massive explosion that sent the blast doors flying and ejected the W-53 cone about 100 feet away from the silo. Huge pieces of concrete and rebar rained down on the crowd gathered outside. Livingston died of his injuries.

Fortunately, the warhead’s safety features held. A 9-megaton ground blast would have emitted a cloud of fallout spilling into four different states, causing thousands of fatalities and injuries.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*U-s1jErrztL6rjqRz3KCpA.png)

[NUKEMAP simulation](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=35.3673&lng=-92.4096&airburst=0&hob%5Fft=0&casualties=1&fallout=1&ff=50&psi=20,5,1&zm=7&ref=nickrroberts.com) of a 9 Megaton surface detonation in Damascus, Arkansas.

All told, the US Defense Department [recognizes](https://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/635.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com) 32 Broken Arrow events between 1950 and 1980.

### ****When it’s almost come to blows**

During the Cold War, the continuation of the human species periodically came down to a guess or a bluff by a single person.

Oft-quoted Secretary of State Dean Rusk, in reference to the posturing between the US and the Soviet Union that nearly brought the two countries to all-out nuclear war in the 1960s, called the state of affairs a “[goddamn poker game](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v08/d141?ref=nickrroberts.com).” It’s an apt comparison.

#### ****Berlin and the backyard**

But if nuclear deterrence was a game, Nikita Krushchev didn’t think much of his new opponent after the 1960 US election. The Soviet leader formerly squared off with Dwight D. Eisenhower, the five-star general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II — himself apparently a master [poker player](https://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/14784-men-of-action-dwight-d-eisenhower?ref=nickrroberts.com). Comparatively, he thought of John F. Kennedy as something of a spoiled softie: A baby-faced aristocrat, [well-known](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/jackie-and-the-girls/309000/?ref=nickrroberts.com) for womanizing and hanging about with the likes of the [Rat Pack](https://www.biography.com/news/john-f-kennedy-frank-sinatra-friendship?ref=nickrroberts.com). Not used to a hard life. Krushchev was 23 years Kennedy’s senior. Though born a peasant, he ascended in the Communist party, participated in Josef Stalin’s purges and took part in the bloodbath defense of Stalingrad against the Germans in World War II, during Hitler’s ill-fated [Operation Barbarossa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation%5FBarbarossa?ref=nickrroberts.com).

Kaplan details the June, 1961 summit between the two men:

> “It proved disastrous. Kennedy had hoped to calm tensions and avoid a crisis. Khrushchev…berated him repeatedly, vowed to sever Berlin’s Western ties by the end of the year, and warned that the Soviet army would go to war if the West tried to maintain its access. Boarding the plane back to Washington, Kennedy mumbled to an aide, “It will be a cold winter.”

Allied-held West Berlin became a thorn in the side of the USSR quickly after its inception in 1949\. It sat 100 miles within Communist East Germany and became a staging ground for East German citizens attempting to flee to the West. By 1961, 4.5 million East Germans had emigrated to West Germany or West Berlin. These were primarily highly-skilled professionals: engineers, doctors, and lawyers, representing some 20% of the East German population. To stem this outward flow, Krushchev wanted to push the US and its allies out of the city and return control to the East Germans. The East Germans constructed the Berlin Wall and the USSR repeatedly signaled that it would forcibly take the rest of the city.

Krushchev also relied on the ominous threat of the “Missile Gap,” which was the idea that the Soviets were far ahead in both their numbers and efficacy of ICBMs than the United States. With this rhetorical tool, his calculation was that the United States would not retaliate against a conventional ground invasion of West Berlin for fear of a strike on the US mainland. Throughout late 1961, East German police began to interfere with or deny access to US diplomats crossing into East Berlin.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*RVCI8EEnUzH2Eog-IJYpTA.jpeg)

Depiction of West Berlin relative to the rest of Germany. [Source](https://look.substack.com/p/jack-be-nimble)

But Kennedy wasn’t having it. With the help of the **Discoverer* satellite’s photography, U-2 reconnaissance spy planes and human intelligence, Air Force analysts debunked Krushchev’s missile threats as baldly overstated. The number of long-range missiles possessed by the Soviet Union in 1960 looked to be merely **four*.

Kennedy authorized a speech by the Assistant Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric to announce the numbers and capabilities of nuclear weapons available on both sides and emphasize that the United States had a clear and overwhelming second-strike capability if the Soviets were to make a first move: “their Iron Curtain is not so impenetrable as to force us to accept at face value the Kremlin’s boasts.” The US wasn’t just going to walk away from Berlin.

Events came to a head on October 28, when General Lucius Clay deployed M48 Patton tanks to [Checkpoint Charlie](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/24/berlin-crisis-standoff-checkpoint-charlie?ref=nickrroberts.com) along the border between East and West Berlin in an effort to enforce US freedom of diplomatic movement. The Soviets responded by moving an equal number of T-55 tanks to the opposite side of the checkpoint. Each force trained its guns on the other and the staring contest lasted 16 hours until backchannel communications defused the situation.

With his long-range missile program publicly discredited for the meantime, Krushchev began looking elsewhere for a lever to dislodge the US from Berlin. He found one in Cuba.

Fidel Castro recently cemented his control of Cuba after the failed [Bay of Pigs disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay%5Fof%5FPigs%5FInvasion?ref=nickrroberts.com), an attack by CIA-trained Cuban guerrillas to attempt to retake the nation and install a non-Communist, US-friendly government. Castro crushed the counter-revolutionaries in three days. A woefully embarrassed Kennedy took the lesson to heart.

In a chance flyover by a U-2 spyplane in October of 1962, the US discovered medium-range Soviet ballistic missiles on the island. Kennedy’s ExComm (Executive Commitee of the National Security Council) went into overdrive. Over the next thirteen days they debated how to proceed, getting little sleep. Most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted an immediate and forceful airstrike to take out the missile sites. Kennedy demurred. He worried that dead Russians in Cuba would mean a clear escalation, giving Krushchev the excuse to seize Berlin, throw the confidence of NATO off-balance, and create a rapid spiral into general nuclear war.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*MiabmlExAdEwvYguJlrTIg.jpeg)

Source: [Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/event/Cuban-missile-crisis?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Kennedy took to national television and announced that the military found Soviet missiles in the Caribbean and said that he authorized a naval **quarantine* of the island. The word quarantine used specifically so as not to used the word **blockade*, which was, legally-speaking, an act of war. In practice, it was the same thing.

The world held its breath as Soviet ships steamed toward the US Navy line. News outlets put out wall-to-wall coverage of events. Everyone waited to see whether the Soviet ships would try to force their way through, or turn around.

Most did. But in one case, the Soviet diesel-electric submarine **[B-59](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%5Fsubmarine%5FB-59?ref=nickrroberts.com)* was too deep to be aware of the evolving situation. US destroyers started tailing the submarine in international waters, pinging loudly on sonar and dropping light depth-charges. A demand to surface. The captain, Valentin Savitsky, thought the Soviets and the US may be at war. He debated whether to use a nuclear-tipped torpedo on the tailing ships with the onboard political officer and the commander of the submarine detachment, [Vasily Arkhipov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily%5FArkhipov%5F%28vice%5Fadmiral%29?ref=nickrroberts.com#External%5Flinks). Policy was that a nuclear weapon launch required unanimous approval. The batteries onboard began to die. The air conditioners keeping the atmosphere cool in the **B-59* began to fail and the temperature inside soared. They finally decided to surface. Arkhipov was credited with being the only one of the three deciders that opposed using the nuclear weapon.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*xrbWwtw8p5c5pd2GIebL2Q.jpeg)

B-59 with a US helicopter hovering above. [Source.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet%5Fb-59%5Fsubmarine.jpg?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Although no Soviet ships could bring new missiles into Cuba, the existing missiles on the island were operational. The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up plans for a ground invasion and enormous conventional airstrikes to take out both ballistic and surface to air missile sites.

But Krushchev extended a deal to Kennedy to ease tensions from their fever-pitch. If the United States would withdraw its Jupiter medium-range ballistic missiles from Turkey, he would withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba.

With the bombing runs slated to begin the following Monday, Kennedy leapt at the offer. Both sides demobilized their respective missiles. Extinction averted again, for the moment.

#### ****Bad signals, faulty chips, and misbehaving radar**

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is responsible for monitoring the planet for any missile or aircraft headed in the direction of the United States or Canada. Although officially based at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, NORAD’s alternate command center resides in the [Cheyenne Mountain Complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne%5FMountain%5FComplex?ref=nickrroberts.com), one of the most hardened facilities in the world.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*1sg8aJYpizbtL-d_NvyiJg.jpeg)

Entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. [Source.](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/king-under-the-mountain-building-colorados-cold-war-command-center/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

November 9, 1979\. The computer screens at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex lit up with Soviet missiles. It looked like an enormous attack. Strikes were imminent, minutes away. Klaxons sounded at bomber bases around the country. Crews rushed to their planes. Fighters took to the sky. SAC, the Raven Rock Complex, and the Pentagon were notified. The entire military infrastructure prepared for the worst. As time went on, however, no bombs detonated. Radar and satellites couldn’t corroborate the launches. Shortly after the alarm, personnel at NORAD discovered that one of their technicians mistakenly placed a training tape into one of the computers. The “attack” was just a simulation.

June 3, 1980\. Tensions with the Soviet Union were high after red troops [poured into Afghanistan](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/08/the-soviet-war-in-afghanistan-1979-1989/100786/?ref=nickrroberts.com) to defend the Communist regime, which seized power in Kabul in 1978, from the Mujahideen, a coalition of mainly Islamist, anti-government factions who rose up to fight the regime’s national reform efforts. In response, the United States led a boycott of the Moscow Olympics and imposed sanctions against the Soviets. They also began secretly providing arms to the Mujahideen.

It was in this environment that NORAD detected a launch of some 2200 missiles at the United States. Now, nearly every Russian silo was empty. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to the President, who received the 2:30am emergency call, was about to phone the White House to have the President decide whether to retaliate, when General William E. Odom, Brzezinski’s assistant, called back a moment before. A faulty chip in one of the NORAD communications devices was reading out erroneous messages. No missiles inbound. Eric Schlosser writes in his book **Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety*: “The defective chip was replaced, at a cost of forty-six cents.”

September 26, 1983\. Three weeks after Soviet fighters shot down [Korean Airlines 007](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean%5FAir%5FLines%5FFlight%5F007?ref=nickrroberts.com), a Boeing 747 carrying 269 civilian passengers (whom all died), after it strayed into Soviet airspace, the USSR was on high alert for a US response. The downing of flight 007 caused worldwide outrage, particularly from US President Ronald Reagan who called it a “[crime against humanity.](https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/06/world/transcript-of-president-reagan-s-address-on-downing-of-korean-airliner.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)”

[Stanislav Petrov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav%5FPetrov?ref=nickrroberts.com), a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Forces, was on duty in a Soviet command and control bunker south of Moscow when early-warning radar detected five inbound Minuteman ICBMs from the US. He puzzled over why an American attack would be so small, and decided **not* to relay the warning up his chain of command, assuming it was a false signal, which it was. Later investigations revealed that light reflected off of cloud vapor would periodically cause Soviet monitoring satellites to interpret missile launches. With his act of omission, Petrov is credited with likely averting a massive Soviet nuclear response and an ensuing exchange with the United States.

### ****We still have problems, but it’s better than before**

With the Cold War behind us and the titanic ideological altercations between Western Capitalism and Soviet Communism the stuff of history textbooks, global nuclear annihilation is no longer top-of-mind for most. Pandemics, the rise of artificial intelligence, and other fears creep in to take the lime-light of existential risk.

Schlosser points out that we’re not out of the woods. That citizens and policymakers shouldn’t lose sight of what’s at stake. Much of the information about the events above is sourced from his book, but it also recounts more modern mishaps that erode the confidence we may feel that the military has everything under control **these days*. With so many Minuteman and NORAD computer systems under the constant effects of weather, entropy and chance cirumstance, malfunctions still happen. Like in October of 2010, when the Air Force temporarily lost contact with 50 Minuteman IIIs near F. E. Warren Air Force base due to the incorrect replacement of a circuit board during maintenance. There is also the ever-present human factor to keep concerns alive.

In a more [recent article](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/world-war-three-by-mistake?ref=nickrroberts.com), Schlosser shows that illegal drug use by US Air Force missile personnel is sometimes a problem, possibly because of the long, boring hours. In 2015 alone, three launch officers stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base were thrown out of the service for drug use “including ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamines” and a separate launch officer at Minot Air Force Base “was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for heading a violent street gang, distributing drugs, sexually assaulting a girl under the age of sixteen, and using psilocybin, a powerful hallucinogen.” What might a future drug-abusing, gang-leading launch officer do some day?

Relations between the United States and Russia no longer signal an imminent nuclear exchange, but there are other bilateral beefs to keep an eye on too, such as the standoff between Pakistan and India, each nuclear powers.

However, lately, when sabres rattle and a US president or a foreign actor spout rhetoric to flex their nuclear muscles, we can take some solace in the fact that our nuclear demise has been much nearer in times past. At the time of this writing, superpower war and guaranteed, mutual destruction of the type that confronted President Kennedy, Nikita Krushchev, Ronald Reagan, or Mikhail Gorbachev doesn’t look to be in the cards. Because of this, deployed nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia shrink with each new arms reduction treaty. With these decreases also comes a lower probability of accidental detonations and more Broken Arrows. We’ve stepped back from the brink.

****References:**

- [The End is Always Near](https://www.amazon.com/Hardcore-History-at-Extremes-ebook/dp/B07H4ZBVPR?ref=nickrroberts.com), Dan Carlin
- [Buzz One Four](https://www.amazon.com/Buzz-One-Four-David-Woodhouse/dp/B0795BZ3F3?ref=nickrroberts.com), Matt Mcormick
- [The Bomb: Presidents, Generals and the Secret History of Nuclear War](https://www.amazon.com/Bomb-Presidents-Generals-History-Nuclear/dp/1982107294?ref=nickrroberts.com), Fred Kaplan
- [Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety](https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788?ref=nickrroberts.com), Eric Schlosser

****Further reading, listening and watching:**

- The Bomb: [Sam Harris interview with Fred Kaplan](https://samharris.org/podcasts/186-the-bomb/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- Dr. Strangelove Whisperings: [Dan Carlin interview with Fred Kaplan](https://dchhaddendum.libsyn.com/ep10-strangelove-whisperings?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Command and Control](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/command-and-control/?ref=nickrroberts.com), PBS
### A beginner's startup guide to DCS World in VR
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-beginners-startup-guide-to-dcs-world-in-vr/
Last updated: 2025-09-22T20:36:19.000Z
Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) is the [preeminent](https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-most-realistic-fighter-jet-flight-simulator-on-PC?ref=nickrroberts.com) simulator for fighter jets. It‘s astonishingly realistic in terms of aircraft physics, environments, and flight controls. I love the attention to the little things too, like the way the sun hits the aircraft canopy and illuminates scratches on the surface, or the signs of wear on the controls. DCS in VR takes you to a new level of immersion; it *really* feels like flying.

But with such realism comes immense complexity. Though there is a lot of information on the web (e.g. the [Hoggit](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/?ref=nickrroberts.com) subreddit/Discord server and endless videos on YouTube) about how to begin, it’s often diffuse and overwhelming.

Starting up, I scoured the internet and spent lots of time trying to answer the following questions in roughly this order:

- Do you need to fiddle with a keyboard while you’re in a VR headset?
- What’s the recommended hardware to play DCS in VR? Can my PC handle it?
- How should you get DCS on your machine?
- What do I need a DCS login for?
- What plane should you choose first and what’s the best way to learn it?
- How do you access new plane modules?
- How do you set up your controls?
- How should I set up my system, in-game and Nvidia graphics settings for maximum performance in VR?
- How does VR zoom work and how do you set it up?
- How do I create custom missions (like a 1v1)?
- How do you record yourself in VR?
- What is Tacview and why would you want it?
- When and how should I try multiplayer?
- How do I install mods like the F22?
- How do I learn better strategy and tactics?
- What are other good resources?

Below, I’ll share what I found and where to go for deeper dives.

## First, a word on how to approach DCS

With patience and humility. If you want quick action without the steep learning curve, there are other games for that. For VR, for instance, I messed around with *War Thunder*, which seemed okay. There are many other non-VR sims, however, like *Ace Combat 7* (which has no VR option for PC gamers at the time of this writing) and the like. But if you want the closest approximation to being a real fighter pilot, buckle in, become a student, and commit to the idea that it’s just going to take a while to figure out the basics, let alone to become proficient. As my dad, who flew real F-15s and F-4s, told me: “Even in DCS you’re actually skipping ahead years. Real fighter pilots spend an entire year in flight school just learning the basics of how to maneuver a trainer aircraft. Combat is a long way down the line.”

For a look at why people choose DCS over other combat sims, look no further than [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH7eH98iutc&ref=nickrroberts.com).

## Do you need to fiddle with a keyboard while you’re in a VR headset?

The answer is yes, sometimes, but you can reduce or eliminate keyboard usage altogether with some awesome workarounds.

Coming from a fully-native VR flight sim like [VTOL VR](https://store.steampowered.com/app/667970/VTOL%5FVR/?ref=nickrroberts.com), where you can interact with all of your controls with the Oculus Touch controllers, I found the need for extra hardware and keyboard inputs initially disappointing. However, while *VTOL VR* is an excellent game and an extraordinary achievement for a single developer, DCS outdistances the entire sim market in terms of graphics and availability of actual high-fidelity aircraft and controls by miles.

Maybe one day Eagle Dynamics will find a way to let your virtual hands control everything in the cockpit (they already let you do quite a bit). But even if they did, there are other problems to contend with, like the fact that the Oculus Touch controllers have a very limited set of buttons, and real fighter throttles and sticks are jam-packed with inputs designed to be used without looking anyway. As far as I can tell, most DCS pilots use the VR headset and ignore the controllers. Personally, I opt for the mouse when I need fine-grain control to select missions or other menu items.

## [Voice Attack](https://voiceattack.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) is a game changer

Until very recently, my solution was to peep through the nose gap in my headset at the keyboard to select commands there, but this is a big damper on the game’s immersion. Voice Attack is the best $10 you can spend to upgrade your DCS experience. It lets you map keyboard inputs to voice commands. So, now, I can just say “gear down” into the microphone on the Oculus to drop the landing gear, “bvr” to switch to Beyond Visual Range (BVR) mode, or “wingman attack ground targets” to sic them on tanks. I probably went a bit overboard, but I have 30 commands configured to fully eliminate my use of the keyboard in-game.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*gJUiV4jCS3JpbOse8CvjEw.png)

All the commands I have bound to Voice Attack

One thing that really helps is if you go through a couple rounds of training the Windows Speech Recognition built-in voice analyzer. Without that, it didn’t work that well for me out of the box.

The developer lets you trial a version of Voice Attack with up to 20 commands. But, really, it’s worth every penny. I can’t recommend it enough.

**Deeper dive**: I followed [this tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r6QXvcLjFA&ref=nickrroberts.com) from the Grim Reapers channel to get a sense for how to set it up. Pretty intuitive.

## Hardware

If you’re gearing up from nothing to play DCS in VR, be prepared to drop a chunk of change. You’ll want a performant PC, a VR headset, and a HOTAS (hands-on throttle and stick).

### PC specs

For a great experience in VR, make sure you’re sporting a high-grade CPU and GPU to render the graphics on their best settings. I currently play on lower settings because of my specs, which are:

- CPU: Intel Core i7–7700, 3.60GHz
- GPU: Nvidia GTX 1070 *(I have a 1080Ti on the way)*
- SSD: 250 GB (*I have the Windows OS and DCS installed here.*)
- HDD: 1TB (C*ame with my machine. I use it to store other games and files.*)

The GTX 1080 seems to be the recommended lower bound for a graphics card for DCS. With my 1070, the game will periodically freeze for a second or two and drop frames regularly.

Frame dropping makes it feel like the game is skipping forward like a record. If it happens enough in VR, it can also make you feel a bit nauseous, because the environment in the game doesn’t keep up with your physical movements.

**Deeper dive**: I found [this guide](https://thefraternitysim.com/how-i-setup-my-gaming-system-for-dcs-world-in-vr/?ref=nickrroberts.com) on system specs to be helpful for pointers on hardware, but also on how to optimize the in-game settings for your machine.

### VR headset

I have the Oculus Rift CV1\. I’d love to bump up to the Rift S, which promises higher pixel density, less [screen-door effect](https://www.howtogeek.com/404491/what-is-the-screen-door-effect-in-vr/?ref=nickrroberts.com), and a slightly wider field of vision, but it’s currently completely sold out in the U.S. due to people snapping up gear for the Coronavirus quarantine. I refuse to pay the 100%+ premium over retail on Amazon or eBay.

I haven’t considered other brands because I already have a sizable library of Oculus games, but they do exist and people like some of them. For instance, Valve (the maker of Steam) released [its own](https://store.steampowered.com/sub/354231/?ref=nickrroberts.com) headset and controllers that track individual finger movements. Pretty cool.

**Deeper dive**: There *are* alternatives to Oculus! [Here](https://www.pcgamer.com/best-vr-headset/?ref=nickrroberts.com)’s a comparison.

### HOTAS

Now for more of the aviation-related, fun stuff. I discovered that HOTAS setups are their own secret universe. A collection of vendors, like Thustmaster, Logitech, and others, make mass-market devices, but some hobbyists take it to the absolute extreme.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*42qI0M14vS8QpLLnO93TqA.jpeg)

“F18C inspired VR cockpit for DCS.”[Source](https://forums.mudspike.com/t/vr-cockpit-diy/8364?ref=nickrroberts.com)

My HOTAS is a touch more humble. I originally wanted the [Logitech X-56](https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/space/x56-space-flight-vr-simulator-controller.945-000058.html?ref=nickrroberts.com), which is a pricier, high-end setup, but, like the Rift S, joysticks appear to be a hot Coronavirus commodity and this one was sold out most places (although looks like eBay may be a good bet).

My local Best Buy had one ready for pick-up, so I opted for the [Thrustmaster T.Flight X](https://www.newegg.com/black-thrustmaster-t-flight-hotas-x-joystick/p/N82E16879337003?ref=nickrroberts.com). This one has the advantage of being both more widely-available and a smaller investment if you’re just testing the waters. The only thing I would say, having played DCS a bit now, is that I do wish there were more buttons on it. In particular, I find that I want more four-way swivel-y inputs, for more ready access to weapon changes, trim, radar slewing, or scan adjustments.

**Deeper dive**: I referenced [this](https://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-pc-joysticks/?ref=nickrroberts.com) piece while picking out my HOTAS.

## How should you get DCS on your machine?

There are two ways of doing it: Download an installer from the DCS website, which torrents the files onto your machine, or install through [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/about/?ref=nickrroberts.com). Torrenting the files is very slow-going, so I used Steam because it was quick and I use it for other VR games.

Advantages and disadvantages to each, according to the DCS site:

> Steam Version:  
> \- Auto-Update without launching the game (as long as steam is open)  
> \- Faster Download/Update Speed  
> \- Steam In-Game Overlay  
> \- Steam Friend List Notifications  
> \- Quick Repair  
> \- DLCs not present on Steam are unsupported  
>  
> Standalone DCS World:  
> \- Get all the modules as soon as they are released  
> \- Does not require any extra program to be launched  
> \- Has every single modules\[sic\] available

Be mindful that you can transition purchases from Steam to standalone, but, according to [this](https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=2085202&ref=nickrroberts.com#post2085202) forum post, it doesn’t look like Steam lets you activate modules with keys purchased directly from Eagle Dynamics or other non-Steam vendors. So, if you’re starting on standalone, you probably want to stay there if you’ve bought anything.

## What do I need a DCS login for?

Two things: Accessing multiplayer servers and purchase management.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*jmWv0zAWswC0PCgL64L2fQ.png)

Multiplayer server list.

To get a DCS account, go to the DCS [site](https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) and click “Login” on the top bar. This will pop up a modal with a “Register” link on it. Set up an account and then click “Profile” when you’ve logged in. Click “edit” next to “Personal Information” and you’ll see a section called “Steam Account.” This is where you can bind your Steam account with DCS. If ever you want to transfer the licenses for any DLCs or modules you’ve purchased on Steam, you can “Get Licenses” to get bring them over.

**Deeper dive**: DCS FAQ on Steam [here](https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/support/faq/steam/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

## What plane should you choose first and what’s the best way to learn it?

This is a controversial topic among DCS fans. Some argue that there’s plenty to learn with the SU-25T (close air support role) and the TF-51D (no guns), which come free with the game, and you should stick with those until you’ve achieved some level of mastery with them before moving on to other planes.

My view: I started DCS because I wanted the air-to-air modern fighter combat experience. I doubt I am alone here. So, I almost immediately purchased the Flaming Cliffs 3 pack ($50), which comes with the F-15C, MiG-29A, MiG-29S, A-10A, SU-27, SU-33, and Su-25 “Frogfoot.” This bundle is designed for entry-level DCS pilots: Many of the aircraft are “low fidelity,” meaning that they don’t have fully clickable cockpits and are simpler to fly than others like the A-10C Warthog.

You may find yourself asking *why are DCS plane modules so pricey*? Frankly, it’s amazing that they’re not more expensive. I listened to a podcast [here](https://www.fighterpilotpodcast.com/episodes/028-air-combat-simulation-gaming/?ref=nickrroberts.com) with Matt Wagner, senior producer with Eagle Dynamics, where he talks about the amount of research and development work that goes into faithfully replicating something like an F-18C. It is staggering. It can be years for a team of engineers and artists to produce a single virtual aircraft at full fidelity, including its unique flight physics and handling.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*kywLOLTMzGlQ1_K4E4lXCA.png)

A Ukrainian Su-27\. [Source](https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/525865693985308930/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

So, if you purchased Flaming Cliffs 3, what plane should you start with? I’d recommend the **Su-27 Flanker** for a few reasons:

1. Most of the training missions that come with Flaming Cliffs use the Su-27\. I repeated each mission until I fully understood the lesson and watched YouTube videos for specifics I still didn’t get.
2. The Russians know how to make an intuitive set of controls. I found the startup time to learn the HUD, radar, radar warning system, and other aspects to be less than NATO planes like the F-15.
3. It is [supermaneuverable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermaneuverability?ref=nickrroberts.com), very fun to fly, and, in my opinion, is one of the sexiest-looking planes in the game.

When learning any new plane, I would focus first on takeoff, landing, and working the sensors, then move on to aircraft-specific tactics. When you get to combat, it helps also to read up on the aircraft’s competitive advantages. For example, Su-27s are superb in close-in fights, whereas the F-15C dominates at beyond visual range combat.

## How do you access new plane modules?

If you use Steam, it’s as easy as purchasing a module in the store seeing it appear in DCS. You may have to reboot the game, but whichever plane(s) or DLCs you purchase should simply appear in the “Instant action,” “Missions” and “Campaigns” menus.

If you purchase a DLC or a new module in the standalone version, you should see it if you click the module manager icon on the top of the home screen.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*iW-0uvFmVYtrcs5OCvY89g.jpeg)

[Source](https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/support/faq/?ref=nickrroberts.com#1432837).

**Deeper dive**: The DCS FAQ [here](https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/support/faq/?ref=nickrroberts.com#1432837).

## How do you set up your controls?

Once you have a HOTAS, it’s time to map controls to it. But first, **install the right driver**. For my T.Flight X, I had to go to the Thrustmaster support site for [my mode](https://support.thrustmaster.com/en/product/tflighthotasx-en/?ref=nickrroberts.com)l and download the package. It tells your PC which inputs to look for. Before I did this, DCS wasn’t recognizing any of my throttle axis movement.

**Deeper dive**: I used another Grim Reapers tutorial [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbrSKsPQ6Oc&ref=nickrroberts.com) (for the SU-27/33, MiG-29, J-11 — he has many others available). I believe he uses a Logitech X-56, so he’s working with more input options, but you can mostly map the equivalents on a simpler device like mine.

The control mapping setup is a bit time-consuming, but there’s a big payoff to having functions configured in a way that makes sense to you. I find it’s even more immersive to follow the types of controls real pilots tend to have available for each hand. For example, countermeasures like chaff and flares on the throttle on the left, trim adjustments on the stick on the right.

**How to assign multiple functions to the same buttons**: If you’re running out of HOTAS inputs, I’d recommend adding a modifier button. You sacrifice one to gain many. In the controls menu, if you click the “Modifiers” gray button at the bottom, you can designate a button on your HOTAS. I use the one circled in red below as my modifier. Once you’ve created one, you can edit the other controls to use it. By default, my four-way button on the joystick is trim. With the modifier, I slew the target designator around.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*2JqPHGLHaaIfjnR9absUpw.png)

My modifier button

## How should I set up my system, in-game and Nvidia graphics settings for maximum performance in VR?

With no adjustments, *DCS* ran smoothly for me on single player in VR, but became very choppy on multiplayer. After a big series of both hardware updates (see my setup above) and settings tweaks below, I’ve seen some big improvements to my average frames-per-second (FPS).

It helps a lot to know precisely where your machine is struggling. Track your in-game performance with [FpsVR](https://store.steampowered.com/app/908520/fpsVR/?ref=nickrroberts.com) from Steam. It costs a few bucks, but it will help you monitor your GPU and CPU when you’ve got the headset on.

Tweaks I made that helped:

- Moving the *DCS* install to a solid state disk (SSD) drive. Rookie mistake, but initially I had DCS on my mechanical hard disk. Moving to SSD made an immediate difference to my load times for games and my in-game FPS.
- Overclocking my GPU. I downloaded [MSI afterburner](https://www.msi.com/page/afterburner?ref=nickrroberts.com) and followed the tutorial [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkwCPGmVszI&ref=nickrroberts.com). I happen to have an MSI GPU, but it also works for other graphics cards. A caution here: Make sure that you have a good cooling system on your card and in your PC case or you risk getting things too hot and reducing the life of your graphics card.
- RAM: Running *DCS* in multiplayer with VoiceAttack and OBS for recording was maxing out my 16GB of RAM. I installed 16 more and that seemed to help a bit.
- Turn off Windows Game Mode in Windows Settings > Gaming.

These are my current progam settings in the Nvidia control panel:

- **Virtual reality pre-rendered frames**: 4
- **Texture filtering — Trilinear optimization**: On
- **Texture filtering — Anisotropic Sample Optimization**: On
- **Power Management Mode**: Prefer Maximum Performance
- **FXAA**: On

I changed these things in *DCS* itself:

- **VR > Pixel Density**: 1.0
- **Textures**: High
- **Terrain textures**: Low
- **Civ. traffic**: Off
- **Visible range**: Medium
- **Heat Blur**: Off
- **Shadows**: Medium
- **Resolution**: 1260x768
- **Aspect ratio**: 1.666
- **Monitors**: 1 screen
- **Res. of cockpit displays**: 512
- **MSAA**: Off
- **Depth of field**: Off
- **Lens effects**: None
- **Motion blur**: Off
- **SSAA**: Off
- **Clutter/grass**: 0
- **Trees Visibility**: 85%
- **Preload Radius**: 15000
- **Chimney smoke density**: 4
- **Gamma**: 1.9
- **Anisotropic filtering**: 8x
- **Terrain Object Shadows**: Flat
- **Cockpit Global Illumination**: Off
- **Messages font scale**: 1.50

**Deeper dive**: I devoutly followed the instructions in the two videos [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywGhE1vnRVA&ref=nickrroberts.com) and [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkzHTclRIgQ&ref=nickrroberts.com) from Lukas S. / Wolta for optimizations.

## How do you zoom in VR?

There are some situations where you’ll want a closer look at your gauges or the horizon to search for targets. In VR, zooming is a little intense, but useful.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*ZscCQYAWv0Svt_fdP1YS8Q.png)

Select “UI layer” in the aircraft list.

To find the “Toggle VR Zoom” command, you’ll go into the controls menu and click on the dropdown containing the list of your available aircraft. At the very bottom of this menu is a selection called “UI Layer.” Click this. You should see a new set of controls, including “Toggle VR Zoom” toward the bottom. I have a button on my throttle that I use with the modifier to toggle the zoom.

## How do I create custom missions (like a 1v1)?

Many missions come with the game and with the Flaming Cliffs 3 module, but it helps a lot to learn the basics of the mission editor in DCS to make exactly what you want.

With the Su-27, I just wanted a 1v1 fight with an F-15C to test out new tactics, but there isn’t one readily available in the Flaming Cliffs pack. So, I created a 1v1 mission for the Caucasus map. If you’d like to use it, just download it by clicking the Google Drive link below and store the file in `C:\Users\{username}\Saved Games\DCS\Missions\`. You can play the mission as-is by opening DCS and going into Missions > My Missions. Alternatively, you can open the file in the mission editor can swap around your opponent for another type of plane.

**Deeper dive**: [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6hEi-fVQbc&ref=nickrroberts.com) is an excellent two-part series on how to set up a mission from the ground-up, including waypoints for navigation.

**1v1 Su-27 vs. F-15C mission** [**download**](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vM8XlOpGC63iN2Su79dp1Gfa%5FfCwj9Bh&ref=nickrroberts.com)

## How do you record yourself in VR?

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*gh8_Bz3gfMbqh9fkQJekWw.jpeg)

OBS Studio.[Source](https://arcolinux.com/a-quick-tutorial-how-to-set-up-obs-studio/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

Download [OBS](https://obsproject.com/download?ref=nickrroberts.com) (Open Broadcaster Software). It’s a solid, free program that lets you both stream and record. It’s quick to learn, but took me a little while to dial in the quality settings and the view for something that looked good for VR. I output at 1080p and the “High Quality, Medium File Size” quality setting and that seems to put out a decent-looking video for sharing on YouTube. I window capture the “Steam VR View” window and it picks up the in-game sound like a charm.

**Deeper dive**: [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGseILULY0A&ref=nickrroberts.com) is a great walkthrough of how to get it going with DCS.

## What is Tacview and why would you want it?

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*bgi31jrDA-NFJPqQ9djxnQ.png)

[Source](https://www.tacview.net/product/news/en/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

[Tacview](https://www.tacview.net/?ref=nickrroberts.com) is a flight analysis tool used by civilians and militaries alike for debriefings or real-time analysis. It works seamlessly with DCS and it’s an excellent way to understand what you did right and wrong in a given mission. You can use it to track all of yours and your opponents’ maneuvers, missiles, countermeasures, speed, altitude and more. I’ve found it incredibly useful as a beginner.

Tacview Standard is $27.99, but another complementary piece of software that is well worth the money if you intend to play DCS frequently.

**Deeper dive**: [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beNKUYXdrUI&ref=nickrroberts.com) is another Grim Reapers tutorial on how to set up Tacview.

## When and how should I try multiplayer?

This is the part I struggled with most. Starting out, I didn’t know anyone who played *DCS*. Browsing through the multiplayer servers intimidated me because I felt like I was missing a lot of context on what was going on. Many of them ask that you join a voice chat through Discord, which is a little scary if you haven’t done it before. I pictured them full of hard-core gamers who say mean things to each other. But that’s really not the case.

It’s easy to just keep putting off multiplayer, but, from what I can tell, *DCS* becomes amazing when you start getting to know and flying with other players. There are a surprising number of people who dedicate themselves to helping newbies like yours truly into the game. The thought being that as the community grows, the game will only get better for everyone.

**My recommendation**: Join the Grim Reapers Discord [here](https://discordapp.com/invite/Vn2rY3H?ref=nickrroberts.com) and follow the instructions in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z%5FtR7H7hu5o&ref=nickrroberts.com) on how to get set up. After this, jump into the GR training server voice chat on Discord where kind folks will help you figure out things like communications in-game, how to coordinate with other players, how the missions work, etc. There’s an instant community to be had here. It’s a great resource if you want to play multiplayer but don’t know anyone.

**How to host a multiplayer server for DCS with friends**: When you want to play privately with other people, the best thing is to set up a new server. One thing I discovered is to \*make sure that you and your friends are on the same build of \*DCS, otherwise it doesn’t seem to work:

- Pick a mission to play. You can create these in the mission editor.
- Make it public.
- Put a password on the server.
- Share the IP address in the “IP”+ “:” +”Port number” format with the other players, e.g. “12.345.678.91:1234”
- Click start and go into the waiting room. Your friends should be able to join.

**Deeper dive**: See the video [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG3x0WrLVWw&ref=nickrroberts.com) for a look at how to set up a server.

## How do I install mods like the F-22?

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*nYTexSOBdxlqQDg2Vdou5Q.jpeg)

[Source](https://www.businessinsider.com/f22-stealth-fighter-jet-unhackable-because-of-old-operating-system-2019-12?ref=nickrroberts.com).

There are two pre-requisites for many of the fifth-generation aircraft mods:

1. The [Flaming Cliffs](https://store.steampowered.com/app/249320/DCS%5FFlaming%5FCliffs%5F3/?ref=nickrroberts.com) pack purchase. Since mods are built around an existing, officially-supported aircraft like the F-15 or the SU-33, you need to have those in your inventory in order to get the mods working.
2. Run the DCS Open Beta. I found out that the standard Steam DCS version, at the time of this writing, is 2.5.5 and the two mods below seem to only work with 2.5.6, which is still in beta. To get the beta, it depends on your platform:
- **Steam DCS**: Right-click on the game in your library and click “Properties,” select the “Betas” tab, then click “Openbeta — Public beta versions.” Doing this will cause Steam to download the beta package. For me it was around 9.4 GB.
- **Standalone DCS**: Go [here](https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/downloads/world/beta/?ref=nickrroberts.com) to download the beta and then follow the installation instructions.

Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to get the mods. Steps for installing the Grinelli Designs F-22A:

1. Download the zip folder [here](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1uAOlRlYVEBUmIghIuY4slKUoZBscj5iU&export=download&ref=nickrroberts.com).
2. Double-click into the downloaded folder and copy the the “F-22a” folder into `C:\Users\{your username}\Saved Games\DCS\Mods\Aircraft\` and paste it here. If the “Mods” or “Aircraft” folders do not exist, create them.
3. Boot DCS and you should now see the F-22 as selectable in the mission editor under U.S. aircraft.

**Deeper dive**: [Here’s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLJjc5zlNL0&ref=nickrroberts.com) a video step-by-step walkthrough from Grim Reapers.

## How do I learn better strategy and tactics?

Check out [Growling Sidewinder](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh2rDh7vXGeoh1LlzL3QEwg/videos?ref=nickrroberts.com)’s matchups and these videos from Jabbers on [F-Pole](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-Lx4SFMWdU&ref=nickrroberts.com) and radar [notching](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-i4eZWD-Nw&ref=nickrroberts.com). According to my dad, the best way to start learning tactics is to start with basic fighter maneuvers (BFM) and then progress to BVR.

My dad showed me [this awesome video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCFMX5z-ed4&ref=nickrroberts.com) from 1993 that is wonderfully cheesy, but also comprehensive.

**Deeper dive**: [This](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL88B1C1FC2D556CD1&ref=nickrroberts.com) is a solid playlist to learn more about BFM.

## What are other good resources?

### The Fighter Pilot Podcast

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*zMJ1GoHxKDLH2bWBwX25TA.png)

To learn more about fighter jets in general, check out [The Fighter Pilot Podcast](https://www.fighterpilotpodcast.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com). Its host, Vincent “Jello” Aiello, a former F-18 pilot, interviews active-duty pilots of various aircraft and makes quite a few references to DCS. I find it’s a great way to learn more about the strategy and history behind some of the world’s most iconic planes. It does have a bent toward the U.S. armed forces, but I suspect they’ll explore more foreign aircraft as time goes on.

### Good Youtube channels to subscribe to

- [Matt Wagner](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHa9LMylydkT0T3qSzAVrlw?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Jabbers](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXXUrGCF3wV3bbZ6pFQ00g?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Spudknocker](https://www.youtube.com/user/Spudknocker1?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Growling Sidewinder](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh2rDh7vXGeoh1LlzL3QEwg?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Ralfidude](https://www.youtube.com/user/ralfidude?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Tricker](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcSm9zitjaWrfJxfM-Q-djQ?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Hoggit

Join the Hoggit discord to find other players and get into multiplayer [here](https://discordapp.com/invite/hoggit?ref=nickrroberts.com).

Check out the Hoggit subreddit [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/?ref=nickrroberts.com) for tips and advice.

### Thanks for reading

I’ll continue to update this piece as I come across more questions and breakthroughs. Please consider subscribing if it was useful to you. Happy flying!
### A look back at 2019
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2019/
Last updated: 2022-04-29T14:11:07.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-2.png)

Unsplash.

### ****By the numbers**

I ran ****1037** tracked miles in 2019

These runs equate to approximately ****171,105** active calories burned

My total tracked fitness in Strava hit a high of ****86** the week of November 20

From their site: “While fitness is a complicated concept, it can be simplified to an accumulation of training. The Fitness Score is calculated using Training Load and/or Relative Effort to measure your daily training, and an impulse-response model to quantify its effect over time. This will intuitively capture the development of fitness from training, as well as the loss of fitness during a break.”

I averaged ****9,919** steps each day, or ****3,620,435** steps for the whole year

I flew ****60,907** miles, which is almost ****2.5** full laps around the Earth

I called my grandfather ****32** times

I called my mom and dad a combined total of ****65** times

I called my sister ****16** times

I meditated for ****3310** tracked minutes

Net worth increased by ****38%** from the beginning to the end of the year

I finished ****16** books

- (11/24/2019) Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit
- (11/17/2019) The Iliad, Homer
- (11/03/2019) The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray
- (09/01/2019) The Monster of Florence, Preston and Spezi
- (08/13/2019) Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
- (07/25/2019) Shape Up, Ryan Singer
- (07/11/2019) Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
- (06/23/2019) Originals, Adam Grant
- (06/14/2019) 10 arguments for deleting your social media account right now, Jaron Lanier
- (06/09/2019) Deep Work, Cal Newport
- (06/02/2019) E-Myth, Michael Gerber
- (06/01/2019) Atomic Habits, James Clear
- (05/29/2019) 12 rules for Life, Jordan Peterson
- (04/15/2019) Waking Up, Sam Harris
- (03/10/2019) Life, Keith Richards

I have ****4** other books in various states of progress

- The Odyssey, Homer
- Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari
- The End is Always Near, Dan Carlin
- Principles, Ray Dalio

I’ve maintained ****21** active friendships this year (outside of family, Close enough to consider a friend. Regular contact and good feelings.)

I have ****25** inactive friendships (outside of family; a pal. Fallen out of touch or regular contact)

I have ****16** acquaintances (A developing friendship or one at arm’s length. I remember their names)

Lowest happiness index: ****70/100** (happiness index: holistic spot-check of how good I feel psychologically and physically, based on my relationships, job satisfaction, financial well-being, goal completion, etc. on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being the worst and 100 being that life can’t get any better)

Highest happiness index: ****90/100**

Approximately ****37,485** mins of iPhone screen time this year (about ****12.25** hours per week)

Averaged over the year I slept ****8 hours and 13 mins** per night and hit ****71.52%** of quality sleep each night. Explainer by [AutoSleep](http://autosleep.tantsissa.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com): "The Quality ring shows hours of quality sleep achieved. This makes it easier to compare with other days. This looks at the overall sleep time, how much light sleep, how much deep sleep, how restless and the nocturnal dip in heart rate and determines how much quality sleep you had. The ring completion target is 85% of your required sleep hours.”

I backpacked ****4** times

- 6/2 - Point Reyes (Coast Camp)
- 6/16 - Point Reyes (Marshall Beach kayak backpacking)
- 6/28 - Yosemite (Big Oak Flat Road to Yosemite Falls)
- 8/17 - El Dorado National Forest (Emigrant Lake)

I visited ****2** countries:

- Iceland
- Italy

I published ****5** articles (not including this one):

- [Overnight to Emigrant Lake, El Dorado National Forest](https://medium.com/bay-area-workers-guide-to-backpacking/overnight-to-emigrant-lake-el-dorado-national-forest-4864d2f027f4?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Kayaking overnight from Inverness to Marshall Beach, Point Reyes](https://medium.com/bay-area-workers-guide-to-backpacking/kayaking-overnight-from-inverness-to-marshall-beach-point-reyes-8dd1a686ae0c?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Interview tactics to find worthwhile customer problems](https://medium.com/swlh/interview-tactics-to-find-worthwhile-customer-problems-faa960ba2842?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [My highest leverage productivity tactics](https://medium.com/the-attention-game/productivity-tactics-a78f033a547?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [A two-step recipe for Travel Magic](https://medium.com/@nickrroberts/a-two-step-recipe-for-travel-magic-3accf1176686?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### Kayaking overnight from Inverness to Marshall Beach, Point Reyes
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/kayaking-overnight-from-inverness-to-marshall-beach-point-reyes/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T04:01:56.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*E5yyeO-ENRA9PfJNTQUkWw.jpeg)

### ****Essentials**

- ****Bay Area Workers’ rating**: ****8/10**. Kayak-backpacking was a totally unique way of experiencing Tomales Bay/Point Reyes. The raw, natural beauty of the place — the rust-colored moss cliffs — and the amount of wildlife was stunning. We didn’t give this one a perfect ten as the kayak rental was a little pricey, and the bug and raccoon situation was distracting. More about that below.
- ****Type of trip**: Weekender (depart Saturday morning, return Sunday midday).
- ****Drive time to trailhead from San Francisco:** \~1.5 hours if you leave around 8am from San Francisco like we did ([directions to the kayak launch at Blue Waters Kayaking](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/San+Francisco,+CA/Blue+Waters+Kayaking+Inverness+%28TOURS+MAY+LAUNCH+ELSEWHERE%29,+12944+Sir+Francis+Drake+Blvd,+Inverness,+CA+94937/@37.9383757,-122.7186111,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x80859a6d00690021:0x4a501367f076adff!2m2!1d-122.4194155!2d37.7749295!1m5!1m1!1s0x8085cf9851e719a7:0x86d437f57c0848ad!2m2!1d-122.8629374!2d38.1075135!3e0?ref=nickrroberts.com)).
- ****Difficulty and total mileage**: \~10 miles out-and-back paddle (moderate). [Here is the pin showing Marshall Beach](https://goo.gl/maps/2GH3Zm2ahX9KB47S7?ref=nickrroberts.com).
- ****Crowds:** Light. Quite a few kayakers about, but few others camping overnight.
- ****Temperatures:** We went in early June. At this time of year, Tomales Bay tends to be around 50 degrees during the day. It’s very frequently overcast and wet. Kayaking itself is also a splashy sport, so bring a robust rain jacket and waterproof/quick-dry pants. Go [here](https://weather.com/weather/hourbyhour/l/Tomales+Bay+State+Park+CASPTOMALB:13:US?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a current forecast.
- ****Permits:** Required for all overnight backpacking trips. You can reserve a campsite up to 6 months in advance on [recreation.gov](https://www.recreation.gov/camping/campgrounds/233359?ref=nickrroberts.com), or try your luck getting a permit the day-of. From our read at the ranger station, it seemed like the kayaking overnight permits were much less competitive than land trails.
- ****Fire restrictions:** Camp stoves and beach fires are allowed; [check with the visitor’s center](https://www.nps.gov/pore/planyourvisit/beachfires.htm?ref=nickrroberts.com) for current fire restrictions and to obtain a permit. Also, it’s a good idea to pack in some fire starter, since you’ll likely be starting a fire on wet sand.
- ****Bears/threatening wildlife:** No large threatening wildlife. There were plenty of gnats, however, and **very* persistent raccoons. Raccoons here are almost guaranteed. It’s a must that you bring a bear canister, remove all of your food from your packs, and then stow your packs out of sight in the tent. We noticed that, even if you remove anything consumable from your bag, but it is still visible, the raccoons will rifle through it. We looked up from the campfire multiple times to see one elbow-deep in one of our backpacks.
- ****Water situation:** There isn’t much fresh water here, so it’s best to buy a few gallon containers beforehand and throw them in the kayak, since weight isn’t as much of an issue.

### ****Prep**

****Gear:** Check out my temperate climate backpacking [checklist](https://github.com/nickrroberts/backpacking-checklist/blob/master/temperate-weekender-checklist.md?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a recommended set of stuff to bring for this trip. Additionally, make ****certain** that you have a bear canister or your food will become raccoon-food.

****Food:** We recommend bringing non-freeze-dried food, as always. This time, we opted for burritos from [El Farolito](https://www.yelp.com/biz/el-farolito-san-francisco-2?ref=nickrroberts.com), which we re-heated in the fire for dinner. Before starting the paddle, we grabbed some awesome breakfast sandwiches from [Inverness Park Market](https://goo.gl/maps/AVSrfNcZFk5QzRZy7?ref=nickrroberts.com). We also loaded up on water jugs here.

****Camping conditions**: Camping at Marshall Beach was not competitive if you arrive before 3pm. After this, we noticed several kayak parties show up and grab big chunks of beach real-estate around the corner. We couldn’t see or hear them, fortunately.

### ****Trip Details**

#### ****About three weeks before the trip**

We booked overnight camping permits on recreation.gov to reserve our spot at Marshall Beach. We also paid for kayaks in advance through [Blue Waters Kayaking](https://www.bluewaterskayaking.com/camping-2/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

#### ****Saturday — Sunday**

We departed with a couple friends from San Francisco around 8am. Traffic was a non-issue. When we arrived in Inverness around 10:30am, we popped into Inverness Park Market to load up on snacks, water, and a second breakfast.

After this, we drove a few more minutes up the road to Blue Waters Kayaking, where we checked in and grabbed our two double-kayaks. We parked the car along the highway outside of Blue Waters — it’s pretty safe (just make sure all valuables are out of sight). Blue Waters will also lend you a rain jacket at no extra charge if you need one.

When we started paddling toward Marshall, we quickly realized that it was best to stick as close as possible to shore. You’re much more likely to see wildlife and cool flora, and you’re also much more protected from wind.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*EmOyDqlLtgRqewYa-BN7lQ.jpeg)

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*ghO1ZbkOWUPTjkhhQsOXXA.jpeg)

At the time that we went, there were tens of thousands of [Sea Nettle jellyfish](https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals-and-exhibits/animal-guide/invertebrates/sea-nettle?ref=nickrroberts.com) in Tomales Bay. They appeared to be everywhere, pulsing their way around. A great number were in the process of washing up and dying by the hundreds on every beach that we passed. You could tell how long they’d been dead by their colors. The newly deceased were still brown with purplish tentacles, while the older ones were completely leached of their pigment, just mucusy-looking puddles in the sand. A very strange sight.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*XvSWJpdaqebPS0Ays9N4tg.jpeg)

Dead and dying Sea Nettles.

One of the folks at Blue Waters also let us know that there is an abandoned bohemian commune, adjacent to Marshall Beach, at a place called Laird’s Landing. More about that [here](https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-point-reyes-preservation-20160418-story.html?ref=nickrroberts.com). Its primary resident, Clayton Lewis, was an artist who lived there for 31 years and died on the premises in 1995\. According to our kayak guy, Lewis, in his heyday, had a thing for inviting young, female proteges to Laird’s Landing to “intern.”

The structures on the property are still there, though they’re in various states of decay. We had to check them out.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*KptVcFbEdIxriuGj_KPHIQ.jpeg)

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*wfpQ5a6KZwiYuqpo_xtTIQ.jpeg)

The commune buildings at Laird’s Landing.

The rest of our evening we ate and drank by the campfire, periodically fending off raccoons by jumping up and screaming wildly at them.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*iZl2z_wDN29lgbFT6KJm1w.jpeg)

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*MGkkTEVXBfD7j6VTXaLpmQ.jpeg)

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*LcgLwe16_NSKoV6z4LFlqQ.jpeg)

The next morning, the bug situation seemed to have worsened. Enormous clouds of gnats harried us during our breakfast. We got out of there fast and paddled back the way we came.
### Overnight to Emigrant Lake, El Dorado National Forest
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/overnight-to-emigrant-lake-el-dorado-national-forest/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T04:02:10.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*i9XGtnbH2wCfVuWnOh9ggQ.jpeg)

### ****Essentials**

- ****Bay Area Workers’ rating**: ****6/10**. While Emigrant Lake boasts stellar views, there are better backpacking possibilities with the same drive time from San Francisco. When we made the journey, we actually intended to backpack nearby [Fourth of July Lake](https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/california/fourth-of-july-lake-trail?ref=nickrroberts.com), but there were no more permits when we arrived. So, if you find yourself out of other options like we did, or you happen to be in the area, Emigrant Lake is a terrific choice.
- ****Type of trip**: Weekender (depart Saturday morning, return Sunday midday).
- ****Drive time to trailhead from San Francisco:** \~5 hours if you leave around 10am from San Francisco like we did ([directions to the trailhead at Caples Lake](https://goo.gl/maps/Yrrh5JbvxHWqx77bA?ref=nickrroberts.com)). Traffic was really bad, so we’d advise leaving before 7am. The drive time should be more like \~3 hours.
- ****Difficulty and total mileage**: \~8 miles out-and back (easy). Here is the [trail map](https://www.alltrails.com/explore/trail/us/california/caples-lake-to-emigrant-lake?ref=sidebar-static-map). We recorded about 900 feet of elevation gain on the way up.
- ****Crowds:** Light.
- ****Temperatures:** We went mid-August. At this time, temps hover around 70 degrees in the day and drop 15–20 degrees at night. Go [here](http://www.carsonpass.com/winter/current%5Fconditions.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a current forecast.
- ****Permits:** To obtain an overnight permit, head to the [Carson Pass Information Station](https://goo.gl/maps/56fv4yUoAvy1fuX87?ref=nickrroberts.com).
- ****Fire restrictions:** No fires.
- ****Bears/threatening wildlife:** Though rare, there are bears here. You’ll also want to bring deet for the mosquitoes — they were worse than we expected at this time of year.
- ****Water situation:** No shortage of water. The hike takes you past two lakes with a stream in between. The water itself is easygoing on your filter. Quite clear and few particulates.

### ****Prep**

****Gear:** Check out my temperate climate backpacking [checklist](https://github.com/nickrroberts/backpacking-checklist/blob/master/temperate-weekender-checklist.md?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a recommended set of stuff to bring for this trip.

****Food:** We recommend bringing non-freeze-dried food, as always. This time, we opted for burritos from [Little Chihuahua](http://www.thelittlechihuahua.com/location/mission?ref=nickrroberts.com).

****Camping conditions**: There is no hard cap on the number of camping permits the National Forest gives out for Emigrant Lake, but we easily found a spot well-away from other campers. We’d advising making a right when you arrive at the lake. Follow the path around the edge and explore up the hill for an existing site.

### ****Trip Details**

#### ****Saturday**

We departed San Francisco at 10:30am and hit bad traffic on the Bay Bridge. This persisted until we hit Sutter Creek and added a bunch of time. We entertained ourselves by listening to back-to-back episodes of [The Clearing](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-clearing/id1471432747?ref=nickrroberts.com) — would definitely recommend.

By the time we made it to the Carson Pass Information Station, all of the permits for the trails we’d wanted to do had been given out. So, we took a National Forest volunteer’s recommendation for Emigrant Lake.

The trail starts out by Caples Lake. We parked at the little lot next to the dam on the farthest West side (directions from SF [again linked here](https://goo.gl/maps/Yrrh5JbvxHWqx77bA?ref=nickrroberts.com)).

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*Otcf_bgrR6CilBuBBkLL8w.jpeg)

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*OGuY8DHUlY0pFvXiYMUABg.jpeg)

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*wccpre-a-iI4qa7ZbX9PTQ.jpeg)

The trail on the way past Caples Lake.

From here, it’s a super mellow 4 miles in. When we arrived, we set up at a spot overlooking the lake, at dinner and watched the sunset.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*Tizn45L-bLqeV7Iv1OM2Dw.jpeg)

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*PBZjiZgboajverv_6fJ7TA.jpeg)

#### ****Sunday**

If you’re up early enough, the sunrise in the granite bowl around the lake is terrific.

We lazily packed up and departed around 10am. We were back at the car at 11:30am.

On your way back toward San Francisco, we’d really recommend stopping off in the old part of Sutter Creek for lunch — we went to the Sutter Creek Hotel. It’s a super charming old-West-looking town!
### Interview tactics to find worthwhile customer problems
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/interview-tactics-to-find-worthwhile-customer-problems/
Last updated: 2021-12-27T18:44:30.000Z
The call to arms for entrepreneurs and product managers is to find a problem worth solving and do something about it. But **how* specifically do you come up with a good problem?

In my experience, if you simply ask someone what’s painful about a particular product or process, the answers tend to be surface-level (“the button to do x is hard to find” or “the UI looks super outdated”). To arrive at an obstacle worth eliminating, it takes a deeper understanding of **what* people want to get done. It also takes an appreciation of the emotional and social environment to figure out **why* people want to do it.

For this, I borrow a lot from Clayton Christensen’s [Jobs to Be Done](https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done?ref=nickrroberts.com) framework. Christensen argues that most companies are founded on problems discovered accidentally. To innovate in a way that isn’t based on luck, we need a more scientific method to reveal jobs that have bad or partial solutions.

During customer interviews, finding jobs with inadequate solutions boils down to a few tactical lines of inquiry. I’ll illustrate my approach with the example of a residential realtor, many of whom I’ve interviewed for my work as a product manager at [States Title](https://statestitle.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

#### ****1\. What are they trying to do?**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*1JRB_-WOD4hg2pzXBL_GWA.png)

Typically, I like to start very high-level and use some combination of the following questions:

- ****When working as a realtor, at the end of the day, what are you trying to get done?**
- ****What is that you have to do in order to feel accomplished?**
- ****What progress are you trying to make?**

Their responses are frequently along the lines of: “I’m trying to sell houses \[in the case of a listing agent\] in order to get paid and also to acquire new clients. If you’re known as a good listing agent, you get more business. My feeling of accomplishment comes when a deal closes or when a new client agrees to work with me.” Answering these questions reveals a high-level understanding of your audience’s objective, but we need to drill further to get to a “job.”

It’s important to note that you should try to narrow the conversation away from generic responses like “I need to earn money” or “make my customers happy” because these responses don’t help you at all. Jobs, as Christensen defines them, are “ongoing and recurring” and take place within certain circumstances. Our goal is to get the full story of what, who, how, and most importantly **why* they’re doing what they’re doing.

#### ****2\. What circumstances surround their goal?**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ndH72AZR2x6firH9LKjebg.png)

Based on our realtor’s response, we need to get more context on the environment around the job so the story takes more form. This is where I like to introduce more of the who, where, and how questions.

- ****Who else is involved in the process of closing on a house?** “There are many people involved: Me, the buyer’s agent, the buyer, the seller, the lender, the appraiser, the home inspector, and eventually the escrow officer.”
- ****Where do you physically have to be in order to sell or pick up new clients?** “For selling, I do most of my business from my car — on my phone. I’m typically rushing around to different open houses and staging or showing them, meeting my clients in person for updates, dropping off purchase contracts to the title company. To get new clients, I find myself creating flyers, blogging, posting on social media, taking referrals from previous clients — that’s the best way.”
- ****How do you get paid?** “I get paid at the closing. Either by a wire out of the escrow account or by being mailed a check.”

This isn’t a full listing. My preference is to ask followup questions in order to gather enough information that I can clearly summarize my audience’s goals and circumstances back to them and make sure they agree with my summary.

#### ****3\. What gets in the way?**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*iphh7h77eyNl7XDD1Sdwjg.png)

Now that we have a richer picture of what the realtor is trying to do and the context of their job, we want to excavate for an opportunity.

- ****What are the biggest things that prevent you from closing deals more often?** “Oh, lots of things! Getting a buyer and seller to come to an agreement can take a long time. After that, inspections, appraisals, and title can all also drag on and extend the closing cycle.”
- ****What prevents you from taking on more listings in parallel?** “The time investment for an individual home sale can be huge. Stagings and showings take a long time, but we need to do them because they have a big impact on the sale. Some realtors have a big enough client pipeline that they can afford to hire assistants to do all that stuff, but I don’t have a big enough portfolio to do that.”
- ****What obstacles do you face in acquiring new clients?** “Marketing. It’s very hard to become known. Most successful realtors have been in the game for a long time. They have a long history of sales and happy clients. A large proportion of their new clients come from their previous ones.”

#### ****4\. What solutions or workarounds are they trying right now?**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*V-pmchriG73CMXuTaJ6SOQ.png)

At this point, we’ve revealed several great candidate issues for further exploration:

- The closing process takes a long time even after the buyer and seller agree to a purchase.
- Repeated tasks, such as showings, consume the time of the realtor and prevent them from onboarding more clients in parallel.
- Self-promotion for new business is very difficult because it relies on reputation, which takes a lot of time and energy to build.

To avoid exploding the scope of the interview, I like to talk more about a single obstacle. I choose based on the one that I perceive to cause the most pain for the interviewee. Another good indicator is if they keep harping on one thing in particular. In our example, our realtor mentioned stagings and showings a couple times, so I want to dig into that more.

- ****How do you currently handle these repeated tasks like home staging and showing?** “I just do it all myself. I’ll hang out for a couple hours at a time to show and meet potential buyers. With staging, there are companies around who will do it for you (people who bring furniture and spruce up the home you’re selling), but they tend to be pricey.”

#### ****5\. What would a quality solution look like?**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*YtKRXBVlF-lK8ky8lSrKBw.png)

Here’s where we can obtain the basic requirements for our solution, if we choose to make one.

- ****Say there was a way to make it so you didn’t have to personally do home stagings or be present to conduct showings. What characteristics would this solution have to have in order for you to use it?** “Well, it’d have to be cheap. I don’t normally spend more than $500 on staging a house. It would also have to give me comfort about the security of the house and my seller’s belongings. I’d worry that if I wasn’t there, people might steal stuff. I’d also want to know how each showing went. Did we have good prospects? How would we engage with the potential buyers?”

After all of this, we’ve finally revealed an underserved need and even developed a basic set of requirements if we did choose to solve.

### ****Takeaways**

I like to approach problem discovery interviews with users by thinking in terms of the [Jobs to Be Done](https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done?ref=nickrroberts.com). For me, it’s a solid way of uncovering the root cause of a user’s behavior, revealing what their current solutions lack, and where there may be opportunities to innovate. This means getting clear on:

1. What are they trying to do?
2. What are the circumstances surrounding their goal?
3. What gets in the way?
4. What solutions or workarounds are they trying now?
5. What would a quality solution look like?

Repeating this process across many interviews lets you develop patterns and see which underserved needs crop up repeatedly. Using this method also signals whether there is adequate demand for a better solution and even its key requirements.

### ****Helpful Resources**

- [Competing Against Luck](https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Customer/dp/0062435612?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Jobs to be Done Medium publication](https://www.christenseninstitute.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [The Christensen Institute](https://www.christenseninstitute.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
### My highest leverage productivity tactics
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/my-highest-leverage-productivity-tactics/
Last updated: 2022-05-26T13:49:19.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*sN8-o7A9prwDC6RcEOrhSw.png)

Over the past few months, I've churned through books about getting more out of your time each day. I’m spotlighting the ones that have worked for me best, and I’ve given them my own spin. Each section contains a source, with a full listing of the references at the bottom of the article.

Here are the 10 most rewarding practices for me:

## 1\. Develop a personal operating system to make the highest use of your attention, and always be looking for ways to make that system better

**Original sources: Personal introspection, Getting Things Done, [Kaizen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen?ref=nickrroberts.com)*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*DYPXqaq0M9tSrZcdiGHTMw.png)

The key thing I’ve learned is that ****attention is the only real currency you have**. These days, it seems like everyone is trying to take it from you, be it your coworkers, the TV, or social media companies who sell your attention to people who want you to buy things or ideas.

Your life is made up of the things you **pay* attention to. “Pay” signifying currency and scarcity. I’m trying to make a real effort to spend mine more intentionally. This is where a personal tracking system comes in handy.

Before I had such a system, the ever-present environmental chaos of my job, relationships, travel and adventure, and the general randomness in the world would constantly challenge my focus. It still does to some degree. I began to notice acutely after finishing school and entering working life that my fractured attention seriously diminished my ability to be present and happy. I learned that the unknown, the chaos, that came at me every day was significantly less scary when I had a model for confronting it. I also learned that having an intentional personal tracking system protects my attention, allowing me to focus. Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, is such a system. Though, I’ve modified and adapted many of the processes to fit my own preference and style--more about that [here](https://medium.com/@nickrroberts/my-gtd-setup-and-workflow-50bdfc9c7632?ref=nickrroberts.com). I continue to update it to make it more lightweight and easy to use.

The importance of continuous improvement for your personal system is that, as I’ve found, you’ll continue to stumble across better ideas as you go. Stuff that makes planning easier or faster. New technologies that can automate parts of your system. Never changing or updating your system also makes it feel stale. I like to experiment with new techniques (like an end-of-day “shutdown routine”) to see whether I should incorporate them. No system is perfect, but you can always seek a closer approximation to one that is ideal.

## 2\. Don’t launch a frontal assault on your tendency to be lazy at a certain time of day, double-down on your naturally productive cycles

**Original sources: Make Time tactic #14*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*9vxLgx7gDNeeytW3ibZyUg.png)

I’ve tried very hard to be productive after 7pm. I’ve attempted various conditioning approaches with myself, like an amateur B.F. Skinner. A beer if I read a chapter of a book. A movie if I write something. A video game if I code something up on my computer. All of these things were aimed at defeating my proclivities toward laziness after the workday. But whatever I did, I could not make myself feel good or energized to do creative or educational things at that time of day. I‘m usually just drained, and whatever output I do manage just isn’t quality.

In the mornings I’m filled with a creative energy that seems to wane by noon. After a recent a-ha moment, I realized there is a much higher probability I will accomplish something (and accomplish it well) if I move it to a morning task, rather than something to be done in the afternoon or evening. I’ve started going to bed earlier (9–9:30ish) and waking up way earlier (5:30–5:45ish) so I can move more things to my morning cycle.

## 3\. There is unreal power in routine: Habits, exercise, and shutting down for the day

**Source: Atomic Habits, personal introspection, Deep Work, Cal Newport [blog](http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2009/06/08/drastically-reduce-stress-with-a-work-shutdown-ritual/?ref=nickrroberts.com), Make Time tactic #16*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*jmZ98aSyIojYYuJ65jqVZg.png)

### Habits conserve mental energy and create order out of chaos

I think the power of routine is in the fact that it’s automatic, mindless. You’re not expending energy planning what comes next, you just execute.

The other thing about my routine is that it provides for me a feeling of control to hedge against chaotic workdays. I’ve found this psychologically beneficial. It’s a structure I can cling to so that, even on days where the plan changes constantly, I know that I’m making progress against some of my goals, just by force of habit.

### Exercise becomes effortless if it’s automatic, and it makes you perform better

There is an inordinate amount research showing that exercise is beneficial for many axes of [your health](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes-brain-improve-memory-thinking-skills-201404097110?ref=nickrroberts.com): Memory, anxiety, heart health, etc. But for all of this, I still didn’t really care for a long time. Before mid-2018, exercise was something I had to psych myself up for. And when I couldn’t summon that motivation, I just wouldn’t do it. But, after committing to a morning routine, starting small, I made exercise mechanical, disconnected from motivation. I don’t even notice that I’m strapping on my running shoes.

After working my way up to it, I set a goal to run five miles every weekday morning, do 80+ pushups, lift some weights, meditate for 10+ mins, and block out an hour for reading or other self improvement (such as writing this article) prior to starting my actual work day. Doing these things reliably makes me feel better. I have more mental clarity and for longer.

I’ll often stop and realize that running every day tallies up to a lot in a few weeks, or that I’ve plowed through a bunch of books by reading lots of little bits. As an example, I’m ahead of pace to run 1,000 miles this year.

> “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.”  
>  
> — James Clear, “Atomic Habits”

### Create and live by a shutdown routine

Speaking of routines like mine at the beginning of the day, creating an end-of-day shutdown procedure gives me a huge sense of confidence and eliminates a lot of vagueness about the next day.

I regularly run through these five steps at the end of my workday:

1. Review this week’s goals and see whether I’m on track.
2. Note down my thoughts in a journal entry.
3. Review all of my personal and work project lists: Ensure that each one has a “next action” in the David Allen sense — “the most immediate physical, visible activity that would be required to move the situation toward closure.”
4. Process my inboxes: Things, Mail, Slack, Messages. I look over these surfaces and either take action, defer an action to a later date, or delegate a response to someone more qualified to give one.
5. Design my next day and block out 1.5–3 hours of uninterrupted time for one or two key tasks.

After this, barring emergencies, I try to completely disengage from work and transition to personal things. These strong barriers between work and personal life make me feel more relaxed.

## 4\. Do fewer non-routine items in a day, ideally one or two big things

**Original source: Make Time #55, Getting Things Done, GTD with Things 3*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*fSRd3XPDRR6N8ZgXT9Comw.png)

In **Make Time,* John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp argue for creating a “highlight” for your day and allocating at least 90 minutes to its completion. Here is a nice [summary](https://medium.com/s/story/how-to-make-time-for-in-between-sized-projects-34c9ecd75146?ref=nickrroberts.com).

I’ve found this to be a very useful practice. Making myself accountable for fewer items in a given day makes my brain feel less cluttered. As above, I tweaked my system to plan the one or two big things I have to do the next day and block out time for them. This helps me buckle down and complete them, or at least make significant progress.

Planning out every minute of the day, for me, is unrealistic, possibly because of the nature of my job role, which involves a lot of coordination and talking to people. I can stick to one or two time boxes for cranking out work, but the rest of the day tends to reconfigure as it goes.

Because the day never stays well-behaved, and inputs, thoughts and realizations come constantly, I’ve been making lots of use the Inbox feature of Things, my to-do list app. An effective practice I’ve discovered is to mentally distinguish that queue from what you need to do today. I capture thoughts as they arise, but process all of these things during a separate time outside my dedicated task time boxes.

## 5\. Shift your media consumption to align with your creative goals

**Original source: Personal introspection, Make Time #25*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*I--Ej0CqRsmMy-PIz1_ZmA.png)

I’ve trimmed out all the stuff that bums me out: Namely, keeping up with politics, world news, and spectating the trollish gladiator fights going down on Twitter and Reddit (more about this in #9). I find that really important news gets to me reliably by word-of-mouth and there really is no necessity for me to be monitoring news apps. I’ve discovered that the headlines generally just make me feel powerless, angry, or sad.

Instead, I’ve been listening to podcasts and audiobooks done by people in my industry or in product management, specifically. People who provide immediately applicable insight. Previously, I thought that listening to podcasts or books about work on your personal time would be a good way to burn out, but it’s been just the opposite. I derive a lot of energy from listening to folks on the [Y-Combinator podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/y-combinator/id1236907421?ref=nickrroberts.com), or Intercom’s [series on product](https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/intercom-on-product-ep01/?ref=nickrroberts.com), or [Masters of Scale](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/masters-of-scale-with-reid-hoffman/id1227971746?ref=nickrroberts.com) with Reid Hoffman. I spend such a vast quantity of my time on my work, so I find any optimizations I can make there have an outsize impact on my general satisfaction.

## 6\. Meditate

**Original source: Waking Up, Make Time #78*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*0vuAahxBUmfsl8GP8O3C4A.png)

I’ve found this practice invaluable for settling into tasks. Actually **doing* work. Meditation helps you realize when you’re lost in thought and then return to the present. In a given 10-minute meditation session, I go through nearly endless cycles of this. Drifting, returning. Drifting, returning. But after a while, you begin to train your mind to drift less frequently. You stay present for longer.

But how to meditate? Sam Harris’ [Waking Up](https://wakingup.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) course is dynamite. I tried [Headspace](https://www.headspace.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) before this, but I’ve found that Harris’ course is more rigorous and rewarding. He gets into advanced concepts pretty fast: Exploring the [illusion of the “self,”](https://bigthink.com/think-tank/the-subjectivity-of-consciousness-with-dr-sam-harris?ref=nickrroberts.com) “Metta” (a variant on traditional mindfulness meditation emphasizing love and kindness toward others), and imagining your conscious experience as separate from your body. All of this designed to make you more present, and help you control your attention.

## 7\. Work from home at least twice a week

**Original source: Remote, personal introspection*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*5MCtDO5DTKWM3BhTjf-Yzw.png)

In **Remote,* Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson argue vociferously against busy office culture.

> “The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely. When you work on your own, far away from the buzzing swarm at headquarters, you can settle into your own productive zone. You can actually get work done — the same work that you couldn’t get done at work!”  
>  
> — Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, “Remote”

The thing is, if you’re like most people and you work in a company where being in the office every day is expected, working remotely all the time is just not realistic for a couple primary reasons: Norms and communication culture.

### Norms

To confront the being-in-the-office norm, the key is communicating the fact that you need to time to crank on projects to your key stakeholders, like your boss, and setting their expectations. If you frame working remotely as a method of achieving better results for the company, you likely won’t face much resistance. I recently sat down with my own manager in a one-to-one and was pleasantly surprised to find that, not only did he support my desire to work remotely more often, he actually asked if I needed the company to supply any equipment for a home office!

I would also moderate how frequently you work from home if you’re transitioning from being in the office five days per week to reduce the immediate impact on you and your colleagues. In the title of this tactic, I suggest working remotely “at least twice a week” to recognize this balance.

### Communication culture

At my company, we’re still pretty quick to throw 30 mins down on the calendar to talk things out face-to-face. It **feels* more efficient than spending the time to think out responses to a long list of questions in an email. I’m certainly guilty of this sometimes.

My preference is for asynchronous communication, as below, but not everyone feels this way. So, rather than create conflict by declining all in-person meetings, I tend to show up in the office two to three days per week.

## 8\. If you need information from other people, use thoughtful asynchronous communication before meetings

**Original source: Rework, Deep Work*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*y-q8-90i9yseLYB1eZgAew.png)

Trimming down your meeting schedule reduces interruption and increases information throughput between you and everyone else.

> “The worst interruptions of all are meetings. Here’s why:  
>  
> They’re usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things.  
>  
> They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute.  
>  
> They drift off-subject easier than a Chicago cab in a snowstorm.  
>  
> They require thorough preparation that most people don’t have time for.  
>  
> They frequently have agendas so vague that nobody is really sure of the goal…”  
>  
> — Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, “Rework”

There’s a trick to replacing meetings with written communication, and it’s in the way that you construct email or messaging dialogs. Cal Newport talks a lot about this in **Deep Work*. His advice is to do more work up front: If you’re planning to meet someone for coffee, pick the place and time and ask for a simple confirmation. Minimize the amount of back-and-forth from the outset and the amount of thinking the opposite party has to do.

Additionally, identify the specific questions and areas in which you require input, and call those out. I personally really like bullets and numbers in my emails, rather than blocky paragraphs, because bullets make each separate question or point more visually apparent and scannable.

## 9\. Do not participate in social media platforms

**Original source: Deep Work, Cal Newport [blog](http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2017/10/02/are-you-using-social-media-or-being-used-by-it/?ref=nickrroberts.com), Make Time #17, Jaron Lanier*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*9FjHGShGHjxCh_ZQ7xU3sw.png)

### Eliminating distraction

This was one of the harder adjustments for me to make, but it’s a very critical one. I realized that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit tended to be very low value-add in the course of my week for all the time they would take (often without me noticing). Hours of social media browsing do not align with the goals I set out in my personal operating system.

Around the beginning of this year, I ceased to use the platforms and deleted all of the apps from my phone, though I haven’t yet actually deleted all my accounts. For me, I’ve found that not having the apps on my phone was enough to curtail my use. For other people, I realize this may not be the case.

### Eliminating the subtle mind-control

I recently stumbled across [Jaron Lanier](http://www.jaronlanier.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com), who’s writing shows how pernicious ad-based internet business models can be.

> …So-called advertisers can seize the moment when you are perfectly primed and then influence you with messages that have worked on other people who share traits and situations with you.  
>  
> I say “so-called” because it’s just not right to call direct manipulation of people advertising. Advertisers used to have a limited chance to make a pitch, and that pitch might have been sneaky or annoying, but it was fleeting. Furthermore, lots of people saw the same TV or print ad; it wasn’t adapted to individuals. The biggest difference was that you weren’t monitored and assessed all the time so that you could be fed dynamically optimized stimuli — whether “content” or ad — to engage and alter you.  
>  
> Now everyone who is on social media is getting individualized, continuously adjusted stimuli, without a break, so long as they use their smartphones. What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.  
>  
> — Jaron Lanier, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now”

One of the portions of the book quoted above that particularly resonated with me was Lanier’s argument that Facebook and similar platforms make you sadder. Similar to the approach of newspapers (“**if it bleeds, it leads”*), the algorithms optimizing for your attention tend to bubble up content that elicits a powerful emotional response. Sadness or anger tend to be easier to conjure up than happiness, so you see more stuff that makes you sad.

Quitting Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (the canonical compare-your-life-to-other-people’s app), and Reddit (say the meanest things you can in the comments to score points) has made a noticeable impact on my everyday levels of happiness.

It may seem hypocritical to say all this and yet still use Medium, but I would argue Medium as a platform is different in three critical ways:

1. I tend to use Medium for research and value-additive functionality and then I stop easily when I’ve found what I’m looking for. I never find myself aimlessly scrolling for hours on end.
2. Medium deliberately does not subject you to the whims of unseen behavior manipulators who purchase advertising. They’ve chosen a paid subscription model.
3. I don’t feel sad after reading articles on Medium, unless I purposely seek out sad material. (Maybe it’s simply not as easy to get sad when you’re just reading content about how to do your job better or get more things done in your day).

Of course, I still love to share thoughts and photos with friends and family, but I’ve just switched to using good ol’ fashioned iCloud photos and text messages to do it. It’s quick, easy, private, and there are no ads or algorithms controlling what I see.

## 10\. During your lazy time, don’t rewatch movies or reread books

**Original source: Personal introspection*

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*lBNg7NmEIezN3_G9qU0LRg.png)

I have a tendency to rewatch movies like the **Lord of the Rings* far too often because it’s like comfort food when I’m feeling lazy or burnt out.

Substitute that movie time with something weird or new and you’ll thank yourself, because your wind-down time is also a form of routine. If you watch or consume bits of new content every night, while you’re in relaxation mode, you’ll gradually seed your brain with new thoughts which flow into your next day.

## Read these books

Along with everything else, these books have been invaluable for me. All of the tactics that I’ve laid out above comprise the key wisdom that I’ve found within them.

I would highly suggest knocking out:

- [Make Time, John Zeratsky & Jake Knapp](https://www.amazon.com/Make-Time-focus-matters-every/dp/0593079582/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?%5Fencoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Atomic Habits, James Clear](https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?gclid=Cj0KCQjw6cHoBRDdARIsADiTTzaM25W%5FJCHYG-3B7btKQ29R64ZzQtE75OWmGHdMeIjWsEHgzQWufvUaAn4IEALw%5FwcB&hvadid=282579595593&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9031948&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=e&hvrand=764245785739039180&hvtargid=kwd-486806483233&hydadcr=15492%5F10339794&keywords=atomic+habits&qid=1561389955&s=gateway&sr=8-1&ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Getting Things Done, David Allen](https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [GTD with Things 3, Eric A. Bowers](https://books.apple.com/us/book/gtd-with-things-3/id1233518078?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Deep Work, Cal Newport](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Rework, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson](https://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Remote, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson](https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Office-Required-Jason-Fried/dp/0804137501?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Waking Up: A guide to spirituality without religion, Sam Harris](https://www.amazon.com/Waking-Up-Spirituality-Without-Religion/dp/1451636024?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now, Jaron Lanier](https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accounts/dp/1529112400/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?%5Fencoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Other references mentioned above

- [Cal Newport blog post on social media](http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2017/10/02/are-you-using-social-media-or-being-used-by-it/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Cal Newport blog post on shutdown routines](http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2009/06/08/drastically-reduce-stress-with-a-work-shutdown-ritual/?ref=nickrroberts.com)
- [Kaizen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen?ref=nickrroberts.com)

### Thanks for reading!
### How to summon Travel Magic
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-two-step-recipe-for-travel-magic/
Last updated: 2022-05-25T16:23:44.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*jau5hqVEVKulLsBgDO_WTQ.png)

I’ve fallen prey countless times to the thought that I must see everything of note in a given country as fast as possible or else the vacation is a bust. The thought usually goes: “one day is probably enough to get a flavor of Milan, right? Because we also need to hit Florence, Venice, Rome, Cinque Terre, and the Amalfi coast to really DO Italy right, right? And we only have 10 days. This means we have approximately 24 mins to see the statue of David before we have to hop on a train at the Roma Termini and go to…”

It’s really easy to stack up too many cities, to over-plan, and end up turning your whole excursion into a stressful experience. More importantly, this stress and this checklist model of travel distracts from the reality that **people* and not merely **locations* make up the culture of a place. You get so focused on seeing the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, this palace, or that Cathedral that you forget to talk to the people who live there and actually learn about their lived experience. When I reflect, some of my most cherished travel memories (what my buddy [Nic Bertagnolli](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-bertagnolli-058aba81?ref=nickrroberts.com) coined as “Travel Magic”) have happened because I or one of my companions decided to strike up conversation with bored waitstaff or the person sitting on the adjacent barstool, and the day took on a life of its own.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*EE6X-FKMvfgaogtCfLZoFA.png)

We tend to graft meaning and expectation onto places because media taught us how to think about them, be it textbooks, news, Instagram, or whatever. It is totally possible to go to a new place and leave without modifying these conceptions. Travel Magic happens when you puncture this media-formulated veneer.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*kEflvhfORvzq9z8xukMAfA.png)

The most recent example of this, which crystallized for Nic and I this whole travel magic phenomenon and a few important principles about travel pacing, was our trip to Iceland. We each found ourselves with a sizable gap of time between jobs this past February, and so we planned a spontaneous winter trek around the country.

There were two halves to our trip: the first was our stay in northeastern Iceland next to Lake Myvatn, and the second in southwestern Iceland seeing various natural wonders — waterfalls, geysers, and this beautifully bleak place called [Reynisfjara](https://guidetoiceland.is/travel-iceland/drive/reynisfjara?ref=nickrroberts.com), which featured jet black sand and bizarre basalt towers.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*js93kUzAl_l557tR)

The black sands of Reynisfjara, southern coast of Iceland

We didn’t really move around all that much during our time in Lake Myvatn, compared to the second half of the trip. Sight-seeing and landmarks weren’t the focus, partly because one of the days we were stranded at the hotel by crazy high winds. But while we were there, we rappelled into a locals-only cave with a hot spring in it, guided by our hotel bartender, played cards and drank Einstok (and this curious liquor called [Brennivin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenniv%C3%83%C2%ADn?ref=nickrroberts.com)) late into the night with the other hotel staff. Through these experiences with **people*, we gained a deep and rich picture of what life is like for Icelanders and how they think about the rest of the world. Cumulatively, it was so magical that it made the second half of our trip (where we ticked off landmarks, took our pictures, and moved on) seem like it was missing soul. Nic and I both agreed that the first half of our adventure was far the better one.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*-7laS1oRbJFNXarv)

Peering down into the chasm containing a hotspring known only to locals of Lake Myvatn. We had to rappel down into this sucker.

But, like witnessing the Northern Lights, Travel Magic is probabilistic. You’re not guaranteed to experience it. However, reflecting on all of this later in a Reykjavik cafe, Nic and I devised a couple principles, based on personal experience, to maximize the chances:

## Don’t make a schedule.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*1AcPhgQNraj-E6GhiZvGpw.png)

****Don’t book hotels in advance.** They lock you into staying places when you might not want to. Let the vibe guide whether you stay another night or move on. It’s a bit scary and potentially more expensive, but doing this creates an awesome sense of spontaneity, which is one of the main pillars of Travel Magic.

****Have a sight-seeing shortlist, but don’t pencil anything in**. \[Nic Bertagnolli\]: “Strict schedules are dangerous, psychologically. What do you do if there happens to be a cool street festival taking place on your way to your scheduled tour of the Colosseum? If you don’t stop, the fear of missing out on some interesting local stuff might haunt you. If you do stop at the festival, you’ll probably feel guilty and worried about how you f-ed up your plans for the rest of the day. Either way, you’re unhappy. If you instead say to yourself ‘I will see the Colloseum **sometime*’ then you have the freedom to stop at the festival and follow that adventure. So, have an idea of roughly what you want to do while you’re in a place, but don’t have it planned out to the minute. Sticking with the Italy example, when you go there you probably have a list of things you want to see. Accept that there are lower value items on that list. You’ll probably come up with three or four things you **have* to see, like the statue of David, and the Colosseum, but be realistic. Then, give yourself two to three days where you are open to going to those places. This keeps things from feeling too frenetic.”

## Optimize for people, not landmarks

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*WXTxniwkAjZ5CGex3eOmqw.png)

****Talk to bored employees of restaurants, bars, or hotels**. Don’t be afraid to strike up conversation. Usually, people are just as interested in you and your story, if only to pass the time. If you get good at this skill, often they’ll invite you to go do things. Do them.

****Be suspicious of paid guided tours.** Know that the many of the cities that you see have changed significantly from their past versions which made them famous (even cities at the center of 20th century events like World War II). Sure, the landmarks are still there, but the people are usually more worldly than our tourist imaginations would have them be. My anecdotal experience is that Americans romanticize places like Paris and have a 1950s, black and white picture in their heads about what the place feels like. Wine and cheese and accordions. There’s a whole industry that’s developed around catering to people’s imaginations of what a place was, rather than what it is now: **Real* viking tours featuring traditional dress. Torture chambers like the Tower of London, featuring lifelike re-enactments of people on the rack! Whereas, authentic experiences are usually just a neighborly chat away.

****Accept hitchhikers.** Probably not always a good idea, but in Iceland there were lots of non-threatening, cash-strapped young people just hitchhiking through the country on the single road that runs a circuit around the island. Most just seemed like interesting European kids looking for adventure.

****Take personal time in public places.** \[Nic Bertagnolli\]: “While I travel I definitely need some time alone, or just chill time with my friends. Often, I’m tempted to just curl up in the room in order to recover. But you can do this in a bar, or a coffee shop. Put yourself in public and create opportunities for engagement with the place and others.”

****Play weird games in communal spaces.** \[Nic Bertagnolli\]: “Related to the above, games are a great icebreaker. People will usually see you and your friends having fun and they’ll stop by and ask you about it. This gives you the opportunity to invite them to join. Maybe they become a new friend, maybe they’re a dick. Either way, they’re an individual with unique life experience that can teach or show you something. There is really no downside.

When I travel I always bring a deck of cards, and 1–2 small indie games that others probably haven’t played. A deck of cards is nice because everyone knows a few card games, and you might learn a new one that you really like. I bring the indie games because they are usually super fun, and they get people interested in what you’re doing. A couple of good examples: [Seven Wonders Duel](https://www.amazon.com/Asmodee-SEV07-7-Wonders-Duel/dp/B014DMSTXK/ref=asc%5Fdf%5FB014DMSTXK/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=198079976844&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=1802615349159560456&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031948&hvtargid=pla-571729287272&psc=1&ref=nickrroberts.com) and [Star Realms](https://www.amazon.com/White-Wizard-Games-Realms-Deckbuilding/dp/B00HRGMPIU?ref=nickrroberts.com).”

---

Travel Magic is far from an exact science, but focusing on spontaneity and maximizing your interactions with the locals are two good methods of achieving the transcendent feeling that is supposed to be at the center of travel. Drop the strict schedule. Leads to interesting things will pop up by themselves if you’re attentive to them. By any means necessary, try to get organic conversations going, either by asking bored waitstaff how their day is going, or by doing something a bit weird like playing games in the middle of the hotel lobby.
### A look back at 2018
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-look-back-at-2018/
Last updated: 2022-04-29T14:12:26.000Z
### 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image-1.png)

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/2018/stats.jpeg)

### By the numbers

I called my grandfather ****55** times this year

I called my mom and dad ****35** times this year

I called my sister ****22** times this year

I've run ****542** tracked miles this year so far

These runs equate to approximately ****88,346** active calories burned

My total tracked fitness in Strava increased from ****4** to ****50** since July

- Quick definition of fitness from Strava's site: "While fitness is a complicated concept, it can be simplified to an accumulation of training. The Fitness Score is calculated using Training Load and/or Relative Effort to measure your daily training, and an impulse-response model to quantify its effect over time. This will intuitively capture the development of fitness from training, as well as the loss of fitness during a break."

Net worth increased by ****32%** from the beginning to the end of the year

I finished ****8** books this year:

- Make Time, Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky
- Blood Meridian, Cormac Macarthy
- The Hunt for Red October, Tom Clancy
- 40 ways of looking at Winston Churchill, Gretchen Rubin
- House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski
- Getting Things Done, David Allen
- The Thirst, Jo Nesbo
- The Snowman, Jo Nesbo

I have ****5** other books in various states of progress:

- Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945, Max Hastings
- The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin
- Atomic Habits, James Clear
- Make, Pieter Levels
- Ancillary Justice, Anne Leckie

I've maintained ****14** active friendships this year (outside of family, but close enough to consider a friend. Regular contact and good feelings.)

I have ****24** inactive friendships (outside of family; a pal. Fallen out of touch or regular contact)

I have ****12** acquaintances (A developing friendship or one I'm holding at arm's length---or someone holding me at arm's length. I also need to remember their names for them to count. This disqualifies people I meet in a blur at a party or something and never followup with)

Lowest happiness index: ****82/100**.

Happiness Index is a number I assign to an instantaneous point in time that takes into account my general satisfaction and joy in my life. I rate it on a scale of 0-100 with 100 being the maximum (perfect bliss) and 0 signifying that I no longer wish to go on with life. Factors: level of productivity, creative satisfaction, physical condition, amount of travel, relationship satisfaction. For me, anything lower than an 85 tends to mean that I'm in some kind of depressive state.

Highest happiness index: ****91/100**

- Listened to approximately ****197** hours of podcasts this year. My top podcasts:
- NPR politics
- Reply All
- Love + Radio
- 99% Invisible
- More Perfect
- Crimetown
- Radiolab
- Hardcore History
- Unerased
- NPR updates (Trump Era)

I meditated for ****360** tracked minutes

I commuted approximately ****441** hours on a tech bus

I sent approximately ****5,406** emails this year, both personal and work related

I've sent and received approximately ****21,012** text messages this year

Approximately ****8,415** mins of iPhone screen time this year
### My GTD setup and workflow
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/my-gtd-setup-and-workflow/
Last updated: 2023-05-03T14:15:38.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2400/0*Pd3nHZ7xST5gecYr)

Source: Unsplash. I like this pic because of the succulent.

> “…There is a way to get a grip on it all, stay relaxed, and get meaningful things done with minimal effort, across the whole spectrum of your life and work. You can experience what the martial artists call a “mind like water” and top athletes refer to as the “zone,” within the complex world in which you’re engaged…”  
> — David Allen & James Fallows. “Getting Things Done.”

I’m experimenting with the Getting Things Done (GTD) system by David Allen because it’s one of the most popular [productivity frameworks](https://blog.todoist.com/2015/11/30/ultimate-guide-personal-productivity-methods/?ref=nickrroberts.com) I haven’t previously explored. I recently read [his book](https://www.ebay.com/p/Getting-Things-Done-The-Art-of-Stress-Free-Productivity-by-David-Allen-2002-Paperback/2346007?iid=253815814663&ref=nickrroberts.com) as well as a bit of [supplementary material](https://hamberg.no/gtd/?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a concise recap (Allen throws many different lists, artifacts, and frameworks at the reader and so it’s sometimes hard to keep it all straight).

GTD is very compelling, but I’ve found it difficult to implement well. This is a piece intended for other people who find themselves in the same situation: Eager to use Allen’s system and all of the benefits that it promises (less stress, a state of always working on the most important thing, more consistency, etc.), but looking for a good digital setup and a demonstration of the workflow.

I’ve found that many of the most popular to-do list tools don’t adhere strictly to the GTD framework and so your setup will likely require multiple applications and a bit of creativity to get working. When I started, I wanted to see someone walk through their whole day and weekly review and tell me what apps they use, when, and why. That is what I hope to show here.

### ****My setup**

****Core task application: Things 3**

For me, it really came down to [Todoist](https://todoist.com/app?lang=en&ref=nickrroberts.com#start) vs. [Things](https://culturedcode.com/things/?ref=nickrroberts.com). [Omnifocus](https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/ios/?ref=nickrroberts.com), another super popular GTD app in the space, is a behemoth of features–though Things isn’t exactly cheap–and seemed a bit over-powered for me, someone just trying out the system.

Features of Things I liked over Todoist (though they are **almost* at parity):

- Ultra clean, Apple-y design. Things won the [2017 Apple Design Award](https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/07/2017-apple-design-award-winners/?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a good reason. The app gets out of your way and doesn’t clutter the UI with anything you’re not using. For example, if a tag you’ve defined isn’t used on any task in a particular view, you won’t see the filter for it on the top of the list. Merely looking at my stuff in Things gives me this sense of zen, which is a feature in itself.
- Events import from Apple Calendar into your Today and Upcoming views. Also, Things imports reminders to your Inbox view, so you don’t have to look at other apps besides Things to manage your day. I really love this centralization. This is not unique to Things, but the Siri shortcuts are also dope (“Hey Siri, in Things set a reminder to change laundry in 25 mins” — adds a reminder with a push notification to your Today view).
- Ability to define “Areas” of your life (to house projects), which aligns with Allen’s Horizon 2 area of focus.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*hA0YgojWncmwNMRB_okStw.png)

- Quick add from anywhere . Control + Space adds a task from any application. If you’re on Chrome or Safari, it’ll capture the title of the page along with the URL into the body of the task if you want to save it for later.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*r60XmAYiziQ6uFXHEyKBdQ.png)

Quick add from anywhere.

- Ease of use with Apple Automator (although, I’m aware Todoist for Mac has similar functionality). I defined my own keyboard shortcut for Outlook (my work email client) to quick add emails that require an action from me to my Things Inbox. For reference, I used [this handy guide](https://medium.com/@chris.russell/integrating-things-3-with-microsoft-outlook-on-mac-63a9ba43abc3?ref=nickrroberts.com).
- The iOS app has some awesome, natural gestures. I love the thumb drag quick-add to Inbox or your current view.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2400/1*y7_tYfe0UlnV-9V2N3DPdw.png)

Thumb-drag quick add feature.

If you’re not in the Apple ecosystem, or it’s just not as central to your life, Todoist is a terrific alternative.

Another factor in my decision was this super helpful article from [The Sweet Setup](https://thesweetsetup.com/apps/best-personal-gtd-app-suite/?ref=nickrroberts.com).

Outside of this, I’ve tried a few other to-do list/note apps: Google Tasks, Apple Notes, Google Keep, but these weren’t opinionated enough for me. I wanted something with more structure and intention to keep me organized.

****Attachments and note-taking: Things + Apple Notes**

I use Things for simple note taking and attachments, since it has an area to add text and links within each task and project. For projects, I’ll use the description area to explicitly write the outcomes which represent the success and completion of the project, so that the project doesn’t remain amorphous and stay there forever.

For heavier-duty documentation, I use Apple Notes because it’s beautifully simple, free, and does exactly what I need it to. The seamlessness of notes syncing across devices is very pleasing. It’s interesting to sketch something on a note on your phone and watch it appear a second later on the Mac version of Notes.

I use a structure like below to match my life areas defined in Things and I file notes in the respective folders.  

I try to be regimented also in my use of Apple Notes so that I can easily find what I need. I create notes for projects that require significant numbers of meetings or research and “pin” them to the top of the corresponding folder. Upon completion of the project, I shift the note to the “Archive” folder so they remain searchable. I refrain from creating a note for every new meeting or thought and instead place all related materials in the same note and separate distinct sections using headings (Command + Shift + h), like “Meeting with Charlie 6/11,” with all of the bulleted agenda items below.

During meetings, I harp on generating next actions once we’ve explored a particular problem or settled on a course of action (and even if we haven’t). I then email the notes to everyone in a recap to solidify who is accountable for what, and shift the next actions we defined to the corresponding project back in Things. Even if I know someone else is taking notes in the meeting, I will still try to do this for my own tracking purposes.

****Another note about meetings**

Prior to scheduling a meeting, I really try to make sure that I need to have it, otherwise I cancel and replace with an email. Synchronous communication is this whole other morass of debate and I tend to fall into the don’t-have-meetings-unless-you-can-possibly-avoid-them camp (see [this article by Paul Graham](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)). At a minimum, try to respect other people’s time and only create meetings with super tight and well-defined agendas. Have an outcome or decision in mind as the pretext for setting something up.

****Bringing “upper horizons” goals down to the weekly level: Things + Apple Notes + Google Sheets**

- ****This Week**: During my weekly review on Sunday, I assign a tag “This Week” to all of the projects in Things that I’m going to try like hell to get done by the following Sunday’s review. I try to keep these projects reasonably scoped so that they can actually be accomplished in this timeframe. Anything longer than a week I do not tag in this fashion. Often, the projects I tag for completion this week bubble up to longer-term goals, as described below.
- ****1-Year Goals**: The objectives I want to complete by the end of the current calendar year, equivalent to Allen’s Horizon Three. I’ve shifted to keeping track of these in Things using a tag, rather than placing these goals in a separate Google doc, which I did for a time. I found that system to be a bit disjointed. I use a “This Year” tag in Things to represent these 1-year projects. I also file them in “Someday,” so that they don’t clutter up my “Anytime” projects (goals for the near-term, of which there are already many). In order to ensure that I’m on track to complete my goals for the year, I’ll try to break them down into weekly projects or tasks. I look over these when I do my weekly review, which I then assign a This Week tag, as described above. Often, these broken down weekly projects I have set to repeat every week to automate the process.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*RIVyuIKfkoBLu4TrumYJAQ.png)

An illustration to show how I breakdown Someday projects into this week’s Anytime projects.

- ****2-year Goals**: Equivalent to Allen’s Horizon Three. I tag these in Things in the same manner as above, only one more year out. I have several “Someday” projects tagged as “Two Year.” I have set reminders for myself to review, complete, and update my two year goals at the end of the current year. Anything not yet completed, but which I still want to pursue, will shift to the coming year’s goals. I will then set new two year goals.
- ****5-Year Goals**: Equivalent to Allen’s Horizon Four. I tag these goals in Things in the same manner as above. I have several “Someday” projects tagged as “5 Year”. Likewise, I have set reminders for myself to review, complete, and update my five year goals at the end of this current year. Anything not yet completed, but which I still want to pursue, will either remain in my five year goals, move up to my two year goals, or to the current year’s goals. Projects that I may have set in prior years have a note in the description about when I set them and a deadline. For example, if I set a five-year goal for myself in 2018, its due date would reflect Dec 31, 2023 and a note saying when I set it. This helps me keep track of the original, intended timeframe for a goal.
- ****Values and Purpose**: Personal mission statement and definitions of metrics derived from each plank of that mission. I tried to attach some quantitative measure where I could. I talk a bit more about that [here](https://medium.com/pminsider/building-your-life-like-a-software-product-e5332de93e17?ref=nickrroberts.com). Equivalent to Allen’s Horizon Five. I keep these now in an Apple Note.
- ****Weekly Reviews KPIs sheet**: I also include a tracker sheet (residual from my legacy system) where I log how I’m doing against my personal metrics defined in my Values and Purpose note. For example, one of my goals is to attain a certain sleep time average, so I track this on a weekly basis in a Google Sheet.

### **How does the workflow look in practice?**

GTD is very clear on how to do task collection and organization, but not as prescriptive about how you actually work during your day. Allen does give some recommendations on how to choose your actions in the moment. His model is a function of:

- Context
- Time available
- Energy available
- Priority

However, I still found myself asking: What should the interface between my task list in Things and my calendar look like? Should I block off time boxes to churn through specific tasks? How far in advance? How do I organize a given day?

I know from personal experience that when I give myself a block of time to get a task done, I tend to focus hard, get into flow state, and do it. However, as Allen also notes, the circumstances of your day often change on a dime, so it’s really difficult to calendar out your day or even your week for specific to-dos.

> …constant new input and shifting tactical priorities reconfigure daily work so consistently that it’s virtually impossible to nail down to-do items ahead of time. Having a working game plan as a reference point is always useful, but it must be able to be renegotiated at any moment. Trying to keep a list on the calendar, which must then be reentered on another day if items don’t get done, is demoralizing and a waste of time. The Next Actions lists I advocate will hold all of those action reminders, even the most time-sensitive ones. And they won’t have to be rewritten daily. — David Allen & James Fallows. “Getting Things Done.”

#### **Daily flow**

So, these are my solutions to the questions above:

- ****My way of dealing with tasks, calendaring, and prioritization:** My main goal is to protect 1.5–3 uninterrupted hours per day for myself. At the end of each day during my “shutdown routine” (taking a leaf from Cal Newport [here](http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2009/06/08/drastically-reduce-stress-with-a-work-shutdown-ritual/?ref=nickrroberts.com)), I schedule one or two 90-minute blocks for essential next actions that I want to get done the next day. These are typically long tasks that require deep work and concentration. The rest of my day I try to manage using Allen’s model of time available, energy, and priority. However, my addition to this is that I more or less follow a hierarchy of lists:
- ****What I do during my “shutdown” routine**: The evening prior to a given day, during my “shutdown routine” task, I do the following: 1) Review This Week’s goals, 2) Journal, 3) Process my inboxes: Things, Mail, Slack, Messages, 4) Review all of my area and project lists, ensuring that all projects have a next action. 5) Block out 1.5–3 hours of uninterrupted time for key tasks which I add to the upcoming day.
- ****How I track next actions and waiting items**: I track next actions and waiting items using Things’ heading feature within projects, as below.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a0/99/a099d561-fde0-440d-8161-92921d516932/content/images/2021/11/image.png)

- ****How I deal with email/“other” inboxes**: I’m less regimented about my inbox clearing habits lately. But generally I try to follow a 2–3 hour rule where I’ll churn through all of my collection surfaces (Things inbox, email, texts, Slack) and process them every two to three hours through the end of my workday, after which I STOP and disconnect. If an item will take greater than 5-ish minutes to complete, but it’s really important, I’ll add it to my Today view and prioritize it accordingly. Anything under 5 minutes I’ll just try to complete. Outside of this, unless I have to use a messaging or mail client to do my work, I’ll try to keep them shut off.
- ****How I deal with spontaneous tasks or recommendations:** This one is pretty straightforward. If at any point in the day someone gives me work, a movie recommendation, a restaurant I should try, or anything else like that, I record it in my Things Inbox.

#### **Weekly review**

GTD emphasizes the Weekly Review as a critical success factor, but what does it contain in a specific sense?

****How I do weekly reviews**

I took a leaf from [this book ](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/gtd-with-things-3/id1233518078?mt=11&ref=nickrroberts.com)by Eric A. Bowers and I set up a recurring project for my weekly review that contains headers and tasks:

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*mpmO1VGUK02lGsGp3RXunw.png)

- The process above can take me 1–2 hours.
- I write a retrospective of my week in Apple Notes. I answer questions like: How did you feel the last week went? Are you heading in the right direction in terms of achieving your 2-year and 5-year goals? What are your focuses and priorities for the coming week?
- I enter my personal metrics in a Google Sheet.
- I define the projects I want to complete in the coming week
- I review all of my open projects and all of the tasks in my Anytime and Someday lists to see if there is anything that I want to prioritize or mark as complete or canceled.
- I plan out all of my exercise and meditation habits for the week. I do this each week because sometimes I’m on vacation or otherwise cannot adhere to a strict regimen.

### ****Conclusion**

I hope the methods I outline above help other productivity hackers out there. I know I was previously scouring the internet to find a good digital setup to implement GTD and an applied look at the workflow.

I also realize that some of what I’m doing is not exactly orthodox GTD. For example, I don’t make use of some of the artifacts like “Contexts” and other things. This is just what is currently working for me.

Feel free to comment if you think I could optimize what I have here, or if anything about my setup or workflow is unclear!

Thanks for reading!

**Updated June, 2019*
### Scenes from Scandinavia
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/scenes-from-scandinavia/
Last updated: 2022-06-15T21:14:05.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/0*sSLJynwbGng1y0NS)

Cred: Fiona Foster (who took most of the photos seen throughout this piece)

It’s a strange thing to read **House of Leaves* by Mark Z. Danielewski while traveling abroad, in lands that don’t speak your language and where your expectations are met with a pesky, shifting reality. Ghost story aside, **House of Leaves* filters the reader through layers of accounts: At first, the text comes from a character named Zampanò who is writing a critique of a documentary film called the **Navidson Record.* The documentary is made up of home footage about a house whose proportions are spookily larger on the inside than that of the exterior. But as you read, you learn that Zampanò is now dead. Old age, or possibly something more nefarious. The next layer of narrative comes from Johnny Truant, a kid who lives in the same apartment complex as Zampanò. He happens upon the manuscript about the *Navidson Record* and becomes absorbed in it. Truant makes his own annotations and occasionally contradicts Zampanò in the footnotes. Mysteriously, another unknown editor appears in the text, also correcting or disagreeing with the other authors at points. You’re never certain which version of events is actually true.

Traveling in other countries is a lot like trying to find the truth in Danielewski’s novel. You read the sparse Yelp recommendations (not really a thing in Scandinavia or Europe) or the Google reviews to get a sense of how a place is going to be or look or whether it’s going to fit your vibe. And then there’s the startling realization that perhaps you yourself don’t know what exactly it is you’re looking for. This is the curse and also the blessing of travel. The constant contingency: the rude surprises, and cheerful jolts of happiness when it dawns on you that you’re having a great time all by accident.

There is a consensus for nearly every city in the world around which attractions ought to be on your hit list. Though, I’m often not sure exactly how to act when I get to them, particularly with art or museums or famous buildings. You are supposed to be in awe when you walk in the footsteps of some past conqueror or king (or “Frederick” or “Christian” as is the regnal tradition in Denmark). Too often, however, I’m just glad I checked the box. I get exhausted by museums with the Blitz-style of art appreciation they encourage. Instead, the truly memorable experiences lay in the unexpected, sometimes terrible, events that occur spontaneously.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*2q4I45fn85lKznIP)

#### ****Scene I: Seafood and cycling through Copenhagen**

The second day in Copenhagen, and a raucous one. It’s hot and that Danish lager, Tuborg, goes down so smooth and refreshingly.

Things start early shortly after our e-assisted bike ride through [Kastellet Fort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kastellet,%5FCopenhagen?ref=nickrroberts.com). I love forts. It’s kind of a pity that nuclear weapons and airpower make awesome behemoth military constructions like star-shaped coastal forts obsolete so they dont make them any more.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*N65V1vcJLGexPPlwrq6Few.jpeg)

We’re knocking back those lagers in a beautiful piazza/square called Nytorv by 1:30pm. It’s roasting.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*xyYPLU62JA3xSTvVa428xQ.jpeg)

Dinnertime rolls around and now it’s on to [Høst](https://www.yelp.com/biz/h%C3%83%C2%B8st-k%C3%83%C2%B8benhavn-k?ref=nickrroberts.com). Five courses of fresh Baltic seafood with a wine pairing for each.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*7LEAJgECsKFJCRuZEoP45g.jpeg)

Then we’re on to Ruby, which holds the same title of one of the best cocktail bars in Scandinavia.

At this point, we’re a bit affected, but the party’s just beginning. From here, it’s on to a stretch of bars and establishments which chemically blur together. I know for sure there was a tiki bar, some type of night club, and an interesting basement full of board games.

My memory cuts rapidly back to our Airbnb apartment, dancing and revelry. Then sleep.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*c14fNU6uMNqQr-xG)

Also, while we eat what is now lunch at the Royal Cafe, we see some kind of fancy-pants military parade going on outside.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*qagnXf441Wgbx8lt1QyjZA.png)

---

#### ****Scene II: Exploring Stockholm**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*22B_CdYLQafIMnaH)

Gamla Stan: The island heart of Sweden’s small empire. The few acres here contain the Royal Palace and endless alleyways that slink between towering old world structures. Mostly tall, three or four-story residences. The place smacks of Italian influence. The cozy piazza housing elegant cafes with patios stretching into the square, as well as the Nobel museum (which is not actually the place where the prizes are awarded I was disappointed to learn. It merely houses interesting artifacts and backstory on prize winners of old). Neoclassical architecture everywhere, but with, like, a Scandinavian touch — my high-brow architectural vocabulary is exhausted with the word “Neoclassical.” The corridors narrow so much in places you almost have to suck in your belly to squeeze through. The roads are cobbled and irregular.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*0VuLiSl5bzh856b4DeoBiw.jpeg)

Our first day in the city, also notable, consists of the museum tour of the [Vasa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa%5FMuseum?ref=nickrroberts.com) (the incredible, well-preserved hull of a 17th-century Swedish warship that sank only moments into her first voyage, covered with silt and raised in the 1950s) and cycling around Djurgården, then the boat bars off of Söder Mälarstrand, and a remarkable cocktail place called [Bar Hommage](https://www.yelp.com/biz/bar-hommage-stockholm?ref=nickrroberts.com).

Our apartment in Gamla Stan is where we begin our second day and, man, it’s hot out. They keep saying everywhere that the whole of Scandinavia is experiencing record-breaking temperatures at this moment. Every conversation we strike up with waiters, bartenders, or bicycle rental staff points us right back to the almanac. Daring us to figure out what normal May weather should be. Is something wrong? Must be global warming. Definitely climate change. Or perhaps it’s just because I’m in town (zing!).

Breakfast at pretty subpar tourist cafe. It’s a minefield out here. The lack of credible reconnaissance on restaurants foils us in ways that would never happen in San Francisco, where the Yelpy collective wisdom guides you so well. 

We wander through Gamla Stan’s snaking pathways until we find a bridge connecting us to Norrmalm.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*sEy3wFD48XH-HH9K)

Then walking and walking. Damn, it’s really cooking. We cross through a few parks and more neoclassical stretches.

We don’t have a particular agenda today, and so decide to dip up a few streets, away from the water to checkout a regal-looking dome on the horizon. We find this belongs to the Army museum. It used to be a military college, but they cleared out in the ’20s.

We decide against the museum tour. Might have decided differently if they had air conditioning. But no, back to the water, where some sort of evaporative cooling and breeze can dry out the sweat on our t-shirts. At least we found this awesome tank.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*Xg_pySfhfTSIQUjhvGBGGA.jpeg)

Moseying around Strandvägen, we waffle on renting bikes again. The temperatures such as they are. We’re not certain if the breeze created by riding will outweigh the heat generated by pumping our legs. To a bar it is!

And what a lovely place we happen upon, even if the premium on a glass of Åbro is a bit shocking: Ångbåtsbryggan, a boat bar. Right on the water with a good view of [Charles ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles%5FSimonyi?ref=nickrroberts.com)[Simonyi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles%5FSimonyi?ref=nickrroberts.com)’s yacht, **Skat*, adorned with helicopter on top, like a gas-powered cherry.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*monlbwfeQOur4kfD)

On account of this unexpected heat, it is here that we make the spontaneous decision that we’re going on a dinner cruise. Perhaps the open water and the sea breeze will bring some relief, we reason.

We also reason that the boat ride might be too good at cooling us down. So, an H&M run for sweatshirts and a few hotdogs later (for some reason "weiners" are quite uniformly the fast-food rage across all of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway), we’re waiting at the dock to board the Cinderella II, our ferry around the islands.

We learn quickly that this is less of a dinner cruise than a mode of transportation for most of those onboard; many passengers hitch a ride to one island or another in the outer archipelago. Despite its ferry-like function and appearance, the Cinderella possesses a kick-ass white cloth dining deck: Excellent food and even Pol Roger, the splurgy champagne of choice of Sir Winston Churchill.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Lx555kf3VlRStuKD8UdxMA.jpeg)

Prior to dinner, we make our way to the back of the boat, the open air portion full of other sunning passengers, and a boisterous crew of Septuagenarian Swedes smoking cigars and knocking back Mariestads like college kids.

The islands pass by and the smells of their foliage sweeten the breeze. It's so refreshing after the brutal heat of the day. Makes me fantasize about spending warm summer afternoons in this archipelago fishing for herring off the dock. Little red cabins even speckle islands no larger than my small, SF apartment. 

The boat turns around at Möja and begins its slow chug toward Stockholm again. We let the sunset take us home. The moon rising off to one side, a shining white jewel in the purple-orange ceiling.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*ZWXFGoX8gC3ZOBP5)

The outer archipelago

---

#### ****Scene III: Oslo to Voss**

Oslo is in the rear-view mirror and we’re all quite happy about it. It was the hottest of all of the cities we’ve visited so far, pushing 30 degrees celsius, as they would say. The apartment’s little air conditioning unit was no match for the almanac-defying heat wave.

“It’s been at least 25 degrees for three weeks straight,” said our bearded, man-bunned guide to the Oslo beer scene — he works as a brewer or something. We ran into him at the Schouskjelleren Mikrobryggeri and he took an immediate liking to Rob, whose easy-going and just-the-right-amount-of-snob manner at the bar makes beer guys flock to him and bartenders float him round after round. I just ride Rob’s coattails.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*DSZEshC1khnxH_J8)

Schouskjelleren Mikrobryggeri

Our man-bunned guide takes us around to all of these insider spots in Grünerløkka, where he fist-bumps whoever is pulling taps. Free pours of Norwegian microbrews appear magically before us as if we’re at Hogwarts. But they come and they come relentlessly. We have to run away from him at ine point, as we’re pretty certain he was ready to throw back brews until the middle of the next day if events continued their course.

#### ****Scene IV: The fjords**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*x2KkHTCoZLIp3dKi)

Voss sits in the Fjord lands on the tunnel-riddled drive from Oslo to Bergen. The number and length of the tunnels through the solid rock of the mountains is astounding. Between Voss and Bergen alone there are some 40 of them. Enormous, cavernous, winding, descending snakes. I fully expect to cross Khazad Dum in the depths of one of these abyssal underpasses.

We emerge from our whole-house Airbnb overlooking grassy fields and a roaring, runoff-swollen river.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*rBoE5u-OpmXyoz9E)

The river near the Airbnb in the evening

The drive today is to Nærøyfjord, next to the village of Gudvangen. This is where we meet Jan, our kayaking guide.

Jan’s the cheerful founder of Nordic Ventures, an outfit that supplies travelers with gear and outdoor experiences around the land. He’s a Dutch-born immigrant to Norway, who fell in love with the ferocious angles and brackish water of the fjords long ago. You can see it on his face. Early forties, but still as excited about being in the wild as any kid.

He runs us through the swirly paddle motions and equips us with our water skirts and life vests. He explains how to operate the rudder.

Jan shoves our kayak into the water. Fiona and I flail our arms and push the boat along to keep up with rest of the pack.

He calls out to us to dip our hands in the water and taste it. He wants to show that the top layer is sweet, though we’re technically in open ocean. It’s the product of thousands of waterfalls roaring down the walls of canyon, setting the snowmelt on top of the salty layer beneath. It’s cold like it was part of a glacier only moments before, but refreshing in the 85F+ day with the sun beating down and heating our t-shirts.

We lunch at a bend in the fjord across from Bakka. Jan spreads out fixins for coffee and tea. I grab a tin cup of Nescafe and follow Rob, Jenn and Fiona along a footpath that traces the water’s edge. A short stroll later, we stumble across a massive herd of sheep and their lambs sheltering in the shade of ancient boulders that crashed down the mountain eons ago.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*4oLBcOi9NgToAa9m)

We return to find that Jan’s prepped us chicken fajitas, but with an amusing European flair: Mayonnaise, corn and little cubes of cheese. I eat two of them and jump into the freezing water with a fellow British kayaker. Fiona dunks her head. The rest of the folks on the beach, mostly hungover brits, look on incredulously.

The water is frigid; it’s a searing, biting kind of cold. It’s beyond me how anything survives in such temperatures. But sure enough, we see a few seals poke their dog-like faces out of the water, observing us from a safe distance, as incredulous as our detoxing counterparts.

I mention to Jan in passing I’d love to jump off some kind of cliff into the icy fjord. Cliff jumping is one of those things that I’ve always loved to do, going back to family trips to Lake Powell. Few things touch that crazy feeling of hurling yourself out into space, with that surge of adrenaline, trusting that the surface below won’t hurt you. Better yet when the water is bone-chilling cold, another shock to your amped-up system.

To my surprise, Jan is glad to accommodate my request, and picks out a sizable rock cliff suitable for jumping.Rob, another kayaker from New York and I clamber awkwardly out of our kayaks and scramble up the rock and launch ourselves in.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*T_C_JX-SKSRPd_8e)

Cliff Jumping

We paddle all the way back and bid farewell to Jan, waving goodbye limply. Our arms aren’t accustomed to hours of this stuff.

But the fjord is too beautiful to abandon so quickly. Earlier on the drive from Oslo, we spotted a massive cloud of spray originating from some enormous waterfall that we couldn’t quite glimpse from the road.

But there are so many goddamn waterfalls in the Nærøyfjord area that we mistakenly go, first, to another thundering beauty of a fall called Stalheimfossen.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*4VWgHJIUMpzFtyKDtD7fXw.jpeg)

Stalheimfossen

After a course correction, we find ourselves at the one we originally wanted to see: Sivlefossen. The water here seems to stream down calmly enough toward the top, but then runs into some kind of massive, submerged rock obstruction, creating a massive explosion of turbulence and a ferocious white mist. The mist catches the wind, which bears it far away from its source. It billows up with the breeze and sweeps across the mossy hills on the opposite side of the canyon until it reaches us, washing across our faces and giving us goosebumps. That’s gotta be one of the most refreshing feelings in the universe.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*T-ddboxcAoc9NWdbGOSI3A.jpeg)

Sivlefossen

---

#### ****Scene V: Escape from Bergen**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*yZAlWIeQlVRwdjDm)

It’s 4:00am in Bergen. We’re all packed and ready to get the hell out on our 6:30am departure. Any way you look at it, two weeks is a long time to spend in cramped quarters with four people, even surrounded by stunning scenery and the intriguing Nordic culture, which is so familiar as an American, yet so full of other things like monarchies and the weight of an ancient, seafaring history.

We gather up our bags and descend the long **spiral staircase* to the bottom floor of the apartment building. Then clicking and clacking the luggage over the cobblestone streets. The sun’s already been up for hours. Not sure if it ever fully set — something about being in Scandinavia that seriously fucks with your circadian rhythms and wears you down after a while. But this morning the purplish hue that bathes the old town is quite pleasant, particularly with the knowledge that we’re returning home. Home means privacy and routine and familiar customs.

We’re on our way to grab the rental car to drive the last dozen miles to Flesland Airport. Since parking was a big uncertainty, we stored the car in a Europark garage nearby and responsibly paid the meter through 4:30am.

We turn the corner to the garage and (here’s that shifting reality again) the garage door is shut. Some big iron gate has descended and removed the friendly void we were expecting to see.

Huh. Hmm. Okay. Let’s try the handle on the mandoor. No, alright. Perhaps there’s a button somewhere. Doesn’t look like it. No keypad even? But, hang on, we paid through 4:30am. There must be a way to get in. Right?…Right? Europark doesn’t pick up when we call the number posted on the sign outside, which also, we now see, reads “Open 7:00–24:00.”

The horror of our situation dawns on us swiftly. No car means no way of getting to the airport and returning it to Hertz. We instantly start ticking through our options. Okay, we need internet. We need our computers to strategize this. My mind flicks for some reason to the glamorous duty-free area of the airport. The comforting in-flight movies. The smell of coffee by the gate. Is this future lost?

We head back to the Airbnb. The sound of our feet on the steps like the trudging of condemned prisoners.

We need to see what Hertz says to do. We can’t be the only ones who have done this. Adrenaline-fueled Google searches. Punching numbers into Jenn’s cracked Samsung S7 screen a she reads them out. I feel like I’m breaking it more with the force of my building anxiety.

“Try this one.”

Not even the comfort of a normal dial tone. Why is this an area where cultures have to diverge? There’s just this long, distressing beeeeeeep. Beeeeeeeeep. Beeeeeeeeeep. “Voicemail. No answer.”

“Okay, this one.”

“Uhh, something unintelligible in Norwegian. Sounds like an automated ‘nobody’s here’ thing.”

“Alright, here’s something that looks like a 24/7 line.”

Finally we’re through to someone. A competent someone, fortunately. Though, the language is a bit of an issue. “You need to grab your own car when the thing opens, we have a flight to catch.” I burn 10 minutes describing and repeating the situation, giving the location of the parking garage (twice), clarifying how the whole thing will go down with Hertz.

End call. Jenn has a taxi number queued up and the next call schedules a ride in — phew! — five minutes. Maybe this will still work?

We race down to the curb in front of the Airbnb to await our cab. We see a gaggle of people down the street, sitting on the curb. One of them gets up and walks toward us. Still no sign of the driver. It’s only been two or three minutes, I guess. The person walking toward us is a kid about 25 years old, Spanish-looking. He’s waving and talking at us. Oh Jesus, what now?

He stops next to us and starts pelting us with questions. He’s drunk or high or something. He smells like booze, but he’s talking fairly coherently in accented English. I notice he’s leering at Jenn and Fiona. They notice too.

We give one-word answers. Where the actual hell is the taxi?

“Where you from?”

“America.”

He launches into a diatribe about how he "got an SAT score of 118,000" and was accepted into a U.S. school but the tuition prevented him from attending. I’m not making eye contact and we’re all trying to make it clear through body language that he should fuck off. But he just goes on and on, getting closer and more animated and talking at us. Putting together who’s with who. He’s really interested in the girls. I’m doing my best to suppress all of my frustration at the morning, at this craziness before us, at the way he’s looking at Fiona.

Finally, a silvery flash in the distance. Thank god, it’s the taxi. He pulls up next to us and he pops the hatch for the luggage. We immediately move to load the car, but the rando guy follows us; he’s all up in our business.

“Is he with you?” The taxi driver asks, sensing some weirdness about the situation.

“No. Definitely not. We have no idea who this is.”

The rando guy turns to me and pulls out some white fabric and attempts to press it into my hand. Rob confirms later that the guy was holding a pair of boxers. He asks, since I’m leaving, if I, likewise, have a gift for him, stepping closer and gesturing for some kind of exchange.

“Hell no I don’t have a gift for you. Back off, man! Don’t touch me, I don’t know you. Can’t you see that none of us want to talk to you?” He stops, but cheekily pokes my arm. The dude wants to fight. What is with this psycho morning?

“Oh your man is so tough,” he sneers to Fiona. “What’s he gonna do?” He keeps trying to goad me into something. I do sincerely want to clock him at this point. But his creepy friends are lurking nearby, and we only have about 30 minutes to spare to catch our flight, most of which will be taxi ride. We all make a move to get in the cab.

The taxi driver is done loading the luggage, and attempts to close the hatch, when rando sticks his head in, preventing the driver from closing it, and tries to say goodbye and to tell us to tip the taxi driver well.

Jenn turns around and yells “FUCK OFF!” The guy finally removes his head from the boot of the car. The driver slams down the hatch, jumps in the front seat, and stomps the gas. It all feels like some crazy, escalating scene in a movie where an obnoxious gang of passersby become psycho killers--[Nocturnal Animals](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H1Ii1LjyFU&vl=en&ref=nickrroberts.com) comes to mind.

#### ****Scene VI: At 35,000 feet**

We’re on our 747 flying out of Amsterdam. Big, fluffy clouds float by the window. The engines roar, sending a soothing and constant vibration through the cabin. The tense moments of the morning drain away slowly like a storm surge. I watch **Red Sparrow* on the shitty seat display. The sound mixing is out of whack, or maybe it’s just the cheapo, single-use headphones they give you. It seems like most airlines haven’t really figured out the in-flight entertainment thing.

I zone out on **Red Sparrow*, which, even with a way to hear the finer sounds of the film, is not a good movie, mostly due to a lack of coherent storyline. Jennifer Lawrence is great as usual though, for her part.

I crack open **House of Leaves* again. It’s the section of the novel where the characters in the documentary within the story explore more deeply the alternate dimension inside the house. There’s a spiral staircase that seems to adjust its size relative to the psychic energy of the person who treads it. At once almost infinite for some, and a short walk for others.

The book itself, already visually complicated by so many footnotes, takes on an increasingly ergodic craziness. The words on the pages begin to appear upside down and backwards. Footnotes with gigantic, pointless lists don’t seem to end. Large rectangular spaces appear in the middle of paragraphs. It’s uncanny.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*owDS_a_YEG16YHm0Mp-QaA.jpeg)
### Austin Creek to Tom King Camp, Austin Creek State Park
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/austin-creek-to-tom-king-camp-austin-creek-state-park/
Last updated: 2021-11-17T03:03:19.000Z
### A quiet retreat near Wine Country

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*VQnqKMMcE1msyaENbJ4zDw.png)

### ****Essentials**

- ****Bay Area Workers’ rating**: ****5/10**. For more experienced backpackers, the hike might be too short. The trail takes you down to a valley floor, rather than up to a beautiful vista. However, the solitude and peaceful quiet of this country makes it a very relaxing retreat from city life.
- ****Type of trip**: Weekender (depart Saturday morning, return Sunday midday)
- ****Drive time to trailhead from San Francisco: \*\~1.5–2 hours*** *\**([directions to Austin Creek](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/San+Francisco,+CA/austin+creek+state+park/@38.1662238,-123.1767762,9z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x80859a6d00690021:0x4a501367f076adff!2m2!1d-122.4194155!2d37.7749295!1m5!1m1!1s0x80841dc9276c4b5f:0x27a48ca62e4b3207!2m2!1d-123.0085783!2d38.5600107?ref=nickrroberts.com) entrance). Here is the [trail map](https://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/452/files/ArmstrongRedwoods-AustinCreekFinalWebLayout2017.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com). You’ll follow the road back toward Bullfrog Pond campground and park at the vista point.
- ****Difficulty and total mileage**: \~8 miles out and back (easy). The hike in is a big downhill all the way to Tom King. So, the hike back is pretty much all uphill. Gets your heart pumping a bit.
- ****Crowds:** Very light.
- ****Temperatures:** At this time (late Spring), expect 70 degrees. Go [here](https://weather.com/weather/today/l/38.56,-123.01?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a current forecast.
- ****Permits:** There are three permit-required backcountry campsites you can reserve at the front entrance of the park. Tom King was the only one left when we arrived, but there is also Mannings Flat I and Mannings Flat II.
- ****Fire restrictions:** Must use the existing campsite fire ring.
- ****Bears/threatening wildlife:** No threatening wildlife other than insects. At this time of year, we found the bug situation to be pretty pesky. Lots of mosquitos in the campground, so bring the deet!
- ****Water situation:** Most of the hike takes place next to the beautiful East Austin Creek and Thompson Creek runs right through the Tom King Campground. Plenty of water, but bring your filter.

### ****Prep**

****Gear:** Check out my temperate climate backpacking [checklist](https://github.com/nickrroberts/backpacking-checklist/blob/master/temperate-weekender-checklist.md?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a recommended set of stuff to bring for this trip.

****Food:** We recommend bringing non-freeze-dried food. We brought burritos from El Farolito (San Francisco) for dinner that were-heated in the fire and made instant oatmeal in our coffee mugs for breakfast.

****Campground accommodations**: As above, backcountry permits are only available at the front entrance to the park and cannot be booked in advance. It may be worth calling ahead the day of your trip just to make sure that there are indeed spots remaining.

### ****Trip Details**

#### ****Saturday**

We departed San Francisco around 11:00am. After an hour and a half drive north through portions of lush wine country, we arrived in Guerneville, which is an quaint little town on the Russian River. It struck me as a completely different kind of civilization as the one we left behind in San Francisco: Rustic and bucolic. The kind of place you see cozy cabins interwoven with the forest and gaudy old signs from the 1950s on the old main drag.

After hanging a right on Armstrong Woods Road, we soon found ourselves at the entrance to Austin Creek State Park. The friendly ranger in the entrance station let us know that Tom King was the last remaining camp spot for the night, so we snagged it.

We made our way to the “Vista Point” near the Bullfrog Pond campground, where we parked the car, ate a sandwiches and began our descent down the fire road.

In approximately an hour (it’s a really short hike) we found ourselves at Tom King, where we pitched the tent and stowed excess gear inside. The campground itself is a large lot, with ample room for at least four or five parties of campers, yet we were the only residents. There’s a big, rusty cast-iron cylinder for a fire, lots of lizards and plenty of picnic benches, riddled with carvings from vandals of old.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*z8KSF1BnZozRS7pD-hBSZA.png)

Once we shed what we didn’t need, we continued along the fire road to Austin Creek proper. Here, we dropped our packs and clothes and went for a brief swim. We discovered a plethora of wildlife in the water: Orange-bellied newts and little fish that pecked at our feet if we stood still for a few minutes.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*mbPv5f711eAypMD7X1502Q.png)

After lazing around by the creek for while, we headed back to the campground, made our burritos, drank some whiskey and conked out.

#### ****Sunday**

We rose with the light and sipped our instant coffee. It was cool in the morning; worthy of a fleece and a beanie.

After packing up, we set off up the sweat-inducing incline all the way back to our car. Though uphill, we made it back a bit before noon (after leaving camp at 10:45am).

We ended our time at Austin Creek clinking our beers together while taking in the view at Vista Point.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*iNwgk74GATbqX2PyCFh_Gg.png)
### McCrary Ridge to Twin Redwoods, Big Basin
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/mccrary-ridge-to-twin-redwoods-big-basin/
Last updated: 2021-11-17T03:05:02.000Z
### A rich mix of mountains, forest and ocean.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*677AfsN2Lebyn0I2GO9N2g.png)

### ****Essentials**

- ****Bay Area Workers’ rating**: ****7/10**. This trek takes you through glorious redwood forests down to the beach with several remarkable vistas along the way. Come here to forest-bathe.
- ****Type of trip**: Weekender (depart Saturday morning, return Sunday midday).
- ****Drive time to trailhead from San Francisco: \*\~1.5–2 hours*** *\**([directions to Big Basin headquarters](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/San+Francisco,+CA/Big+Basin+Redwoods+State+Park+Headquarters+&+Visitor+Center,+21600+Big+Basin+Hwy,+Boulder+Creek,+CA+95006/@37.4495799,-122.4746951,10z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x80859a6d00690021:0x4a501367f076adff!2m2!1d-122.4194155!2d37.7749295!1m5!1m1!1s0x808e53ad644bc42b:0x8db63e05e782b9bb!2m2!1d-122.2217765!2d37.1723716?ref=nickrroberts.com)). Here is the [trail map](https://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/540/files/BigBasinRedwoodsFinalWebLayout101816.pdf?ref=nickrroberts.com). You’ll have to show your permits to the rangers at headquarters and then they’ll let you park at Jay parking lot.
- ****Difficulty and total mileage**: \~23 mile loop (moderate-strenuous). Taking the advice of a park ranger, we followed Hihn Hammond Trail and connected with the McCrary Ridge Trail. McCrary then runs downhill to Twin Redwoods campground. This makes the return journey a long, gradual uphill. We really recommend returning along Skyline to Sea trail and getting a glimpse of Berry Falls. Alternatively, you can return along McCrary Ridge, but you’re missing out.
- ****Crowds:** Light-moderate. There tend to be a lot of day hikers and car campers milling around the park headquarters and trailhead but they thin out dramatically after a mile or so into the hike.
- ****Temperatures:** At this time (late Spring), expect 70 degrees. Go [here](https://weather.com/weather/today/l/38.56,-123.01?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a current forecast.
- ****Permits:** Must book ahead. [Go here](https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page%5Fid=26658&ref=nickrroberts.com) to see the calendar and to book your permit for Twin Redwoods campground.
- ****Fire restrictions:** No fires.
- ****Bears/threatening wildlife:** No threatening wildlife other than a few mosquitos.
- ****Water situation:** Oodles of water everywhere on this one (once you’re off the ridge and in the canyon of Big Basin). Remember that filter and bask in the plenty.

### ****Prep**

****Gear:** Check out my temperate climate backpacking [checklist](https://github.com/nickrroberts/backpacking-checklist/blob/master/temperate-weekender-checklist.md?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a recommended set of stuff to bring for this trip.

****Food:** We recommend bringing non-freeze-dried food. This time, we opted for sandwiches from our go-to spot, Mission Picnic, which we snarfed down on the beach while watching elephant seals bark at surfers. \[You end the first half of the trek back in civilization next to Highway 1 and the beach\]

****Campground accommodations**: As above, grab your backcountry camping permits online in advance. Twin Redwoods campground itself situated next to the stream that runs through the canyon. Camp spots are a little crowded together; you can see and hear most of the other occupants. Hint: If you can, get here early and grab spot #4\. This is the best one that we found. Much more seclusion.

### ****Trip Details**

#### ****Saturday**

We left San Francisco at 11:00am in time to pick up our Sandwiches at Mission Picnic shortly after they opened and headed south on the 280.

The drive through the forest toward the trailhead is magnificently tree-laden, yet so winding that it made us a bit nauseous.

The headquarters area of Big Basin consists of a few old log-cabin style buildings constructed in the late 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. They smell pleasantly smoky and evoke a frontier feeling with their rugged simplicity.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*p3FIdeHvxFRpUcrXi7RJfA.png)

Once we were at the park, we walked over to the ranger in the main headquarters cabin. She was super helpful and marked up our map for us in a blue pen, as well as no-go zones in red (trails which had been washed out with the big rains of winter 2017).

Then we were off on the trail. The scads of tourists melted away behind us, and we quickly found ourselves in solitude on McCrary ridge. The only sound was our feet crunching the gravel and dead leaves as we passed through magnificent groves of redwoods, which were speckled with picturesque clearings. Sunbeams shone through the canopies and illuminated copses of greenery so that they glowed brightly.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*vPSV0X7AlEWi5ONOzRm5RA.png)

We wound up at Twin Redwoods after all this, where we dropped our packs and claimed a site by putting up our tent.

After ridding ourselves of excess weight, we continued down past the random farms and across Highway 1 to the beach, where we ate our dinner and sipped whiskey while watching the waves break on the shore.

Just before the sun set, we trekked back into the forest to the campground, where we listened podcasts until we drifted off to sleep in the tent.

#### ****Sunday**

The next morning we found that banana slugs had invaded! So, as we prepared our breakfast of instant apple n’ cinnamon oatmeal and coffee via Aeropress, we watched the slugs munch on dead leaves and slowly slime their way toward their mysterious objectives.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*468Tsb2vprXpDIQc_hDaeg.png)

Once done with breakfast, we broke camp and headed up to Berry Falls. The hike up via Skyline to Sea turned out to be a longer, yet much gentler grade than the descent along McCrary Ridge.

Berry Falls is a small, picturesque waterfall, but surrounded by colossal Redwoods, both standing and fallen around the stream, which make it magical. We tried to imagine what it must have been like to witness one of these giants toppling over, all two hundred feet smacking down across the river and the bank beyond.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*ezcvOnf2Cngj8aCSzVZpsg.png)

Here, we snacked on beef jerky and trail mix to prepare for our last push up the hill back to headquarters.

Some four miles later, we were back at the lodge, where we grabbed a couple of tall pints of Shönramer Gold from the fridge (their beer and wine selection is remarkable!) and kicked back at a picnic table to revel in the behemoth redwoods that surrounded us.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*whbXUnfDtGABO7HU6eRdyQ.png)
### Vicente Trail, Big Sur
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/vicente-trail-big-sur/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T03:59:33.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*wgRX79ZRV03P3fzADqksEg.png)

Views for miles up the coastline.

# Essentials

- ****Type of trip**: Weekender (depart Friday after work, return Sunday midday)
- ****Drive time to trailhead from San Francisco: \*\~3.5 – 4 hours*** *\**([directions to Kirk Creek Campground](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/San+Francisco,+California/Kirk+Creek+Campground,+California+1,+Big+Sur,+CA/@35.9900799,-122.6148585,8z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x80859a6d00690021:0x4a501367f076adff!2m2!1d-122.4194155!2d37.7749295!1m5!1m1!1s0x80929badc6463c97:0x754a4f7385e3e64c!2m2!1d-121.495721!2d35.989993!3e0?ref=nickrroberts.com) which is right across the highway from the Vicente trailhead)
- ****Difficulty and total mileage**: \~10–18 miles out and back (moderate). Expect a fairly merciless uphill with a few thousand feet of elevation gain on the first day. Vicente Flat Campground is 5 miles from the trailhead. You can opt for day hikes once you drop your stuff off at the campground. Daily mileage will be \~5–9.
- ****Crowds:** Very light trail traffic (when we went in March). Non-competitive backcountry camping situation. There are two spacious spots earlier on the trail just after the it heads inland from the coast. If Vicente Flat is by chance full, you can cross the river and continue about a quarter mile toward Goat Camp, where the trail opens up into a wide grassy meadow.
- **\*Temperatures: \**In the spring, when we went, temperatures stayed around 40–50 degrees with some light rain. Definitely more on the chilly, damp side. Go [here](https://weather.com/weather/today/l/36.36,-121.86?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a current forecast.
- ****Permits:** [California fire permit](http://www.preventwildfireca.org/Campfire-Permit/?ref=nickrroberts.com) (if you wish to have a fire). No camping permit required for Vicente Flat Campground
- ****Fire restrictions:** None. Just be responsible and try to use existing fire rings if they’re around.
- ****Bears/threatening wildlife:** No bears in Big Sur. There are ticks and large amounts of poison oak, so take heed. Also, beware the banana slugs! (jk)
- ****Water situation:** In the first 5 miles there is limited water availability. There is a substantial stream of fresh mountain runoff at Vicente Flat Campground. Bring your filter.

# Prep

**\*Gear: \**Check out my temperate climate backpacking [checklist](https://github.com/nickrroberts/backpacking-checklist/blob/master/temperate-weekender-checklist.md?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a recommended set of stuff to bring for this trip.

**\*Food: \**We recommend bringing non-freeze-dried food. The trek is short enough that food weight shouldn’t be that much of a concern. We cooked up a set of 6 burritos: 4 x breakfast burritos and 2 x carne asada and wrapped them in foil. You can easily toss these in a fire to be heated by coals (but be aware that the flames themselves don’t consume your foil dinner! We’ve had this happen).

****Campground accommodations**: For Friday night, you can take a chance on one of the two first-come-first-serve spots at Kirk Creek Campground (which has an [incredible coastal view](https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x80929badc6463c97:0x754a4f7385e3e64c!2m22!2m2!1i80!2i80!3m1!2i20!16m16!1b1!2m2!1m1!1e1!2m2!1m1!1e3!2m2!1m1!1e5!2m2!1m1!1e4!2m2!1m1!1e6!3m1!7e115!4s/maps/place/kirk+creek+campground/@35.9898898,-121.4952355,3a,75y,284.72h,90t/data=%2A213m4%2A211e1%2A213m2%2A211sLdbfdCpOSb1QhbLlr7u29w%2A212e0%2A214m2%2A213m1%2A211s0x80929badc6463c97:0x754a4f7385e3e64c!5skirk+creek+campground+-+Google+Search&imagekey=!1e2!2sLdbfdCpOSb1QhbLlr7u29w&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwia4IzG2fnZAhUh4YMKHXSFAP0Qpx8IlQEwDg&ref=nickrroberts.com)) or continue down the highway for about 5 miles to Plaskett Creek Campground, which is what we did. We booked our night online, but there are also first-come-first serve spots available at Plaskett.

# Trip Details

#### ****Friday**

Depart San Francisco/Silicon Valley around 6:00pm and arrive at campground around 9:30–10:00pm. Bring a bottle of wine to pop in the dark when you get there and either sleep in your car (like we did) or pitch your tent in the campground.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*luHYdu1SwH-T-A21IUiA6Q.png)

Plaskett Creek Campground, where we camped Friday night

#### ****Saturday**

After breakfast, head to Vicente Trailhead. Parking should be available on the road pullout beside the trailhead across from Kirk Creek Campground. Gear up, stow your valuables, and start your ascent to Vicente Flat Campground. There are several stellar viewpoints along the way that offer sweeping vistas of the coastline. The trail also weaves through rainforest-like copses of eucalyptus and redwoods.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*jFLCNG_acv6cWuqvS7z-QQ.jpeg)

The squalls of rain passing overhead made for a kind of foreboding, moody look to the trail, which we loved.

Vicente Flat itself is set inside of forested canyon. While beautiful in its own way, the campground doesn’t offer the same panoramic view of the ocean and coastline. After lunch, you can either backtrack on Vicente Trail for a 1–2 miles until the coastal view opens up again, or cross the stream at the Vicente Flat Campground and follow the signs toward Goat Camp. Follow the narrow trail for 1.5–2 miles until you’ve found a stellar viewpoint.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*eoBeGJka4hySagXc-RIfuQ.png)

Our spot at Vicente Flat Campground. Me drinking whiskey.

#### ****Sunday**

Make breakfast and break camp. Pack out along the same route you came in.

After getting back to your car, be sure to stop by the [Big Sur Tap House](https://www.yelp.com/biz/big-sur-taphouse-big-sur?ref=nickrroberts.com) for a beer and something greasy. We highly recommend taking Highway 1 as far as possible on your way back home. It’s a crazily scenic drive.

Enjoy!

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*5yL78k-Mkt_-IJxz82Gmxw.png)

One of the many famous beaches along Highway 1 on our return
### Good dev process, bad dev process
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/good-dev-process-bad-dev-process/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T03:59:16.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*Owgm5ILoCtEcFFOr-pDwgw.png)

#### ****Process weight continuum**

Thick process slows things down with the aim of reducing risk. In software this usually takes the shape of lots of review boards, stakeholders, or committees that review any changes affecting a live product. It seems typical of giant corporations who do not want to disrupt steady flow of revenue or other success metrics. Thick process tends to ensure more consistency, which is important when you’re building an airplane, but it also can strangle creativity and morale, because it doesn’t leave enough room for innovation. Thick process is what causes people to call an organization bureaucratic. Thick process is “red tape”.

Lightweight process, or sometimes no process, on the other hand, is volatile for better and worse. Light process tends to be the way that many startups get up and running: Being scrappy, frenetic production, not abiding to norms, and just getting done what needs to be done, checklists or reviews be damned. But these traits can feel anarchic and also demoralize team members. If it seems like there’s no central direction or organizing force, it feels confusing and stressful if you’re not sure how things come together. “Just launch! Launch! Launch! ” mentality can be invigorating but also just result in bad product that nobody wants.

****Good process is a balance between the two poles, it leaves room for individual team members to be creative, but ensures quality. Bad process skews to one side.**

#### ****Return on Process**

This is the answer to the question “Exactly what do you gain with this set of rules for launching a new feature?”. Any new process should be viewed with the suspicion and made to prove itself.

All process comes at the cost of time and therefore money. There is often opportunity cost for not launching, like if you delay for an extra week of QA.

There is also a substantial cost to launching something that breaks your core product.

****Good process yields a high return for the time and energy the team devotes to abiding by a set of rules to make something and ship it. Bad process just costs.**
### My Deep Work Experiment
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/my-deep-work-experiment/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T03:59:05.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*1HXA_kputkrp1kTNdeveCg.png)

A few weeks ago while traveling, I listened to [Cal Newport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal%5FNewport?ref=nickrroberts.com) speak on NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast (episode [here](http://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/539092670/you-2-0-the-value-of-deep-work-in-an-age-of-distraction?ref=nickrroberts.com)). He’s one of many authors in a new series the show launched this summer called “You 2.0”, which is about practical ways to improve your outlook on life, love, work, etc.

Newport’s [main thesis ](http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/?ref=nickrroberts.com)is that, if you desire to do great work, you need to focus deeply for extended periods of time without interruption (“Deep Work”). The biggest impediment to your best work, he says, is [context-switching](http://calnewport.com/blog/2015/12/12/deep-habits-the-danger-of-pseudo-depth/?ref=nickrroberts.com), or “pseudo-depth”.

He names numerous thinkers who have employed Deep Work strategies in the past: [Mark Twain](https://medium.com/@DanSanchezV/find-your-deep-work-sanctuary-cf12f6a6d6f9?ref=nickrroberts.com), [Alexander Hamilton](http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/04/08/alexander-hamiltons-deep-work-habits/?ref=nickrroberts.com) and J.K. Rowling — whose retreat at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh was the site where [she finished the last Harry Potter book](https://www.therowlinglibrary.com/2016/06/01/the-balmoral-hotel-where-j-k-rowling-finished-harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows/?ref=nickrroberts.com). It stands to reason that most of the world’s most notable artists, scientists, engineers, and inventors hid themselves away from the world, making space for vast stretches of productive quietude.

Newport got in my head. I haven’t been able to stop pondering all the small interruptions that cause me to repeatedly switch my mental context while I’m trying to focus. I started to wonder how many books I haven’t read, or how many essays, articles or novels I haven’t written or finished because I’m glued to text messages, or social media, or hopelessly trapped in my inbox.

In a [prior article](https://medium.com/pminsider/building-your-life-like-a-software-product-e5332de93e17?ref=nickrroberts.com), I wrote about my love for personal optimization through an “agile” form of goal tracking. So, in my current personal sprint, I decided to focus on reducing distraction and finding ways to do deeper work.

However, I should also mention that I regard Newport as somewhat of a radical. To truly follow the Deep Work™ doctrine, one has to make some pretty dramatic life changes. For instance, he [praises Aziz Ansari](http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/08/09/aziz-ansari-quit-the-internet/?ref=nickrroberts.com) as a shining example to all for quitting the internet. He also proposes that we [eliminate email altogether](https://hbr.org/2016/02/a-modest-proposal-eliminate-email?ref=nickrroberts.com).

These aren’t practical options for me. I’m employed by the internet. I also **like* the internet, and I think I possess a decent amount of self-control in that realm. The replacements he proposes for email, such as getting rid of personal company email addresses in favor of individual office hours, just aren’t crusades I’m interested in having with my organization. Email, for all its flaws, is entrenched in my company’s culture and it’s not going away any time soon.

As a product manager at eBay, I’m caught in the middle of numerous, parallel work-streams for the product we’re building. I can’t just turn off completely. A big part of the job is being available for designers, engineers, and other individual contributors to clarify requirements, or to work through problems.

However, because another significant component to my job is being creative and crafting a product vision, I need quiet time to think. I want some Newport-style theory in my life, but I need an immediately applicable, incremental version.

Here are some strategies (mostly modified Newport ideas) I’m experimenting with right now:

#### ****Killing notifications**

Easy…mostly. I find that phone and computer app notifications are constant digital prods that wreck my ability to stay on task. For example, Slack, while disrupting the corporate communication space, also completely disrupts my concentration. I find it irresistible to respond to co-workers while mid-flow on something else if I hear that [unmistakable popping sound](https://soundcloud.com/jldavid/slack-knock-brush-sound-effect?ref=nickrroberts.com).

I’ve now muted all apps on my phone and laptop. Chaos was replaced with this odd, quiet bliss. It was a little unnerving at first, but I now feel a strong sense of peace — and I’m only a week into this experiment.

The only thing that I allow ping me now is my computer calendar, which lets me know when I should switch to the next task’s time-box.

I stopped wearing my Apple Watch entirely.

#### ****Time-boxing work and communication cycles**

Simply declaring that in the following hour, I will do one thing (like write) gives me a strong sense of purpose and keeps me focused.

Likewise, I’m trying to designate three 20-minute compartments (a Newport idea) in my day for communication: A morning, afternoon, and late afternoon cycle for emails, text, and Slack messages.

This is, of course, unless one of my task time-boxes is some form of necessary communication (summarizing and distributing user feedback, for instance).

I don’t always draw time-boxes on my calendar — sometimes I’ll just say to myself “until my next meeting I’ll work on this user story” — but it helps.

#### ****Keeping a physical distance between myself and my phone (reducing temptation)**

I want my phone around for things like work and family calls, two-factor authentication, etc. but I’ve taken to placing it in my backpack every day.

At home, I’ll just leave my phone in another room.

I’m trying to force myself into a state where I only take it out again when I purposefully mean to catch up on communication during a designated cycle. I think of it like proactive, versus reactive, phone interaction.

#### ****Starting on paper, then going digital**

I’m jotting ideas down on paper now, away from a screen. Screens are shiny portals to other interesting dimensions, so when I’m brainstorming or trying to work through problems, I now avoid using my laptop.

For story or article ideas, product ideas, or anything else that spontaneously occurs to me, I’ll make note of them first in a Moleskine journal I keep with me all the time.

Those ideas, such as this very article, I translate into digital form when they’re more solidified.

#### ****Working from home often, but not all the time**

This topic itself is a universe of intense debate, with [IBM](http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/19/technology/ibm-work-at-home/index.html?ref=nickrroberts.com) and [Marissa Mayer](http://www.businessinsider.com/mayer-still-defends-remote-work-ban-2015-11?ref=nickrroberts.com) types on one side (Mayer [declares](http://www.businessinsider.com/mayer-still-defends-remote-work-ban-2015-11?ref=nickrroberts.com) “People are more collaborative, more inventive when people come together”) and the [David Heinemeier Hansson](http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com) and [Jason Fried](https://medium.com/@jasonfried?ref=nickrroberts.com) types on the other:

> We think she made a big mistake. Because work doesn’t happen at work.  
>  
> If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond “the office.” If they do say the office, they’ll include a qualifier such as “super-early in the morning before anyone gets in,” or “I stay late at night after everyone’s left,” or “I sneak in on the weekend.”…  
>  
> …A busy office is like a food processor — it chops your day into tiny bits. —[ Jason Fried](https://www.inc.com/jason-fried/remote-excerpt-one.html?ref=nickrroberts.com)

Again I find myself caught in the middle here. Offices are giant distraction parties, but face-time is also important. I find that working with people in person — whether in meetings, code review, design sessions — inspires trust and forges emotional bonds that are otherwise very difficult to do over Google Hangouts or Slack.

During the design sprints for our product, I also see that it’s easier to whip up creative excitement about solutions to user problems when we’re all together, in person, drawing on the same whiteboard.

However, in most cases, working from home 1–2 days per week (on days when I don’t have many meetings) reduces the immense time overhead of my commute — 1.5 hours from San Francisco to San Jose each direction — and the repeated taps on the shoulder I get at work which disrupt my focus on any particular task.

#### ****Creating intrinsic motivation to complete work**

At the end of the day, you have to motivate yourself to do whatever work needs to be done. Distraction is only one side to productivity.

I feel much better when I execute on tedious tasks in a way that doesn’t feel like pulling teeth. Most of the time, I use a mental exercise to fit whatever undesirable task is in front of me into a larger vision that I’m passionate about. If you’re intent enough on the vision, I’ve found that it makes more immediate, chore-like tasks much more palatable.

#### ****Conclusion**

Last weekend, I wrote a Medium article and read most of a book. I pumped through tasks this week at work, knocking them out one after another.

I’ve found in the past week that simply creating a protected time space, muting anything that could disturb me, hugely increases my happiness and task completion rate (the evidence is in my personal sprint board’s “Done” column).

With these tactics, I’m seizing more of my day and taking back some of my time that previously slipped into the cracks. This experiment is probably here to stay.
### Building your life like a software product
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/building-your-life-like-a-software-product/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T03:58:47.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*YCOBQpg3-cCYu0_2VXDEpg.jpeg)

A couple years ago, in a fit of creativity and post-breakup soul-searching, I started writing down things I wanted to accomplish in my life.

I decided to create this whole concept of my existence that mimicked a product development approach. I began by defining a vision for how I want to live and tried to break it down to various sub-pursuits (projects). My thinking here was:

- Business products seek product-market fit (businesses want to make something people perceive to have value and therefore want to buy). Likewise, I want to make something out of my life that provides value to me.
- In this analogy, I am the market and my life (my relationships, income, career, etc.) is the product. I have to find a way to craft a life that I find meaningful and valuable.

I also acknowledge that this product-oriented approach is just **a* way, in a field of many methods, to structure one’s pursuit of meaning, happiness, and value.

So, I started with a ****Values Declaration**, in which I lay out my mission — the various experiences that I believe make me happy. Below is a figure I drew illustrating my three main areas for self-improvement:

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*eBE4MGkQ_cjAEy2ddQN1qw.png)

In this document, I also wrote a mission statement for myself. Not going to repeat it here word for word (because it sounds really cheesy like the kind of euphemistic, flowery language that some giant corporation like Target would use to describe its aims), but I will say that it helped a lot to frame how I thought about myself and the purpose/direction of my life. Things like: strong relationships with friends and loved ones, intellectual achievement, and financial comfort.

#### ****My Measurements**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*XhCH3wh0v8XitgL4X0OL5Q.jpeg)

A good product manager uses success metrics to get a sense of how a product is doing and to make adjustments when needed. So, I created supporting KPIs (key performance indicators) to track how I progress toward each “plank” of my mission statement. I selected:

- ****Number of Meaningful Relationships**: a spot-check of the number of people I feel I have a meaningful relationship with. The “meaningful” part of this tends to mean a relationship that is intellectually stimulating or loving: family members, my girlfriend, friends, but not brief acquaintances.
- A ****Relationship Quality Index**: (a scale from 0–100, 100 being the highest quality) A spot check of the aggregate quality of all of the relationships I have: family, romantic, co-workers, and friends.
- ****Estimated Hours Devoted to Intellectual Self-Improvement**: The number of hours I’ve devoted to any intellectual pursuit (film, literature, writing) over a given period of time.
- A ****Happiness Index**: (also on a scale from 0–100, 0 being no more will to live and 100 being pure, heavenly ecstasy) Very fuzzy. This is also a spot check catch-all of how good I feel psychologically and physically, based on my relationships, job satisfaction, financial well-being, goal completion, etc.
- ****Net Worth**: Dollar value combination of cash, investments, retirement and an estimate of the total value of my possessions.

These metrics are far from perfect in capturing the total progress toward really abstract concepts like the “quality of relationships”, but I felt it was important to take a stab at some kind of quantitative measure. I needed something to guide which projects I would take up, some numbers I could move the needle on. I started recording all of them on weekly basis in a Google Sheet, which I’ve now done for two years. I figure at some point I will have enough data to draw some interesting insights about my life — like if any of the metrics have an especially high correlation with my happiness index.

#### ****The transition from a Waterfall personal goal-tracking system to Agile**

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*LGNFbGSMz_Nig0shP1cayQ.jpeg)

My first idea, in 2015, was to start with a five-year plan and work backward from that. I ended up with a set of google docs, respectively titled:

- ****Five year goals**
- ****One year goals**
- ****6 month goals**
- ****This month’s goals**
- ****This week’s goals**

The design was that this week’s goals would roll up to this month’s goals, which roll up to 6 month goals, etc.

This turned out to be very difficult to maintain and I found that it’s almost impossible to determine exactly where I wanted to be in five years, or even in one month — how do you account for all the unplanned opportunity you find along the way?

I also found this system to be pretty prohibitive of what my friend Graham calls “contingency”, or the spontaneity that gives life its tang.

I discovered later that the initial system I created was akin to the [Waterfall ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall%5Fmodel?ref=nickrroberts.com)methodology of project management, where a feature or end product is determined entirely ahead of its release. In the software development world, this means that you create user requirements, hand them off to designers to create the interface, the designers hand off their mocks and specs to engineers who code up the application to fit the designs, the engineers then send their code to quality engineers who check for bugs, and the quality engineers in turn give the go-ahead to release the code to a production environment. It flows like a waterfall, each person in the system passing the baton along when their part is complete.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*W9Ls4n8GDIXJ2HvWjnmL5A.png)

The Waterfall method is typically defined by longer cycle times (from requirements development to launch) and less user-focus throughout the whole process.

In my first system, each week or month’s tasks were similar to a phase in the Waterfall lifecycle, each sub-task rolling up to another larger goal that I defined long ago.

So, as is problematic in Waterfall, I would often find myself working on goals for a given 6-month or year period, only to determine that I was no longer interested in the original goal, or a new goal had outdated it. For example, my goal to learn the Angular javascript framework became outdated when it became apparent that the React framework was what I was really interested in, or how my goal to get really good at rock climbing became less of a priority to me than backpacking and bagging more peaks because those things are just what I began to enjoy more so as time went on. The “market” (what makes me satisfied) had changed. The goal posts moved constantly.

These problems, that my goal-tracking system was cumbersome and that my changing desires were outdating the plans I’d made, was something that dogged me for at least a year and a half, until I found a solution.

“Agile” is a software development method that became very popular after the 2001 Agile Manifesto (written by a variety of software engineers at a conference at Snowbird, Utah), and it aspires to the following:

- ****Individuals and Interactions** *more than processes and tools*
- ****Working Software** *more than comprehensive documentation*
- ****Customer Collaboration** *more than contract negotiation*
- ****Responding to Change** *more than following a plan*

— [http://agilemanifesto.org/](http://agilemanifesto.org/?ref=nickrroberts.com)

To be more user-focused (me-focused) with my goal planning and to respond better to change, I decided earlier this year to switch my entire goal-tracking system to a formal agile method and away from my first, homegrown system.

My mission statement and KPIs are really the only parts of my goal-tracking system that have stayed consistent. I underwent a significant change in my day-to-day goal tracking system, moving from a system of rigidly planning everything up front, to a more fluid, adaptable method.

#### ****How I manage my goals now**

I don’t mean to make it sound like I don’t do long-term goal planning any more. I do, but I try to be more vague and flexible about longer-range objectives. For instance, I don’t like to try to write out in advance exactly how I’ll achieve my desired future income, as I believe that curtails opportunistic thinking and it’s nearly impossible to do anyway, I’ll just write down my aspirational target.

There are lots of ways to “do agile”, but I use the [SCRUM framework](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum%5F%28software%5Fdevelopment%29?ref=nickrroberts.com), which endorses a particular set of artifacts and processes:

****Artifacts (components of my agile board):**

- ****Personal backlog**, I now use the cloud-version of [JIRA](https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira?ref=nickrroberts.com) to manage my backlog. From using this software all the time at work, I found that I really like JIRA’s information architecture and that it contains all of the tools you really need for SCRUM.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*6po55tOe4k3lchtnMRVeqg.png)

A screenshot of my JIRA board

- ****User stories** are the individual tasks on the cards above, the most granular form of goal. For example: “Draft a Medium/site piece on managing your life like a product”.
- Since there are only so many things I can get done in a particular time period, I scope each story with ****story points**. Story points are an abstraction of effort and time. I use the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) to make estimates on how large of an ask each story is. A “1” is a quick and simple task and a “13” is a highly complex and involved task.
- I bundle user stories into ****epics,** or higher-level initiatives that comprise lots of different stories (epics are the colored labels on the stories in the picture). For instance, “Plan a trip with friends” contains lots of sub-stories: Agree on dates, agree on a place, agree on a budget, secure commitments, etc. To complete an epic, all sub-stories must be complete.
- I have two different types of epics: **\*one-time \**(e.g. read Lord of the Rings) and **\*routine/ongoing \**(e.g. Personal Finance). I color the one-time epics blue and routine epics orange (just my personal preference).
- Epics fit into ****components** (the row of blue links on the top of the board). These are broader areas of my life, like “Adventure/Travel” that span many epics.

Non-JIRA stuff:

- I still use Google Drive for a lot of documentation, like extra info or background that doesn’t fit into a JIRA issue that nicely. I also keep a google doc “****Daily Notes**” that I use religiously to manage daily tasks and and a lot of small trivial stuff that I don’t need to track on my JIRA board.
- I map out what I’d like to get done in coming sprints (at the epic-level — calling out important stories below) in a **\*roadmap \**(below). But I constantly manage my roadmap due to ever-changing personal circumstances. It’s more of a guide than a rigid plan.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*8tqD_dLeAWlGwAtmKKzlCA.png)

****Processes**

- I operate in two-week personal ****sprints**, which contain what I want to accomplish in that time-span.
- To figure out what should be in each sprint, I have an 30 minute-long personal sprint-planning session every other Monday morning, where I add and update stories to the upcoming sprint backlog.
- I have daily 10-minute ****standups** with myself (which sounds incredibly dorky as I write this) to take stock of how I’m progressing through my sprint backlog. I’ll often fill out my agenda for the day during this time, which I then use to guide my day.
- At the end of each two-week sprint, right before I begin the next one, I have a retrospective, about 15 minutes where I figure out what I can do better in future sprints and I record my metrics. Since it’s just me managing the whole process, I often make many small tweaks to my process (the way I write stories, or adjustments to how I scope). ****Summary listing of the documents/systems I use**

Personal JIRA agile board

Google Drive:

- “Daily Notes” doc
- “Personal Metrics” sheet (for recording KPI data points at end of sprint)
- “Values Declaration” doc
- “Roadmap” sheet
- Drive folder containing any additional documentation on specific stories

#### ****Conclusion**

I’m still pretty early into using JIRA and managing my life in this way, but over time I’ll starting using the software’s native reporting tools for velocity tracking (how many story points I average in a sprint) to get a sense of how much scope I can accommodate. JIRA offers a lot of really cool [reporting graphs](https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracoreserver073/reporting-861257295.html?ref=nickrroberts.com).

Already, I’m seeing the benefits and flexibility of an agile personal goal-tracking system for myself. I’m completing more and the system feels much lighter. I’m no longer spending long hours drafting out long-term plans that get outdated or are forced to change with new circumstances.
### Trail Notes: King's Canyon
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/trail-notes-kings-canyon/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T03:58:32.000Z
San Francisco’s an unendingly interesting place. Sprawling, green parks. Excellent restaurants. Local beer and coffee flow freely, enveloping you in a dreamy, creative fog. There are strange people, worth watching for a while, who seem to pop out of the woodwork when the sun shines.

We live near Dolores Park, which is rife with debauchery and every variant of every inebriant you could ever desire. It just takes a wave to identify yourself to some merchant of mischief. The joint man who walks around with a jelly jar of dank strapped to his hip. The LSD man who struts about in his pajama pants selling a fucked-up afternoon for a few bucks a hit. There’s the machete-bearing rum coconut man, with his dreads and odd math. The woman selling vegan edibles out of a basket. There’s the dude who hocks pizza and beer. The support staff of a thousand sunburning hipsters and tech bros frittering Sunday afternoons away, every weekend.

It’s a spectacle, where we live. It always is.

But we were yearning for the mountains. Homesickness for the regal enormity and unspoiled possibility of Utah national parks started setting in. We logged 16 trips of one kind or another in 2016, while we were residents of that state. We made a routine of outings to the mystical red rock of the south. Memories of the absolute solitude of those places linger in my mind like a phantom appendage.

Fiona was feeling that too. So she picked out King’s Canyon. We’d never been.

# Friday

The length of the drive out is considerable, but beautiful. As we head south, the banal, strip-mall landscape of Silicon Valley gives way to vast fields: orchards, vineyards, tomatoes. All illuminated in a sideways, golden manner, in the waning evening sun. The highway is littered with fruit stands. There’s a lot of traffic, so our car is slow-going. We roll down the windows and take in the sweet smells. The fresh farm air that wafts through the rows of clean-cut plant life.

We pass through small town after small town. Most seemingly outgrowths of the rest stops for highway travelers who can’t hold it any more or truck drivers who need to re-up on chewing tobacco. Towns like Los Banos (no joke), where we stop in for gas. But, the bathrooms at the gas station there leave something to be desired. You’d think the town would take a bit more pride in its name.

We walk through the gas station convenience store to the attached McDonalds and order up a couple of coffees and apple pies. We need a bit of fuel to power through the rest of the drive up to King’s. I just can’t resist the occasional McDonalds apple pie. I recognize that each pie is like 99% corn syrup with artificial apple flavoring and child’s tears, but it’s a special occasion.

The night quickly overtakes Fiona’s Prius. I’m playing Radiolab and drifting in and out of the story. Something about a Venetian gondolier and feminism. We’re up in the canyon a ways. I glance over at Fiona, who’s white-knuckling the driving wheel, wide-eyed. Some asshole is tailing us through the winding and unforgiving turns of the cliff-side road. But they soon turn off.

Then it’s awe and splendor. The headlights begin to illuminate hundreds of massive sequoias. I roll down the window to let the wind howl in. The fresh mountain air is flavored by pine and dirt. It’s cool and the smell evokes memories of other wilderness adventures with Fiona and friends back in Utah.

Around 11:30pm, we turn into the Sunset Campground. The camp host has long been asleep. At the gatehouse, we find our reservation name/number posted on a list. Spot #57\. We drive on. It’s pitch black punctuated by a fire here and there, illuminating groups of tents and campers. It’s just then Fiona and I realize that the entire campground is full and there are more than 150 spots. It’s becoming clear that we’re in for a bit of a crowded experience.

We locate our spot, which is closely adjacent to several other sites. We don our headlamps and get our tent up and the food loaded into the bear box. Then I pull a couple beers out of the cooler and we switch off our lights and drink IPAs in the pitch black at the site’s picnic bench. Fiona and I whisper our thoughts to each other. The beer’s molasses sweetness, the whispers, and the total darkness create an interesting effect, accentuating all of our non-visual senses. The only thing we can see are the stars poking through the treetops above.

# Saturday

At 7am we’re woken by the screams of children. Yells of joy and the wailing of complaint. Loud and close and from every direction. There are young families all around us. Ugh.

Fiona remarks that kids wake up super early, then they become teenagers and sleep forever, then they become adults and wake up super early again.

We amble out of the tent and groggily make a light breakfast of oatmeal, bananas and some of the Ritual coffee that Fiona had the foresight to grind and pack in pre-portioned ziploc bags. It helps ward off the irritation from all the kids.

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/2.JPG)

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/3.JPG)

We GTFO as fast as we can and head into King’s Canyon proper (Sunset sits sort of on the outskirt of the park). Suddenly the forest to the right side of the car drops away, and a vast expanse takes its place. My eye follows the mountain and dips down, down, down into the sheer, enormous valley of King’s Canyon. It’s a magnificent view. And I don’t care how fucken nerdy this sounds: It reminds me of the scene in the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, when Gandalf crests a hill and the vast expanse of Gondor and Minas Tirith stretch out on the screen. The same theme plays in my head.

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/4.jpg)

We stop for a few pictures as we travel down the highway. Here and there snapping the walls of the canyon that soar up into the blue sky above. When we reach the bottom, we discover the river.

California had an unprecedented amount of precipitation this past year, so much that my apartment building flooded one day. Water cascaded down the center stairwell from all of the buildup on the roof. It caused the carpets in the public spaces to mold and the whole place smelled nasty after a few days.

Up in the mountains, all that moisture came in the form of snow, and all of that snow is in the process of quickly melting when Fiona and I are in King’s Canyon. What results is that all of the streams, rivers and waterfalls are SURGING. The river at the bottom of the canyon is a pure white, like the snow it originated from. There’s so goddamn much water that rapids aren’t really rapids any more, they’re more like constant watery explosions. It’s violent and terrible and absolutely riveting. We pull off the road several times to gape at the volume of swift water.

Fiona mentions that two people already died this year by accidentally falling in and being promptly pummeled and torn apart by the raging current.

We follow the bellowing water and hike several trails that jut off from the main road.

We come across Grizzly Falls first. The water is so powerful that it mists up in this great windy cloud that feels incredible to let blow over you. It’s icy and tingly and makes you feel fully in the moment. I’m getting goosebumps again as I write this, just thinking about it.

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/5.jpg)

Zumwalt Meadow is next. Part of the trail loop is flooded and we have to wade through the insanely chilly water covering the section of the trail that is boardwalk. It’s so cold on my legs that it gives me a headache. I can barely concentrate, though the water is only up to my shins. My legs are numb for a good while afterward.

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/15.JPG)

We eat a quick lunch in the parking lot of the meadow, and then make our way to Roads End. This is where we spend the majority of our day. It’s a 4-mile trek up to Mist Falls. But by this point in the day, the air is scorchingly hot.

I get a small degree of heat exhaustion on the way up. Fiona survives well because she dips her tee shirt into the freezing water, letting it evaporate as we hike. But I don’t want to follow suit due to the mosquitoes, which attack all exposed skin they find. I fear that even a moment with my shirt off would offer the little fuckers too much opportunity. We finally arrive at Mist Falls, which, like the other parts of the river is hugely engorged by the Spring melt-off. The plume of mist let off by the crush of water coming off of the falls rises a hundred, maybe two hundred feet into the air. You can feel the mist even a quarter of a mile from the fall itself.

The fog is actually so thick at the bottom side of the falls, that we decide to hike up further and watch it spill over its big drop. When we get there, the scene is startling and terrifying. The water sweeps up very close to the trail. There are signs posted in various places warning that one little slip would instantly take your life. The water is so powerful that it is transfixing. It’s like watching a tornado up close, without being sucked into it.

Fiona and I sit on a rock nearby and drink a tallboy just trying to comprehend what we were seeing.

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/11.jpg)

When the beer is gone and we’ve had our fill, we hike back down to the car. The scorching air replacing the chill from the falls with more heat exhaustion.

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/9.jpg)

We roast carne asada on sticks like barbarians that night. It’s a sort of tradition that Fiona and I developed. It grew out of an incident last year in the Wasatch, when I forgot my stove and we had no ability to cook our steaks.

We sharpen sticks and cook the meat over the flames, the grease dripping and hissing in the fire. We devour it, holding it with our bare hands and tearing the charred pieces of flesh off with our teeth. It’s primal and incredibly satisfying.

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/10.jpg)

I’m dog-tired after our day of nearly getting heat-stroke. My skin is red and raised in places because of mosquito bites. After the carne asada, we drink a bottle of red wine as the fire winds down and then sleep a very deep sleep.

# Sunday

Yelling again. The kids are up at like 6:30am. I try to cover my head with my sleeping bag but it doesn’t help much.

We eventually rise and stiffly begin assembling breakfast and starting to pack.

Around 9:30am, as I’m boiling water for coffee, a man, a girl and a boy, walk up the road, stop across from me and then just stare and loiter.

After a few minutes, the girl, probably 15, walks toward me and asks “hey, when are you leaving? We have this campsite.”

It’s still early and I’m sore and haven’t had my coffee yet. The audacity of this infuriates me.

“Y’all can wait until we’re ready to leave. We have the site booked until midday.” We do.

The girl looks miffed and returns to her family on the other side of the street. They continue to stand there and stare. I continue to prepare coffee.

One thing I hate is when people make me feel unnecessarily rushed.

I raise my voice a bit: “I told you we have this site until noon so you all can get out of here right now!”. They shuffle off.

But then they return 5 minutes later in their minivan, park in a nearby site, get out and continue to watch us, waiting for us to leave.

“Jesus”, I think. Fiona’s irritated too. We eat the rest of our breakfast, annoyed. These fucking camper families. We vow to make our next outdoor trip a backpacking excursion so we avoid all the gomers.

We decide to just hurry up and finish breakfast and pack up the site. I feel like sticking both middle fingers up at the hawking family as we leave, but think better of it.

We jet off to our last destinations: the Grant tree Grove and Hume Lake.

The Grant tree area sets my mood right as soon as we enter. The caffeine is starting to set in and the sequoias reach high into the air in front of us. They’re so massive and peaceful looking. A feeling of zen just falls over me.

An interesting feature of the grove is this centuries old dead sequoia called the “Fallen Monarch”. It lay on its side, resisting decomposition for an inordinately long time. The carcass of this tree was evidently so hardy that it was used as a shelter by travelers and lumberjacks in the 19th century. The interior of the tree feels like a cave and it stretches some 150 feet from end to end.

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/14.jpg)

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/13.jpg)

The Grant tree itself is a behemoth sequoia. It has a giant fire scar on one side, which burned off the sturdy redwood shell on one side, but apparently had no effect on the tree’s will to live and grow even higher.

![](http://localhost:8000/static/images/kings_canyon/12.jpg)

We weave our way around the tourists and back to the car and then take off to see Hume Lake, which is accessible by a very long and particularly windy stretch of road.

Fiona feeds a family of ducks on the shore and we stare across the blue water for a time, watching kayakers paddle around and the fishermen cast their lines. Then we’re back in the car setting a course for home.

We stop in some part of fresno at a super janky and un-air-conditioned taqueria, where we get one of the best carne asada burritos I’ve had in some time. It’s roasting in there, but the cooks and the patrons didn’t seem to mind. Fiona and I are sweating. There’s nowhere to stand exactly and it’s not clear where to pay or order. Eventually someone walks up to us and take our money. Staff rushes about all around around. A sweat-laden man nearly bumps into us with a massive slab of pork crackling. There’s shouting in spanish and soccer playing on a TV in the corner and the occasional sizzling roar of meat being thrown on the hot stove.

Fiona and I devour our burritos back in the car while we crank the AC.

We return to San Francisco by way of the Bay Bridge. Home again on our hill overlooking Dolores and the Mission, my sunburned neck and mosquito bites souvenirs from King’s Canyon.
### Notes from the Rockies
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/notes-from-the-rockies/
Last updated: 2022-05-25T15:58:57.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*gvcB_iB32Xc8zzkxnGFQlQ.jpeg)

### 7/21/2016

The plane takes off and before we know it, we’ve put several thousand feet of air between the fuselage and the ground.

I guess the reason that planes freak me out so much is that I’ve never piloted one and I have no idea how sturdy or flimsy they are or how much margin for error exists. If a column of air hits the plane in just the right way, I wonder, would it just cast us down from the sky?

Descents always scare the shit out of me because they seem like they’re always barely controlled. We list with the thermals rising up from the rye fields. And so I curse rye whiskey, hipster bread and everything rye is used for, because I’m thinking that I really don’t want to die in Calgary, Canada. I mean, that would be so random. If I had to choose, I’d much rather smack into a peak in the Andes, or plummet to my doom into a small island in Micronesia. Something distant and foreign and mysterious.

But we land without incident and the kindly flight attendant who re-seated us lets us know that two big planes landed at approximately the same time as us in Calgary and that it would be in our best interest to hustle to customs and get through before the lines stack up with a couple thousand people.

Fiona and I rush off the plane as fast as possible, but we get stuck behind a disembarking elderly person for five or so minutes which adds to our anxiety. But then we’re off again shooting around masses of people, ducking and weaving and practically sprinting down the mysterious, dimly-lit, back hallways of YYC to get to customs. And we get there ahead of everyone and triumphantly look back at the swarms gathering behind us.

The customs agent glances at us and asks us our business in Canada in an extremely flat tone. Very makes me wonder if he’s asking out of duty, some obscure training, or if he’s genuinely interested. We say we’re off to Banff to go trekking through the wilderness. He hands us back our passports without a word.

We shoot off again and collect our bags from the carousel decorated with bizarre trinkets which are supposed to advertise the Alberta Ballet. "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy," huh? Fiona and raise our eyebrows at one another.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1600/1*rErHrJfhmcDKNgkNj8ZPvQ.png)

We put on our backpacks and head over to the Budget Car Rental place, where we meet a bro-ish looking guy named Scott in line. He asks us if we're headed up to Banff and if we'd take him too if he gave us some cash. We welcomed the opportunity to subsidize our rental car, so we say sure.

We jet off to Banff with Scott in tow. We hit a Tim Hornton’s on the way out of Calgary though and go through what seems to be a ridiculously complex drive-thru ordering process involving many followup questions about sauces and sandwich customizations. The drive to Banff then goes without incident except that Fiona gets a speeding ticket from a hilariously polite, but stern, cop. We try to blame it on a conversion error from mph to kph. It doesn’t work.

Outside of this, we learn a lot about Scott’s bro life. He’s in finance, living in LA and single and 37, though he looks 25, and he‘s been a lot of places. He says ‘Machu Picchu’ in this strange way, like ‘maynu pitchu.’ He tells us that he isn’t in any kind of relationship, so he spends all his time off and all his money traveling the world.

We drop him off with his bro buddies at Two Jacks Campground. And in a remarkable display of gratitude, he flipped us another twenty to put toward the speeding ticket.

At this point, Fiona and I are time-crunched to reach our shuttle to the trailhead before 4pm at the Sunshine Village gondola station (which doesn’t run during the week, hence the shuttle bus). We quickly stop in Banff and grab two cans of bear spray, two cans of isobutane, and two fifths of whiskey and blast out of town again on the Trans-Canada highway up to the Sunshine Village Ski Resort. On the way up to the resort, we see a bunch of male big-horned sheep staring blankly at our car. A bachelor party, it seems.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*QsBvORvW0DJuA6-yy9oO5w.png)

We’re the only passengers on the shuttle bus. The driver lectures us on all the cool sights on the trek out to Mt. Assiniboine. He’s very excited for us and going on in his thick Alberta accent. I pick up about half of what he says over the roar of the engine. I hear ‘ya have aboot a 50–50 chance of seein’ a bear’.

He drops us off at the station at the top of the gondola. We go in and grab ice water from an Australian girl at the bar. It’s sort of awkward because she’s shooting the bar water gun into our Camelbaks and it takes a really long time, so we have to make conversation to get through the six liters.

After this, we head up the hill and roam across the four miles to Howard Douglas campground, stepping around the chirping ground squirrels, which inhabit the ancient glacial plain. The plain rolls green, covered with wildflowers and opal, glacial pools, into the distance until it reaches the mountain ranges, which shoot up in every direction, jagged and bluish.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*_Ys6I4qdD1mNUiBU0_rYVw.png)

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*PUGys70FIJ1Wjzs-UxGyBQ.png)

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*7ief7s2_MX4R3WzahlBi3w.png)

We have a bit of trouble finding the actual campsite, but we meet a man who’s trekking 800 miles across the Great Divide trail. He’s an interesting fellow: solo, a resident of San Diego, a part-time accountant, and clearly not a huge fan of people. He split off from us as soon as we arrived at the campsite. It seems there are many people on this trail, solo, out to figure out something about themselves.

We settle, pitch the tent, and eat our freeze-dried meals by the lakeside, swatting off mosquitoes and gulping whiskey until the sun sets behind the mountain.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1600/1*7C45zmDam1Up6DHOQRK4Jw.png)

### 7/22/2016

We wake up to the buzzing of mosquitoes. It’s the first time that I realize the bugs are going to be a real problem. We do our best to move quickly to prepare breakfast and pack up the tent, but the little fuckers follow in persistent clouds and settle on you to do their vampiric business if you stop moving for any length of time. Even the deet we brought doesn’t seem to deter them much. We have to walk around while munching our freeze-dried food.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*xsvyKC6hUpsrUfgBt5kQYQ.png)

After breakfast, we make our way out again on to the trail toward Assiniboine. The meadows yawn wide and green and rolling off into the distance once more and the ranges of the mountains jut upward like castle ramparts. We pass a mountain called The Citadel. Our pace is very quick and we descend, after crossing Citadel Pass, into the Valley of the Rocks. We’re on edge for a moment due to the fact that many trees are scraped up and de-barked and we think this is because of bear activity. I heard somewhere that bears like to scratch the bark off of trees and then use naked trees to scratch their assholes . When I offer this idea, Fiona laughs and thinks this theory is ridiculous. Either way, we’re on the lookout for bear danger during much of the day. But we never see anything.

Fiona checks her map and says, if we’re feeling up to it, we can push an extra 4.5 miles today to get to Lake Magog, at the foot of Mt. Assiniboine, which makes the whole distance from Howard Douglas about 15 miles. We decide to go for it.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*Kgg3Qd5q8prlC2t9ZkjGqg.png)

By the time we reach Lake Og (which is on the way, 10.9 miles from Howard Douglas) though, we’re sore and tired. My feet start developing bad blisters just below the middle toe on both feet. These haunt me for the rest of the journey. We filter water and eat lunch at Og. I had the beef pho, which is okay. All the meals already start tasting the same, even though they’re supposed to be entirely different flavors. I dump the dregs on the rocks for the flies to feast on. We pack up again and proceed to Magog, passing a set of mysterious caves.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*F6mtqrfuJuVmaxx8053EIA.png)

Luckily, these next 4.5 miles are relatively flat and fast. Still, we’re exhausted by the time we reach the next lake. We go for a beer (two actually) at the backcountry lodge . We're very pleased to discover that the Canadian Provincial Park flies out tourists and supplies by helicopter to this place deep in the backcountry!

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*1kVruGeQprIKzdoyGEBmGw.png)

We sit next to a couple from Calgary who tell us that they’re getting a civil union at the lodge the next day. Apparently, it’s easier to get married in British Columbia than Alberta, less bureaucracy or something. They’re kind of rednecky and talk loudly about guns and make jokes about Justin Trudeau. We politely nod until we depart to our campsite at Magog with a bottle of wine. At this point, we see the mighty Assiniboine rising upward, a jagged cone, covered with glaciers, with a massive, aquamarine lake at its base.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*BXg8qpKLBQVIEd1rQiyWLA.png)

We set up camp and realize that we don’t have a wine opener. I borrow a knife from a fellow camper to peel off the foil and then use the butt of Fiona’s tooth brush to ram the cork inside of the bottle, spraying myself a bit in the process.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*Jwhbkrz1hH0rp8A5OhKtsw.png)

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1600/1*J4PgeeQdDmw9NWhmiDnN6A.png)

During this time, Fiona goes pee in the bushes behind our campsite and then gets back into our tent. She still has her shoes on. She smells something reeking and notices that there’s a clod of human feces attached to her boot. I scream and she tosses her boots out of the tent. We check and ensure there’s no more shit in the tent. Fortunately, there isn’t. The piece of poop remains just outside of the tent for the rest of our stay. Neither of us wants to even touch it with a stick. We’re also just exhausted to all hell.

We drink wine in the tent, make another fucking freeze-dried meal, and then go to sleep in the twilight.

### ****7/23/2016**

We wake slowly. We sleep for 12 hours in total. 9pm to 9am. During the early morning, I briefly woke to hear the voices of some New Zealanders heading out of camp (probably to summit Assiniboine). While that would be a great achievement, I’m not envious in the slightest. When we get out of the tent, we see that the peak is locked in by storm clouds and it’s cold out. Conditions look really harsh up there. As I fetch water from the glacial lake, I take in the view once more. The mountain surging upward, carrying its glaciers.

We make more fucking freeze-dried breakfast (it’s really getting old, almost nauseating, at this point) and then hike up to The Nub. Fiona’s knee is stiff and beginning to really bother her. A remnant of our grueling day before. But we press on and make our ascent.

We summit and spread out the pack we brought on the ground, making coffee and taking photos of the abundant marmot population there. We even see a pair boxing one another. More often, they just sit and look at you or each other, and chirp.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*qjVoYf4fUDc--GY-dFFpLQ.png)

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*AS76zzAg2SO2CroKGri4gw.png)

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*GFhCcwA6gLjXNoEXfalVwA.png)

The view from The Nub is jaw dropping, offering an expansive look at Assiniboine and its surrounding peaks, and the three bright blue glacial lakes beneath.

When we start our descent about an hour later to go back to camp, Fiona’s knee is almost unbearably sore. She has to hobble down in a manner that doesn’t cause her knee to bend. We lunch at Sunburst Lake, At this point, I’m straight up done with freeze-dried meals, but I choke down a Shepherd’s Pie.

Heading back down the trail 4.5 miles back to Lake Og, my blisters ache and squish badly. It’s like there are capri suns attached to the bottom of my feet.

We arrive at the camp and set up our test, filter water, and sip whiskey. We get told off by a condescending, but very polite Canadian mountaineer who’s disconcerted by the fact that we aren’t using the designated cooking area on the other side of camp and that we’re causing an unnecessary bear risk because of it.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*m6puSTuhGo7u9ZJqsyg2rA.png)

So, we go over to the cooking area and strike up conversation with two guys who met in a Ju-Jitsu class and attempted to make Magog from Sunshine Village all in one day (20 miles), but couldn’t make it.

We get in our sleeping bags and I think I hear a bear, but turns out to be the flagging of the tent tarp in the breeze. I think I’m deliriously tired. After my freakout, I enter a dead, black sleep until the sun shines down on our tent and bakes us out.

### 7/24/2016

Even in the morning we’re both imagining eating burgers, slurping down beer, and cooling our feet. We initially planned to just go back to Howard Douglas this day and to finish the last 4 miles to Sunshine the following morning. But I can’t even eat breakfast because I’m so sick of our backpacker food and a little hungover and headache-y. Fiona feels similarly ready to get back and to shower. So we decide to go for the whole 15 miles today.

Everything is great until we arrive at what I dub The Great Bitch-cline: The ascent back up to Citadel Pass. It’s approximately 1500–2000 feet of elevation gain, straight up (because the Canadians don’t seem to believe in switch backs). This ascent is by far the crux of the entire 50 mile trek. We’re forced to stop several times on the way up to catch our breath. But this sucks because the amount of sweat we’re pouring out washes away the deet we’d applied earlier, leaving us susceptible to the mosquitoes, who swarm and stab. But we make it to the top, totally beleaguered and depleted. Gulping water from our Camelbak hoses. I completely bonk on my blood sugar levels just before we reach Citadel mountain with no breakfast and just energy gels to keep me going. I wolf down one of Fiona’s meal bars.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*pyDJyqex9n0-zb1FgFkGIA.png)

The last few miles past Howard Douglas and to Sunshine Village are some of the most harsh and grueling (mostly psychologically as we’re so close to our destination and relaxation and food). With every step I feel pain shoot up my leg. My ankles feel weak and my blisters are pulsing. But by sheer force of will and desire for beer, we press on and finish our return to the Sunshine Village gondola station (the top) two hours before closing, way ahead of schedule. Victory.

I pay a ridiculous sum for two pale ales, but we drink and sweat and revel in our sore accomplishment on the patio for a solid hour. We end up booking a hotel on the main street of Banff— the Mount Royal — whose accommodations are decent, but a tad worn. Still, showering there is one of the most pleasurable experiences of my life.

We eat poutine and burgers at the Elk & Oarsman across the street. Our first proper meal in days is such a treat.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1600/1*rr6rEZqi1TX2Jlv16KHKTQ.png)

### 7/25/2016–7/27/2016

The Ice Field Parkway is an astonishingly long route from glacier to glacier pouring down the sides of the mountains that line the road.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*YJPNp1iWSuLxS_EoMQ0lxA.png)

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*90X8RYAuKWrAWqM7EFgJWQ.png)

We dine at Lake Louise in the Glacier Saloon , which is in the basement of the lakeside Fairmont Hotel. It’s a beautiful, mahogany-adorned place, with a killer view of the water. We're forced to pay the tourist levy, but our dinner is cheap because Fiona finds a mosquito cooked into in our poutine skillet — the little fuckers finally did us one solid. The waiter is so embarrassed that he comps our poutine and our beer.

Anyhow, after dinner we hike up to the observation deck that overlooks Lake Louise. The view is staggering, but we don’t remain there for very long on account of the mosquitoes, again.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*HBNu9ivgcWaBLW-nOJrKfA.png)

We spend our last day in Lake Moraine admiring its unique bright, bright blue nature. We canoe, hike and then eat in the lodge on the side of the lake.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1600/1*b8TmpZmPm_E1PZpijfnDOw.png)

We rent canoes and paddle into the opal expanse.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*ZQZBV99e8MnNcb0deyXpjA.png)

Later, we decide to don bathrobes and walk down to the canoe dock. With an audience of tourists who just poured off a big bus, Fiona and I take a running start and leap into the lake (which never gets above 6 degrees Celsius). It’s a blast of profound cold. We immediately swim back to the dock and pull ourselves up, panting, shivering and laughing hysterically.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*Aq20zyIEGz86zwE7fs9Avw.png)

We dine at the lodge and then take a last round of pictures at the huge pile of rocks next to the lake, right as the sun is setting.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*ajAksl8XDjh_0x5LvUd1PA.png)
### A Guide to Backpacking Death Hollow in Escalante, Utah
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/a-guide-to-backpacking-death-hollow-in-escalante-utah/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T03:57:58.000Z
![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/2000/1*ltApjoV2EWdstRPexxiE_w.png)

I decided to write this quick post to aid future travelers to the gorgeous Death Hollow trail near Boulder, Utah. Though we attempted to follow the Google Maps directions from the AllTrails app, we were led astray and had to backtrack to the Anasazi State Park center in Boulder to buy topographical maps for more specific direction. Beyond that, the trail itself was confusing and we did not know what the camping situation would look like when we got there. Here are some pointers that would have helped us a lot to have in advance.

****Getting there from Salt Lake City.**

Here is a [custom map](https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Salt+Lake+City,+UT/37.8847385,-111.4636446/@37.8820217,-111.4638884,15.2z/data=!4m8!4m7!1m5!1m1!1s0x87523d9488d131ed:0x5b53b7a0484d31ca!2m2!1d-111.8910474!2d40.7607793!1m0?ref=nickrroberts.com) on Google to the Boulder Mail Trail beginning from Salt Lake City.

There is a makeshift airstrip near the trailhead that a little hard to find on conventional maps or when you’re out of cell service range like we were. Here’s trail map that my dad drew over one of the topographical maps we bought:

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/800/1*d--rCUVYb9f-k0e8Z7U8LQ.jpeg)

****You cross Sand Creek to get to Death Hollow Canyon.**

Sand Creek offers the first opportunity to access water on the trail. It’s about two miles in. But do not be confused: This is not Death Hollow canyon. From the trail descriptions we read, it appeared that you merely descend from the parking area at the trailhead into a canyon and then follow the water. This is not the case. You cross the stream in Sand Creek, and then the trail veers away from the water and you hike out onto a plateau between the two canyons.)

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/800/1*LiMThoPEfXEmLCvAHBxVrw.png)

**Hiking away from Sand Creek. The trail gets dry and dusty.*

It’s approximately 6 miles from the trailhead to the overlook of Death Hollow — one of the most gorgeous views of the trek.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1200/1*RtkLAkYAwhru03lOj37j0g.png)

It’s confusing if you try to find Death Hollow on Google Maps, because though you can see the topography of the canyon, it doesn’t appear to have any water running through it, unlike Sand Creek. Death Hollow canyon has plentiful water, ranging from shallow areas to deep pools.

****Go early to get a good spot.**

Especially on holiday weekends like Memorial Day (when we went), the first good patches of sand next to the river fill up quickly with backpackers (it only takes a few because there aren’t many spaces). My advice would be to go as early as possible in the weekend to nab a good piece of of real estate. We ended up having to hike an additional mile, already weary, to find a suitable location (and ours was kind of mediocre as it was in the center of the trail).

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1200/1*437XSrdfkRkhHsiYGhHojw.png)

**First night’s site in the middle of the trail.*

****Dogs are allowed, but be aware of the water situation.**

Our golden retriever, Ricotta, is 8 years old. She’s sturdy, but she has a heavy fur coat, so this late spring hike was pretty warm for her. We constantly had to take breaks to avoid overheating her. I would ****not** advise bringing your dog between June and September. For the first 6–7 miles of the trail, water is sparse, excepting the Sand Creek stream — but the trail doesn’t keep you next to it for more than a quarter of a mile.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1200/1*BctEmz1oyZAHjjPNo6DAhA.png)

****Beware the poison ivy!**

We did not realize before we went that the areas surrounding the stream in Death Hollow Canyon are covered with poison ivy— which looks like this:

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/800/1*-vbQQAeZp7rL868jnhFE5Q.png)

If you get the oils from the leaves on your skin, they can cause very itchy and unpleasant rashes.

One solution is to wear long, breathable hiking pants and a long-sleeved shirt. However, the oils from the poison ivy leaves can linger on your clothing if you brush against it, so be aware of touching your skin after touching the exterior of your clothes. I would also bring a change of clothes to wear while in camp.

Another, solution is to bring water-wading shoes and to walk in the river, which is often what we did.

I hope that taking these tips into account will let future backpackers and hikers enjoy the trail and its awe-inspiring natural beauty more fully.

**Many thanks to Fiona Foster for taking the photos!*
### Life in a Modern-Day Mystery Machine
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/life-in-a-modern-day-mystery-machine/
Last updated: 2022-05-25T16:08:15.000Z
### 

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1200/1*-sVTh4CkGKffHv1kt8zl_A.jpeg)

I walk into my friend Thom’s house just in time to inhale a plume of smoke emanating from burning crab cakes on the stove. Some long-haired stranger is attempting to make dinner. There’s a clamor. Thom’s throwing all the windows open. Ryan, Thom’s housemate, chides the guy: “You’ve got that temperature up as high as it’ll go!”

But things resolve quickly and I introduce myself to the crab cake dude. He tells me his name is Reed. Turns out he’s Ryan’s brother, and he’s staying for the week at Thom’s.

We all spill out into the backyard, sipping canned Uinta summer ales and munching singed snacks. Hammocking, catching up. Reed has a wonderful dog named Sadey, a German short-haired pointer. She’s full of energy, chasing sticks and rooting in the bushes for critters.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/800/1*oV2P7dN4nhpPB8p8AvBBoQ.jpeg)

Eventually, Thom and I have to head out to go to dinner with another visiting friend. As we’re bidding farewells, someone mentions that Reed lives in the van parked in the driveway, a big white Sprinter.

Our Uber is pulling up, but I couldn’t resist asking Reed to let me have a peek.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/800/1*mM9c79PfEH5JNfNkKMgwng.jpeg)

The interior is well-crafted and the usage of the space is deliberate: There’s room for climbing crash pads in a space behind the bookshelf. The space under the bed houses Reed’s construction equipment. There’s a sink and a seven-gallon drinking-water tank. Solar energy powers the lighting and phone charger. The van is obviously built for long, lonesome stretches on the road.

I leave to go to dinner, but I can’t get the van-dwelling lifestyle out of my head. I think it’s because Reed’s setup reminds me that there are romantic alternatives to my nine-to-five:

> “ I have never profited more than $30,000 in a year, I have owned a failed small business, have been a carpenter, a weed sprayer, pulled gigs off Craigslist, and have always worked hard for my money. Through all of this I have found a way to fund transcontinental, multi-national trips centered around climbing in the Patagonian mountains of Argentina and Chile as well as to Nepal and Thailand…  
>  
> …You have 29,280 days from birth to age 80\. You have 1 day until tomorrow. You can’t choose when your book will end, but you can choose what fills the pages.”

— Reed’s blog, titled My Everyman Story.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1200/1*hioR0y2NQj_dk7ymoZqFNw.jpeg)

We meet up the next day and I roll the recorder.

****How much did it cost to get started?**

I got the van itself for $7,400\. It had 156,000 miles on it, and it still probably has 250,000 miles more in it because it’s a turbodiesel. And then I put $3,200 into the build. So, a total of about $10,600.

****Wow. That’s way cheaper than I would’ve thought.**

Because I could do \[the construction\] myself there were a lot of corners I could cut. If I was building something like this for someone else, and they had an unlimited budget, building something like \[what I have\] would be C-grade construction for me. There are a lot of other things I would’ve done, like a different way of doing the wood. If I had the choice \[now\], I would’ve done horizontal, actual siding boards. They’re beautiful. I’d stain them up really nice. I also would’ve gotten a bigger solar generator. Right now, I’m running 400 watts. If I had the 1250 watt version, I could’ve run a fridge. Are you looking to make a business out of these kinds of van conversions?

Yeah so that’s what I’d like to do. I’ve been re-modeling houses for two years and building custom homes. I just recently started an LLC \[for the purpose of van conversions\].

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1200/1*jwewZvUkcBWlHVqxQLIVzg.jpeg)

Some friends of mine own a \[climbing\] gear consignment shop called the Gear Room. They just bought a Sprinter and want to turn it into a mobile storefront. They wanted some advice on how to do their own build and it me think that this sort of thing would be the dream: to convert vans, campers, cargo trucks, stuff like that, into adventure vehicles for people.

****What would you say are the biggest difficulties about van life?**

The cooler. I probably put $30 a month into ice to keep my food cold. The goal is to get a fridge going as soon as possible or just get a Yeti cooler.

****How much would you say that you’re spending each month on food, gas and living costs?**

Between food, gas, ice, and my payments on the van, maybe $330 a month is all. I’ll probably have the van paid off by the end of this year and I’ll be back down to $150 a month.

****So are you able to allocate to savings?**

No. Pretty much everything goes into the next trip. I’m not exactly a plan-for-the-future kind of guy. The joke is that this \[van\] is my “pre-tirement” home. My thought is that I’ll worry about \[savings\] when I’m done traveling. I picture myself in here for at least six more years (I turn 26 in 6 days).

****What’s the best thing about living in a van?**

Literally everything I do is for climbing. This gives me the easiest access to that. Climbing is what I want to do more than anything else.

Skiers always brag about how they have 100-day seasons. I got 254 days of climbing in last year. Living like this lets me save money to go on trips. Outside of my dog, I have no responsibilities (utilities, rent etc.) to consider when I want to leave the country or be away.

It’s freedom.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/800/1*9-HMUJyJa6giFlTWJacVmQ.jpeg)

****What do you do about pooping?**

Well, for example, when I was in Fort Collins, I was staying at a rest area and they had toilets. Also, when you’re building houses or remodeling, those people tend to have bathrooms you can use.

I try to plan to stay in a location for two months at a time. So I’ll buy a \[climbing\] gym membership and shower there. A lot of climbing gyms let van dwellers park in their lots. The one in Fort Collins opened at 6:00am, so I could shower and use the bathrooms there.

****Isn’t this a pretty lonely existence?**

A little bit at first, but it’s super normal now. I’ve also got Sadey.

In Colorado these past two months, I was entirely alone every week. I worked alone, did my remodels alone, went to bed alone at the rest area every night, but it’s totally normal for me.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/1200/1*mb7HiENdYhzy5tUR7ePWjQ.jpeg)

****What advice would you give to someone looking to plan for this van lifestyle right now?**

It depends on your job, and how often you want to move. Structure your van life around what you want to do: see a new city, climb, surf, etc.

If you do it in a way that’s comfortable to you, you’ll be fine. If you feel like you’re roughing it, it’s not going to be fun for very long.

On the whole, it’s a hard trigger to pull \[to leave a 9 to 5 lifestyle in a single city\], but it’s easy to live once you do.

![](https://cdn-images-2.medium.com/max/800/1*f3o0tIaZcMbe0w1jMLHL6w.jpeg)

**Many thanks to Fiona Foster for shooting the photos!*

**Find Reed Rombough at his website, [myeverymanstory.com](https://myeverymanstory.com/?ref=nickrroberts.com), and his Instagram account [@reedrombo](https://www.instagram.com/reedrombo/?ref=nickrroberts.com).*
### Lubbock
URL: https://nickrroberts.com/lubbock/
Last updated: 2022-05-25T19:23:33.000Z
I’m reading Kerouac as the plane accelerates to liftoff velocity. And I can’t help but think that the wild pace of the book will have some kind of effect on the plane and it’ll come crashing back down into the runway.

I get all kinds of paranoid when we fly. I have to recite little mantras to myself when the turbulence buffets the fuselage about how, as long as the engines are on and the power is going, the pilots still have control and that we’ll be fine. But 30,000 feet up in the air, even with mantras, the absurdity of flying makes itself fully known to me. There is just space and nothingness beneath us.

But we arrive into Vegas without incident and sip mimosas in this place called the Jose Cuervo Tequileria, where we’ve gone during many other commutes to Lubbock to tear into big quesadillas. 

The McCarran airport is always packed to the gills. A mix of the busy people making connections, the smug Vegas winners, and the dejected losers. The people trying to make at least a little of it back at the slot machines parked in the middle of the hall. The oxygen bars. The people carrying alcoholic drinks around the gates, luxuriating in the sinful freedom. The little evil things they can’t do back home.

As we fly out of Vegas again I stare down at the Strip, which grins lasciviously back at me. What a bizarre place, I think, as we jet off over Lake Mead. It's out here in the middle of the desert, sucking up what little water there is, blasting energy from a billion lightbulbs into the ether. It’s the energy of millions of people squeezing their gambling money into machines designed to defeat them.

I go through the same set of anxieties about flying as we continue to Lubbock. We land just fine and make our way out to baggage claim. Normally, we are greeted here by a family member, who flings their arms around each of us in turn after we clear the security checkpoint. But this year no one awaits us, so we collect our baggage and make our way out to the curb, where we meet a driver. It's a nice car and has one of those analog wrist-watch looking clocks in the center of the console. Looks fancy.

It’s foreign to me to go from the airport back home to Grandma and Grandpa’s in such an impersonal, businesslike manner. At this point, normally, we would be talking about life, and how G&G are doing with the family member designated to pick us up. Instead, we talk about the snow back in Utah and exchange pleasantries to make the ride less awkward and silent.

This year, the different units of our family decided to stagger their visits to G&G, who are getting quite old, in a non-overlapping fashion, so that they would have family members around for nearly a month. It's a nice idea, but the house feels so empty when we get back — no cousins, aunts or uncles. The place is usually so crowded that I’m used to sleeping on a makeshift bed made from couch cushions in the living room downstairs, while the eerie ‘Elf on a Shelf’ watches me snooze. Now, I actually have a bed to sleep in. It’s very disconcerting to have this luxury. It’s one of those undeserved pleasures that actually makes you feel guilty.

Grandma and Grandpa are in good shape when we see them. Joyous and giddy. We all talk and drink wine and eat copiously, then go to sleep. The next night, we celebrate my Grandma’s birthday and I make the number “22” in her cake with candles and we all smile because she just turned 86.

---

I like the way the light falls on the Texas panhandle. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t have any mountains to obstruct the more extreme angles. It goes in this bright and beautiful sideways manner in the mornings and evenings.

Each morning I wake up at around 7:00am and steal a view across the golf course that runs behind the house, drinking in the picture and savoring it. It's the same view I've seen for my whole life; for countless visits to see my grandparents. Given their age, I'm trying to slow things down and make sure I appreciate every one of these moments.

My uncle has this friend named Kevin that he met while messing around with bulletin boards back in the early, early days of the internet, when computer screens were still black and green. Kevin ran a bulletin and there were a handful of kids across Lubbock who would write messages to the others. My uncle was among them and, one day, rode his bike over to meet up with Kevin on the other side of the Lakeridge neighborhood, supposedly skidding and crashing on the street while Kevin and another kid looked on. I can't tell how much of this is a friendship-founding myth. 

I met Kevin a few years ago after being introduced by my uncle and so we started hanging out when I’d fly into town. Kev lives out of town as well, but always seems to be in Lubbock around the same time as us, visiting his folks.

Kevin and I meet up go for a walk around the downtown of Lubbock and across the Texas Tech campus, where Kev went to school. We muse about video games, virtual reality, drugs, art and creativity, and nostalgia.

Kev mentions how he doesn’t really get a lot out of being creative and making things these days. He says how he used to put hundreds of hours into making songs and music, but he can’t really remember why. He says that, most of the time, music was just a huge pain in the ass and he doesn’t remember necessarily liking the process. It felt mostly like something he *should* do, like something other people wanted him to. 

He says that, these days, it’s easier than ever to entertain yourself with video games and books and shit other people create, so why would you go about trying to make your own art when you don’t even enjoy it?

This gets me questioning whether I actually enjoy, truly, the act of creation. And I figure that sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. I think that the thing I enjoy about creativity is what I’ve heard referred to as ‘flow state’, where you get into a rhythm when you’re creating something and you just lose yourself in it for hours. Like what’s happening here as I write these words. I’m lost in the slow pace of thinking and typing.

We’re walking through the old downtown of Lubbock where the buildings are tall and there looks like there should be some hustle and bustle. But it’s depressing precisely because there is none of that. There are no people out, except for a few homeless men, and the shops are all abandoned and their windows broken. It looks like some post-apocalyptic scene.

Kev explains that the downtown hit its heyday in fifties. Real estate developers came in and suburbanized the city and the whole population moved southwest, out of main city area. I heard my uncle once describe Lubbock as a sand dune that slowly moves toward Mexico. People are just forgetting about the old main drag.

Sometime in the ’70s, I think, a massive tornado tore through the downtown of Lubbock. It smacked into the NTS Communications building, which is probably thirty stories tall. The building didn’t fall over, but I guess the force of the wind was enough to make the whole building shift on its foundations. If you walk right up to it and stare directly up at the corner of the building, you can see the twisting as it rises upward, which I find totally fascinating.

Kevin and I are right at the corner of the NTS, looking up at the twist, when a Chevy Suburban pulls up next to us on the street. It’s a concerned-looking family. They yell out that they’re out serving cookies ‘to the community’ in the spirit of the holidays. It take us a moment to realize that they think we’re homeless. Probably because only homeless people hang out downtown these days and we do look a bit shabby, I guess.

We politely decline and continue on down the street. We laugh about it, but I'm glad there are people like that in the world though, handing out cookies to folks with no place to go for holidays. We arc past the jail and bail bond district, past the art revival area of Lubbock, past the Post Office and full circle back to our car and head home. We’re out for three hours.

The next day, my family visits Llano Estacado Winery, which my great uncle, Art, helped found. Art was a successful entrepreneur in Lubbock and, with my grandparents, brought the McDonald’s franchise to town in the mid ’70s.

We tour around the place, which was recently remodeled. It’s totally different than I remember, and I was there last year for my uncle’s wedding ceremony. I’m not entirely sure if I like the new linoleum floors as we walk around the place. It seems a little too...cutesy, like it’s right out of a Martha Stewart catalog. The back offices are adorned with lots of those mass-produced wood panels with painted cliché phrases on them like ‘Home is where the Heart is’, or ‘Where’s the Wine?'

We buy a couple of cases and head out on the road, driving through immense cotton fields all the way back. The sky is huge.

In the evening, Kevin and I meet up again and walk from Lakeridge over to this frozen custard stand that we like close by. It’s the middle of winter and pretty chilly in Lubbock, but we don’t care. We check out a rundown house on the edge of the neighborhood, which used to be inhabited by another friend of my uncle’s. It’s a massive, deserted structure and the wildlife is taking it over again.

On the way back we talk about nostalgia. Kevin says that romanticizing the past and lamenting change is what makes you really sad. Everything we own is actually a rental if you think about it. We’re only ever the temporary possessors of our property. In the end, after we die, it all just moves on to other people or just breaks and becomes trash. If your goal is to be happy in life, you have to, at some level, accept that nothing stays the same and just go with the flow. But living your life trying to avoid, ignore, or prevent change is a good way to get depressed.

I bid farewell to Kev in front of my grandparents house and we part ways in the dark.

The next day, my family says goodbye to G&G and we head out in another car with an analog wrist-watch clock in the center of the console. We enter the tiny airport and pass through the security checkpoint that the TSA squeezed into place after September 11, 2001\. I'm hit by a memory of my grandfather standing in the doorway of the gate, back when you could go that far without a boarding pass, smiling and waving goodbye as my sister and I trot after our mom. 

I blink again and I'm back in the present. Our flight is boarding. I scan my ticket and follow the flow of fellow travelers down the ramp.