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The title is just a there for you to consider. I think it’s true. I’m not going to back up that thought in this email though. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll explain this more.

I’ve been spending my free mental time this last week trying to decide what I think about the human-like consciousness artificial intelligence character archetype. I listened to Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost from the this week and was offended by how far from any guessable future reality his AI character is. I kept asking myself: “Is this even science fiction?” How do you feel about books, movies or TV shows centered on an AI which is inexplicably able to have human-like consciousness? Haven’t read science fiction in a while? Here are a 3 books I’d recommend with and without AIs and one I think does AI well but don’t really like.

What is required for successful leisure is the accumulation of supplies the leisurist feels comfortable working.

At least that is my working assumption. I think this is why, when we all got trapped at home, we started baking. Who doesn’t feel somewhat comfortable with food? I think it’s why bicycle repairers invented the airplane. And I suspect the lack of accumulation of supplies we feel comfortable working with is why it’s easier for us to turn to Facebook and Netflix to pass our nights. Learning a new skill is hard. Buying supplies required to learn a new skill often feels like a waste. Why don’t we watch Hamilton on Disney+ again?

Anyway, if someone out there has a good book or podcast on the Wright brothers please send it my way. I’m contemplating having my leisure be reading about them. From my high school level knowledge, it seems crazy they were the ones who invented the airplane. I’d like to know more. That said, I’m not sure I’m ready to start reading history books. I definitely haven’t accumulated a bunch of history books supplies…

Anyway, the search goes on.

This is a coffee cup.

I am slowly coming to the realization that to make a video game that is enjoyable to play I am going to have to spend a lot of time drawing. And I mean a lot of time. To be immersive the art needs to come alive with tiny animations. It needs to grow and die, open and close, walk and run. I’ve been hoping I could find enough free or cheep art on the internet to fill get something working. But the game’s needs are specific, and while I may be able to fill in the broad strokes with bits grabbed here and there, much will need to be created pixel by pixel. This realization leaves me with 3 options.

1. Start learning to draw pixel art
2. Find a partner to work on the game with

My goal for this week was to have the first version of the base you manage ready to share before I sent this newsletter. Sadly that will not be happening. I’m pretty close though, so here is an overview of what I’ve been doing.

If you’ve been asking what in the world this game is, you are not the only one. I’m going to try and give a clear answer. But first, here are some fast answers to other frequently asked questions.

I have a bulleted list of todos titled “Mars Game” in my journal. The bullets are broken up into sections with each section ending with a title for this newsletter. This week I was hoping to get these tasks done.

In my first email I said that “I’d like to write something and then move on” before promising to write 12 emails about croissants. When the 12 croissant emails were sent, I wanted to keep writing and somehow suggested I’d write about pinhole photography but I forgot to say how long I was going to keep at it. 12 batches of croissants was hard, but an undefined number of photo sessions is harder. So hard in fact, that I’ve failed to write the last two weeks and I even took pictures! So hard in fact that after 6 and a half sessions, I’m done. I’m happy to have tried it. It was interesting. It’s not my cup of tea. Maybe its your cup of tea? If so, I’d love to see some photos. The photos are really cool, the process is just not for me.

This experiment with photography as leisure is proving to be less about learning a new skill than about documenting random items around my house. First it was my Bonsai tree, then a whiskey glass. Last week was an old kids camping chair and this week it’s Mother’s Day flowers. There have been a couple of cool photos, things I’m happy to have made. But I’m not pushing past the abstractions created by modern smartphone photography to get at some missed essence as I hoped to when I pivoted to photography from baking. I’m just sticking a box out in the sunlight and praying the chemical-reactions-that-be grant me a photo that is intelligible. I think it’s time for a change.

This coming week I’m going to build a new camera. This one will have at least two lens. I’m hoping for nine. We will see what happens. The goal of the next camera won’t be some lofty pursuit of understanding photography. I’m just want to make something with a lot of lens and see what comes out the other end. The point is madness. If it fails, so be it.

In June 2018 Caitlin and I both needed to travel for work and so Emery’s Godparents watched him for a few days. To make this work we bought a small blue toddlers camping chair so he’d have a place to sit at their house without needing to haul our highchair across town. It worked and he loved it. Two years later now, Emery and Mara take turns sitting in it while having outdoor snacks in our backyard. Seeing its sun-worn canvas glowing in yesterday’s wonderful sun shine, I decided to try taking pictures of it. As you can see, resulted varied.

On Saturday, when the sun finally broke from behind the clouds, I almost went outside to take photos. But the day had been full of garden work and the kids were letting me read so I continued to read Station Eleven, thinking, the sun will be out tomorrow. Today, it rained all day. I never saw the sun. And so, this weeks photos were all taken at night. Each one is a photo from above of I got recently with a mold of Mt. Washington in the bottom.

This week has been more about cutting cardboard than about taking photos. The bar I set for myself, a new camera that could take light test photos, was too high. It turns out cutting, taping and gluing cardboard takes time! In the end I created an 8in box with a removable lid which improved my ability to focus the camera but did not enable me to take “light test” photos.

(This email experienced a delivery failure last night, here is to hoping it works this time…)

Thanks to The English Game I am running way behind on writing this. So let’s get right to the pictures.

Last weekend I said I was done writing about croissants. And I am. Really. But… This Wednesday and Saturday I baked croissants and I did it so much differently and it worked. So, I thought I’d tell you about that quickly and then intro pinhole photography.

The sun has broken through the clouds and what was another dreary day under quarantine has turned into a wonderful late afternoon of soaking in the sun and reflecting the past 12 weeks of learning to bake croissants. Further down I’ll step through these reflections in detail, but first, let’s talk about what comes next.

I am sitting at what, I guess, is my quarantine desk. Such a weird idea, quarantine. Cate and I just took an old table from our basement and installed it into our bedroom. If we’re going to be “locked” inside for the next two weeks, we might as well have a place to sit. Pandemic aside, hopefully it will help my posture while I write the last few issues of this newsletter.

In other news, this week I baked sourdough croissants and it worked, though in different ways than last weeks batch. I’ll let the expert explain.

Ahhh. Look at that wonderful croissant. Oh, and here is another.

I am a person who tries to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. I fail. Sometimes in big ways. Often in small ways. And knowing I’d fail is, in many ways, the reason I picked Christianity out of all the frameworks for living a good life. I thought, “if there is a god who is good, then that god must accept that I will fail to be good” and of the handful of worldviews I examined Christianity was the one that seemed to fit that belief the best. So I decided some fourteen years ago that I’d let the Bible define who God is to me.

Now, this isn’t a defense of Christianity. It’s a newsletter about the first 12 times I will make croissants, so why in the world am I talking about how I came to accept being a Christian? Well, today I am going to write about how I came to make croissants and to do so I’ll need to type “God” and “Faith” a few times. If you aren’t a person of faith or if you left your childhood faith because people used words like “God” and “Faith” to do harm or excuse themselves from harm they’ve done, I’ll be trying not to do that. Feel free to let me know if I have by replying to this email. Only I’ll get it and since I can’t see your body language, your reply is the only way I’ll know if I’ve caused harm. But really, I’m going to be writing about why I decided to make croissants, so, all of this is hopefully not needed.

Before a croissant is baked, twenty-five percent of its mass is butter. And yet, I haven’t talked about butter for more than a few asides in this newsletter yet! What am I even doing? Well, I hope to redeem myself this week by diving deep into what makes butters different and how this difference effects a croissant. But first, the run down for batch 7.

This week was different. On Monday night I had a “spare” 30 minutes before putting Emery to bed and decided that the little dude and I could whip up a small batch of croissant dough to test out the red wheat flour that vexed me in . The version of this email that I drafted in the back of my head while rolling the dough into a block, had two bakes. The throw away testing bake I was making at the time and a real bake I’d make later in the week. But then I got the flu, and what was supposed to be my throw away bake turned into the only bake. And wow, does it show.

I’m starting to write this week’s newsletter while the croissants are still unfinished. Somehow the week got away from me and so the 24hour+ process of making croissants did not start mid-afternoon yesterday! Fear not, they will be done in time for me to include Caitlin’s expert review.

As I wait for the dough to rest between the second and third turn I thought I’d take sometime to talk about my plans for baking this week and what comes next for this newsletter, but first, an excerpt from a conversation between Emery and Caitlin while I worked on the first turn.

It’s 11:38 on Tuesday night and I am writing this with buttery flakes all over my fingers and shirt. What a wonderful life! Being late, I’m eating them alone. Let’s pretend I only going to eat this one.

It’s after the kids have been put to bed. In a few hours this email needs to be sent and I’m just getting started now. I blame a trip to the library and this excellent book. Ironically, I didn’t procrastinate on making the croissants at all. They were done before west coast readers were even out of bed on Monday morning.

While my last email pointed out the failures of the first batch, I was feeling pretty good about my innate skill to make croissants. People liked them. They mostly looked like croissants. I assumed I knew what to improve in the second batch. But those technical improvements were not enough, I also needed MORE croissants. And, I needed to try a new butter because I felt like I was skipping out on the key ingredient. And then, when I realized I could get local flour, I just had to use it. If I had stepped back and counted the changes I was making, I’d like to think I would have stopped, but it wasn’t until I had fully worked the dry flour into the wet ingredients and the ball was still very wet that I realized how far from the original recipe I had diverged. Pride comes before the fall, and the enthusiasm blinds us all.

: 3 out of 10 : “They tasted like…bread? Not super buttery, not enough salt and not a lot of air. Grateful for fresh bakes anyways. :)”

Somehow, in the process of planning for this first batch of croissants, I came to the conclusion that the right time to eat homemade croissants was in those precious moments spent waiting for my first cup of coffee to cool to its ideal temperature. And, since clearly one needs to eat a croissant while the smell of it baking is still in the air, I found myself waking up at 3:45am on Thursday morning to roll out, cut, shape and set my first batch of croissants to proof so that I could have them in the oven by 6:30 and out by 7. The work paid off, even if they were much more like crescent rolls than croissants. Crescent rolls are a consolation prize, it turns out. Though, next week, I really hope I pull out croissants! Below is how I came to make these wonderful little failures. But first, context!

Last year I read a newsletter by the author Robin Sloan. It was about nothing really. His thoughts and discoveries correlated each week and sent out to people who wanted to follow along. But now he’s stopped writing it. The project is over. The goal complete. He wrote 48 nearly weekly newsletters and moved on. I like this idea. I’d like to write something and then move on. Though I’m not sure I could last a year. My life works more in quarters than in years. So, let’s assume this lasts the first quarter or 2020, 13 Sundays. This is Sunday number one.