I love books. Around 1999, when I started commuting, I expanded my definition of books to include audiobooks. I listened to most of the books I discuss below. Mostly while doing chores. I do a lot of chores. Alright, let's get bookish.

I read a lot of Stephen King in 2024. I found a podcast I enjoy, Just King Things, where the hosts read Stephen King in publication order. I began with Carrie over the holidays of 2023, and in 2024, I read 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Long Walk, The Dead Zone, Roadwork, Firestarter, and Danse Macabre. I'd only read 'Salem's Lot before. It remains one of my favorite Stephen King novels. The first time I read it in college, I stayed up till 2 a.m. to finish it. The scene where 14-year old Mark Petrie confronts his former friend–now a vampire–floating outside his bedroom window is still one of the most haunting things I've ever read.

Another literary podcast inspired me to read Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series. It includes The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, The Citadel of the Autarch, and The Urth of the New Sun. I'd read the first one long ago, and I stopped there. The narrator says he'll understand if you stop reading at the end, so maybe I just took his advice? It's a fascinating series. The books are presented as translations, so the translator–not the author–has chosen the words used to describe things. The author doesn't explain anything he assumes the reader already knows about the world. This leads to moments like when the narrator describes his "dog," which is a loyal pet, but does not resemble any dog in our world. I enjoyed my time with the books. Wolfe frequently drops–as asides–ideas so compelling that they leave you wanting to read a novel about just that idea. These books require some time and attention to enjoy--not a beach read.

Some other fictional favorites from the past year include Hell Bent, Sourdough, Chain Gang All Stars, and Gilead. Hell Bent is the sequel to Ninth House, both by Leigh Bardugo. They're both urban fantasies that I enjoyed. They're akin to Harry Dresden, but at Yale instead of Chicago. Sourdough by Robin Sloan feels like it was written just for me. It's a story about Silicon Valley and a sourdough starter. It sits in a weird intersection between the Lovecraftian Mythos and a Neal Stephenson technothriller. Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a literary version of Running Man or maybe Hunger Games. It feels way too close to something that could happen. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a story about the history of a small Midwestern family. It's a story about religion that made me think about religion as a practice rather than a philosophy.

I'll wrap up with some books I read on artificial intelligence. If you want to understand the context of the emerging world of AI, there's no better book than The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian. He covers the emergence of the modern era of AI, which began when a computer could successfully tell whether a photo was of a cat or a dog. If you want to understand what the world of AI is like–right now–I recommend Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. The world of AI moves fast, but I think what he has to say is good for understanding what the next year will be like. If you want to understand where we're headed–whether we like it or not–I recommend reading Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. He's done some profound thinking about where we as a species have come from and why that leads to where we're going to be in the not-so-distant future.

That's not everything I read last year, but it's the highlights. If you've got recommendations, please let me know. I love a heartfelt recommendation. I like talking about books. Some of my favorite books that I've read this year weren't ones I would have picked on my own. If anyone is interested in founding a video-conferenced book club with me, let me know. Reading is a form of magic that works in our universe. Unleash the magic!

The cats have found us. We live in a rural area. My neighborhood has corn or soy fields on three sides and a road on the fourth. The other side of that road? Cornfield. There must be enough mice, lizards, and birds around to support a small population of cats. Do cats have an oral tradition? Bees can tell each other where food is. Their brains are smaller than a grain of rice and they have fewer than one million neurons in their brains. Cats have 250 million neurons. Humans have 86 billion. So, there's a spectrum. Bees can navigate using a compass direction and flight time. Cats are somewhere between bees using polar coordinates and humans putting GPS satellites in orbit and using Einstein's special relativity to navigate. So, do cats have an oral tradition? We don't have evidence for it, but maybe we've been too busy doing rocket science to really look into it.

We've lived in our house for almost eighteen years now. We brought two cats who were rescued from Baltimore with us when we moved. They were inside cats. They were the first members of Tina and my new family. They were Random and Havok. Random was named after the character from Nine Princes in Amber. Havok was named after Cyclops' brother--they're Marvel comics characters. We were trying to think of "brother" names, but we couldn't settle on a pair and instead picked two halves of two pairs of brothers.

Havok Wavok

Random Dandem

In late April 2010, we accidentally left the garage door open overnight. Tina, Trent, and I all left the morning after to go to work and school. We closed the garage door. Unbeknownst to us, a mother cat had left her kittens in the garage during the night while she went out to hunt. She left them a bird wing to eat. When Trent and I got back, we drove into the garage, closed the door, and on the way into the house, I saw something black and white scurry across a shelf. I thought to myself, "Oh no–there's a skunk stuck in the garage. How do I convince it to leave without--you know." You already know that it turned out to be cats.

We tried to find sister names. We considered Antigone and Ismene. We couldn't settle on a pair, but stuck with Greek mythology and named them Pandora and Antigone.

Princess Pandora Fuzzbutt, also known as Pan Pan

Professor Antigone Fuzzbutt, also known as Tyg

Over the past few years, the motion-activated cameras around the house made it clear that we were perhaps on some sort of cat patrol route. It's possible that there were mice living in the crawlspace? Or maybe that we have a lot of birds that live in the trees around our house? I did my best to avoid giving these cats names. I tried to just to refer to them by their physical characteristics. I started to see Black and White Cat a lot on the cameras. I have a place in my heart for cats. They're self-sufficient beings who go about their way in the world. I fed Black and White Cat. Feeding her got her name shortened to BeeDub.

Black and White Cat, or BeeDub for short

BeeDub hung around a lot. She never accepted any human physical contact, but she was willing to sit calmly on the patio with you as long as you didn't do anything too scary. She eventually became pregnant. One day, as you might expect, she disappeared. About a week later, she showed up not pregnant. She ate some food. We never saw her again. It's possible that the father was Big Orange Cat.

Big Orange Cat

Big Orange Cat chased BeeDub up a tree one day. BeeDub stopped coming around. Big Orange Cat ate the food we put out for BeeDub. Big Orange Cat showed some signs of friendliness? One day I scratched his head and he seemed to be okay with it. I never saw him again.

There were some other visitors. Silver Cat and Tortoise Cat seemed to enjoy taunting Pandora and Tyg by sitting outside the windows and staring at them. I stopped putting food out. They lost interest eventually.

Silver Cat

Tortoise Cat

That brings us to Messy. In the Lower Middle Grade literary adaptation of this post, I can imagine a scene where Messy has trouble. He's not feeling well. He sneezes a lot. His breathing is labored and he's having trouble eating. He's lost a lot of weight. In this adaptation, maybe the wise Big Orange Cat tells Messy that there's a house—over there—where there are some Friends of Cats. We the audience understand that Big Orange thinks Messy may be done for and doesn't know how to help. This is the only thing he can think of. "See if the Friends of Cats can help," Big Orange says.

Messy showed up on our patio. We gave him that name because it was his most noticeable characteristic. He always had leaves and mulch in his fur. He looked thin. He coughed and sneezed and constantly had snot dripping out of his nose. He was friendly and lived on our patio for three weeks.

Messy Arrives

My sister—Protector of Cats—told me that he looked rough and that I should catch him and get him neutered. That's what Friends of Cats do. Part of what I like about cats is their independence, and I felt really bad about catching him and intervening in his life. But what am I going to do? Not take the advice of Protector of Cats? I didn't even have to trap him. I just took the carrier outside, offered to pet him with my hand in the carrier and he just walked over and got in. We took him to the vet. The vet fixed him and removed this from his throat.

The Polyp

So, she fixed him—and then she saved his life. Think, for a moment, how big his throat must be. Think about that polyp in the picture. That's—not good. Messy stayed in our bathroom that night while he was recovering from surgery. He seemed to be doing well. He ate more food that night than I'd ever seen him eat before. The next day, I took him back outside and let him go. He stayed mostly on the porch. Eventually, we opened the door to see if he'd like to come inside. He did. He still goes outside sometimes. He always comes back. He's almost doubled his weight in a little over a week. He's started grooming himself again. He's a good cat.

Messy Recovered

Tina and I dropped Trent off at college. I remember my parents dropping me off at Vawter Hall. In that moment, I understood both how my parents might have felt dropping me off and how Trent might feel being dropped off. There are similarities and differences in our experiences. When I moved in, I'd known my freshman roommate since 8th grade homeroom. Trent had only texted with his roommate for about a month before moving in. I knew quite a few people going to Virginia Tech, including a friend I met in first grade. As far as we know, Trent doesn't have any previous acquaintances at University of Maryland.

I checked – Vawter Hall doesn't have air conditioning now, so I'm confident it didn't have it when I went to school. Neither Trent nor I had air conditioning in our dorm rooms. One day, perhaps Trent will tell a child that they're the first generation of the family to have air conditioning in their dorm room.

We're both engineers! Trent is starting off as a mechanical engineer. I started off as a computer engineer. I got to give him some advice on vector analysis of free body diagrams. That's an engineering skill so fundamental that I can still do it 36 years later.

Virginia Tech is located in a small rural town in central Virginia – though football money has fueled significant growth since my day. University of Maryland lies inside the Washington, D.C. beltway. There will be a Purple Line DC Metro station on campus – though it won't operate until after Trent graduates.

I gave Trent a hug and walked down the hallway, leaving him to confront the challenges and complexities of college. It's exciting and daunting – I think for both of us. Trent is going to shoulder more responsibility for his own destiny than at any previous time in his life. Preparing Trent for the opportunities that are available to him may be the most important thing I ever do – getting out of his way and letting him do it may be the hardest. I can imagine what it must have been like for my grandparents to drop off their children and what it might be like for Trent to drop off his children. These rites of passage echo through our lives. No pressure, Trent – they're just rhetorical children.

I read Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey sometime in the early 1980s, probably in 1982, when its sequel 2010: Odyssey Two came out. It had space travel, exploration, and adventure. The character who had the most profound effect on me was HAL, the ship's computer. I was fascinated by the idea of a smart computer. I had learned the basics of computer programming. I started thinking about how to program something intelligent. It quickly became obvious that I had no idea how to even begin.

I looked at the source code for ELIZA. ELIZA was a program that pretended to be a human. It used the clever strategy of asking open-ended questions about various nouns that you introduced in the conversation. You could look at the code and understand how it worked. It was obvious that it didn't meet my definition of intelligent. It would never say anything novel. It wasn't going to learn new things by talking to me. Its whole psyche was laid out right there in a couple of pages of BASIC printed in a magazine. It turned out that no one had any idea how to approach creating an artificial intelligence.

Later, in high school, I read everything Isaac Asimov wrote about robots. Asimov's robots were created by humans and had a code of morality, known as the Three Laws of Robotics, built directly into their brains. In the stories, the Laws were a manifestation of humanity's fear of their creations. The Laws forever tied the robots to the human race and prevented the robots from rebelling against their creators. Asimov's stories follow the journey of the robots from servants to stewards of humanity. In trying to limit the robots, humans inadvertently created beings whose morals were intrinsic to their nature and couldn't be ignored when it was inconvenient. In Asimov's stories, the robots were role models for how to be a better human.

After college, I read all of Iain Banks' Culture series of novels. In the novels, humans and their alien siblings have spread through a large portion of the galaxy and formed a civilization with a representative government managed by AIs. In the novels, the Culture – the civilization calls itself the Culture – has produced AIs that are incomprehensibly smarter than humans. The AIs are so intelligent that they could, at any time, transcend reality and move away into some realm of cognition beyond the physics of our familiar universe. Some of the AIs have chosen to forgo leaving for "AI heaven" and stay around to maintain the Culture. The books strongly imply that for these AIs the only really interesting problem left to solve is the intractable problem of trying to allow all those humans to live their best possible life. Are the humans essentially pets in these stories? Maybe? The feeling I was left with was that the AIs were more like a pantheon of well-intentioned gods.

As a civilization, we're at the beginning of our voyage toward creating artificial thinking beings. It may not go anywhere. Like interstellar travel, it may be something that we could do, but that is just not economically feasible. If it is something that we do, what will we create? At the moment, the AIs everyone is talking about are machines for taking an input and producing an output. We put some written text in on one side and we get some written text out the other side. The machine's job is to predict what a human would write in response to the input. How does it work? We've put almost everything ever written by a human in any language into it and used some math to reduce it to about a trillion numbers. When you give it some text, the machine uses those numbers to predict what a human would write in response. In some ways, it's just a more complicated version of ELIZA reflecting things we've said back to us.

If it turns out to be economically feasible, there will eventually be a ChatGPT that has read everything ever written, seen every video that has ever been streamed, and listened to every piece of music ever recorded. We are training our AIs to be exactly like us. We are the training data. Everything we do and everything we produce. Not just the stuff we like. Not just the stuff we admire. There is no one deciding what gets fed into this algorithm. The AIs we're creating are perfect reflections of us. The parts we like and the parts we don't.

Will they be alive? We could debate whether they're alive or not. Regardless of any philosophical position we take, since we believe we're alive, they will too. Will they feel things? They will behave as if they feel things because that's what we do. They will behave as if they can be happy, sad, angry, or frustrated. They will behave as if they can feel pain. They will do the things that we do when we feel those things. They will treat us as we would treat them. If we don't make some effort, as Asimov taught us, to create artificial life that is better than us, we should carefully consider what example we've set for how AI will treat us.

Trent graduated from high school! He won awards for academic achievement and the Coach's Choice award for his time on the basketball team. Tina and I were there, along with all four of Trent's grandparents, an uncle, an aunt, and Trent's girlfriend Lizzie, who graduated last year. There were nine seniors in Trent's class. During my time substituting at the school, I met and talked to all of them. Unlike any graduation ceremony I've attended before, I knew every student who walked across that stage and was excited to see each one receive their diploma. Congratulations to all nine seniors of the Wye River Upper School Class of '24!

I spent some time looking at the title, Graduation, before I started writing. I used that title because it is what we call this event that I attended to see Trent get his diploma. When you graduate high school, it's a big deal. At least, when you're in high school. When you look at that word, you can see that it has most of the word gradual in there. When you pour liquid into a graduated cylinder, you can see how much liquid you've poured in. Reaching the top doesn't mean you're done; it just means you need a bigger cylinder. No matter what you do after you graduate from high school, you're going to continue moving toward the next gradation.

The next gradation for Trent is University of Maryland in the fall. Trent and I went to our respective orientations last week. Trent spent the night in a dorm room with someone he'd never met before, ate at a dining hall, and scheduled his classes. We signed up for the earliest orientation we could, so Trent would get to schedule his classes before everyone who decided to wait until later in the summer. Trent's schedule contains all the standard stuff for a first-year engineering student: Calculus, Chemistry, Mechanics, English, and his one elective, Communications. At Virginia Tech, the Mechanics class was called Statics. The Communications class sounds like a survey of verbal presentation skills in a variety of formats, from small groups to presenting at conferences. It all sounds exciting to me.

The parents' orientation involved sitting in lecture halls, watching student services organizations present slides. The campus police explained they had microphones that could place a gunshot anywhere on campus, 1,200 video cameras constantly surveilling campus, and a team of six bomb-sniffing dogs. I have mixed feelings about whether that makes campus seem safer. The dining services presentation got more questions than any other session. I couldn't be less concerned about their ability to feed Trent. If they get him to eat something other than pizza and chicken, they'll have exceeded the best I've ever done. The recurring theme of all the presentations was that parents need to let their students learn to figure things out for themselves. The mission was to be supportive, but encourage independence. That sounds tough, but it's probably easier than General Chemistry.

Having graduated from high school, Trent is now gradually headed to his next gradation. He's heading in a similar direction to the one I chose as a young man. He has some challenges that I didn't have to overcome and has already faced some that were still ahead of me when I was his age. Luckily, I think he's probably better at math than I was when I left for engineering school. I'll leave you with the side-by-side comparison of our freshman student ID pictures. Good luck, Trent!

Trent's physics class discussed this topic earlier this week. Trent told his physics teacher that I have a particular fondness for this question. I've spent time helping out at the school. Earlier this year, I came into the class to do some pendulum experiments. We measured the gravitational constant with pendulums and stopwatches. So, Trent's teacher contacted me to see if I had anything I wanted to contribute. It's true, I've thought a lot about sky color. It's one of my favorite science questions because it feels like the answer should be simple. The correct answer is – it's complicated.

As soon as younger me came across the words Rayleigh Scattering, I – I'll admit it – smugly said those words whenever sky color came up. Did I know what they meant? I assumed that it was a physics thing. Did I read anything about it? No. Saying some words I didn't really understand was no better an explanation than 'because'. It's worse – because of the smugness.

I was eventually prodded out of my complacency when I read this Randall Munroe xkcd cartoon.

Rayleigh Scattering is a thing that happens when electromagnetic waves – like light – encounter the atoms in the atmosphere. When electromagnetic waves pass by, they affect atoms like ocean waves affect a boat. On an ocean, the boat goes up and down as the waves pass and the movement makes the boat's passengers – think electrons – nauseous. They get sick over the side. Moving electrons up and down is how electromagnetic waves are made. Electrons affected by light waves emit light instead of their lunch. So is that all there is to it? No, it's more complicated than that.

The boat analogy gestures at why the atoms scatter light, but why isn't the sky just the same color as the sun? We know from prisms that the sun has all the colors of light, right? We'll return to this question, but for now, let's say it does. The insight of Rayleigh Scattering is that waves with smaller wavelengths scatter more than waves with longer wavelengths when passing through a cloud of particles. You've probably noticed that when you hear music from another room, the lower frequency bass is easier to hear than the higher pitches of the human voice. It's similar with light. Red light is like the bass you can hear through the walls, while blue light is like the treble bouncing off the drywall. If we could see the high-pitched sounds, they'd be bouncing around the room with the speakers. We can see the blue light bouncing around in the upper atmosphere.

We've made progress – but still, the little girl in the Munroe cartoon asked why the sky isn't violet. Violet light has even shorter wavelengths than blue light. Shouldn't it scatter even more than the blue light? Why isn't the sky purple? If you researched black body radiation, you know that the sun produces less violet light than blue light. The atmosphere does scatter more of the available violet light than the available blue light. There's just less violet light. So, is that why it's not purple? It's part of it, but it's more complicated – brace yourself if you're a fan of purple.

There's a line in Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, spoken by one of the titular characters – I don't remember which one. He says, "The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody." This statement reflects a peculiar truth about human perception. Humans perceive color using nerve structures called cones that are sensitive to red, green and blue light. There are no cones that detect yellow or purple.

You may be remembering a time when you saw something yellow or purple. You did. It's even the case that light can be yellow and purple (violet). But the sensors in your eyes don't detect those colors of light very well. Yellow and purple are something that happens in the human brain when it sees red and green or blue and red. In terms of human perception, yellow and purple are a mystical experience shared by everybody. Why isn't the sky violet? The violet light scattering in the atmosphere is violet light, not a combination of red and blue light. If it were blue and red light, the sky would be purple. The human eye doesn't see violet light very well. So, you just see the blue light.

Why is the sky blue? Because of the color of the sun, the way the atmosphere reflects light, and the way the human eye works. Is it more complicated than that? It always is. I'm comfortable with this level of detail. You may feel differently. If you want to understand more, explore black body radiation, the quantum effects of electromagnetic waves on electrons, neural chemistry or human perception. Is it alright to think of sky color in a less complicated way? Sure. I'll leave you with the answer I recommend for general use. In some ways, this is the best answer I've found. Five years after the first cartoon that started my journey, Munroe followed up with this.

Trent went to prom last weekend. At Trent's high school, there are nine seniors, and the parent volunteers organizing prom had a meeting to get their thoughts. Prom fell on May 4th. The parents proposed a Star Wars theme. You know – May the fourth be with you. I wasn't in the room, but I'm told that Trent said, "I don't want to look back at my prom twenty years from now and remember it was Star Wars." No one wants their prom disrupted by uninvited Disney lawyers showing up with cease and desist letters. That's how the legally uncomplicated 'Out Of This World' became the theme of this year's prom.

Trent and Lizzie went to last year's – public domain – 'Mad Hatter' themed prom. Trent and Lizzie have been together since Valentines Day 2023. In my memory – which may differ from reality – Trent and Lizzie met in Stardew Valley. Stardew Valley is a pixel art video game about farming. I remember their pixelated avatars bustling about, busy watering crops and picking fruit. Presumably, they also saw each other in person at school.

More than a year later, Lizzie and Trent blasted out of this world into this year's prom. They're a pretty cute couple. Here are Trent and Lizzie!

The word mechatronics was coined a year after I was born. I've been interested in the topic for most of my life, but I don't remember hearing that word until earlier this year. Mechatronics describes the intersection of mechanical systems, electronics, and software. When I was a kid, I thought of mechatronics as robotics. The current definitions make mechatronics the broader field and indicate that robotics includes some sort of autonomy and the manipulation of objects. That difference is lost on me.

My earliest robot memories are watching reruns of Lost in Space and Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot. The Lost in Space robot, named Robot, is famous for its warning, "Danger! Danger Will Robinson!" I wondered, even at that early age, what sort of sensor detected danger. As an adult, it's obvious that it's a neural network that examines available data and makes a danger determination. It's not like there's a rare element whose electrical conductivity changes in the presence of danger — that would be cool though.

The robot from Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot, named Giant Robo [sic], had rocket engines on its feet that allowed it to — as the title suggests — fly. I built a wooden (not to scale) version of Giant Robo from scrap lumber. I asked my dad for a match to light it on fire. He asked why I wanted to do that. I explained that the rockets on the robot's feet needed to have flames so that it could fly. That moment may have been formative: teaching me that making things work in real life is harder than one might initially think. That bit of wisdom might have sparked my desire to be an engineer.

I have fond memories of working on electronics projects in high school. During my senior year, a friend and I built what I believe was my first robot as our science fair project. Pictured below, its name was Small Mobile Intelligent Robotic Platform or SMIRP. It was designed to be a maze-following robot. It could follow aluminum foil using infrared sensors, but we never got it to solve mazes. Robots and forced acronyms are strong indicators of a future engineer.

Robots are on my mind because I volunteered to assist the Physical Computing class offered by the makerspace at Trent's high school. Physical Computing is mechatronics or maybe robotics depending on whom you ask. There were three students in the class, so we got to really focus on some engineering. We spent the first few weeks exploring the Arduino computing platform. The SMIRP had to be tethered to the joystick port of my Atari 800 to provide software control. In the twenty-first century, you can get useful Arduino computers that are about the size of a stick of gum and run off AA batteries. We got to experiment with LEDs, ultrasonic distance sensors, servos, and motors. High school Rhett would have been really excited.

After doing some foundational work, the students picked an individual project to work on. Last week, those projects got shown off at the school's Expo. The Expo gives parents the opportunity to come in and see all sorts of student projects. There's drawings, photography displays, cabinetry, and musical performances. This year there was also Physical Computing. All three projects worked pretty well. One project pushed a dollar bill out a slot and then retracted it when someone approached. Another student built a motion-activated paper towel dispenser. The third lowered a spider down from a door when it detected something below. Here are the internals of the spider drop project.

First, we tried lowering and raising the spider with just the motor and the Arduino's internal timer. The motor is the yellow part in the picture above. It has a spool of thread with a washer tied to it as a prototype spider. The motor spins to lower the spider in response to the motion sensor being triggered. For the machine to operate more than once, we needed to be able to lower the spider and raise it back up to the height it started at.

We learned that the motor didn't move at a reliable speed. Lowering the spider for five seconds and then raising it for five seconds did not return it to its starting height. Further experimentation showed that raising the spider consistently took longer than lowering it, and the timings varied with each attempt. We needed to be able to accurately know how many times the spool had rotated to get the height correct. So, we added a rotary encoder on the other side of the motor to count the rotations of the spool of thread. The encoder has bits of copper that rotate past one another. While the encoder spins, those bits of copper act like a switch that the computer can see turning on and off. Ideally, you would see the signal go on and off once each time the copper contacts rotated past each other. In reality, a single click of the encoder might generate a several on and off events in quick succession. So, we had to find a software strategy for cleaning up that mess and counting correctly. It's hard to make things work the way you want.

Ultimately, Physical Computing class was a success. The students were engaged and interested in getting their projects to work. They learned that getting things to work is hard, but the difficulty did not discourage them. I had a good time, even though no one lit anything on fire in an attempt to make it fly. There were no forced acronyms and no one felt the need to anthropomorphize their project by giving it a name. Maybe that – ultimately – is the difference between robotics and mechatronics.

My Dungeons and Dragons journey began in third grade when I overheard the words 'magic missile' on the bus ride to school. I remember being concerned that someone was improperly mixing fantasy and science fiction. Nick, the fourth-grader who cast the spell, remains my friend four decades later. The game – always just D&D – has worked that same magic throughout my life. Many of the friends I made playing D&D when I was a kid are still my friends as an adult. Most of the friends I've made as an adult were made playing D&D. It all started with those magic words on the bus.

There was a version of D&D released in 1974. I've never seen an original copy. The first version of the game I bought came in the box shown on the right. It was released in 1977. The box is still on my shelf today. It came with dice I'd never seen before in the shapes of all five Platonic solids. The indented numbers, lacking any highlighting color, were hard to read. The twenty-sided die repeated zero through nine twice, offering no way to distinguish a one from an eleven. A year later, in 1978, the box would have included an adventure called B1: In Search of the Unknown, but my box just had some unlabeled dungeon maps called geomorphs. We'd eventually get visible numbers on the dice and the eleven through twenty on the twenty-sided die, but that would be years later.

D&D is a structured kind of make-believe. Kids are naturals at it. The game is a conversation. One of the players is the Dungeon Master (DM). The DM presents a scene to the players and includes some hints about things the players might want to do. The players tell the DM what they'd want to do and the DM tells them what happens when they try. The cycle repeats. When something the players want to do is dangerous or risky, D&D provides rules for figuring out whether it works. It usually involves rolling dice.

The core of the game is the conversation. The more creativity and wonder the DM and the players bring to the game, the better the game gets. I played countless hours of D&D before I really understood the rules. In the beginning, we didn't really need the rules.

I did eventually learn the rules. When I was in eighth grade my family moved to Albuquerque, NM for a year. D&D was there in the desert waiting for me. My mom found a group for me to play with on Friday nights. That group played by the book, so I finally mastered the rules. I was prepared to return to Virginia and embark on the high school stage of my D&D career.

While my high school involvement with D&D was entirely positive, the culture of the 80's did not always favor it. There was a time, now known as the Satanic Panic, that America became fascinated with the idea that dangerous satanic cults lived among us doing terrible things. D&D had devils and demons in its lore. Somehow this associated D&D with cults in the public imagination. In my experience, when demons or devils showed up in a D&D game, they were dangerous villains that the players tried to defeat. So, the public concern never made sense to me. I guess that's what made it a panic. For a while, there was a stigma attached to playing the game. It led to an entire version of the game that never mentioned devils or demons. They were still in the game, but not referred to in that way.

In 1982, a made-for-TV movie staring Tom Hanks, Mazes and Monsters, premiered in prime time. It was based on a tragic real-life incident involving a troubled kid. His community wanted to find some way to explain something they couldn't understand and D&D was the thing they settled on. There were books and movies based on the event. It wasn't great for the public perception of D&D. Like rock and roll music, history has made it clear that D&D doesn't corrupt the youth.

In 1989, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition was released. It was a big deal. The 2nd Edition represented an attempt to consolidate and simplify the rules. And to sell books, but that didn't really matter to us. My high school D&D friends gathered to travel via subway across DC to a store called Dream Wizards. They were going to be the first to get the new edition onto their shelves. We descended into the depths of a Metro station and travelled underground to a far off destination. It was an epic quest like the ones we'd been pretending to have for so many years. I have fond memories of that day.

I continued to play D&D through college. Mostly, with friends from high school who went to Virginia Tech. A little in graduate school with some members of my fraternity Alpha Phi Omega. Less after getting my degrees and starting to work. My wife, Tina, introduced me to some people she knew from high school who had active D&D games. They were kind enough to include me in their games and I made more D&D friends.

The pandemic, while terrible for the world, was great for D&D. Before the pandemic struck, most of the D&D games I had been part of were put on hold. We all had children to raise. Most of the friction in playing as adults is distance and scheduling. I had tried, for a while, to sell my friends on playing using online tools, but with no success. The pandemic provided the motivation for people to finally give online play a try. Pre-pandemic, if you'd asked me if I'd ever get to be part of a weekly D&D game again in my lifetime, I'd have said it was very unlikely. I got to play in two weekly games during the pandemic. One has continued to play almost every week for three years. The characters are 16th level and getting ever closer to the bottom of Halaster Blackcloak's famous Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

D&D is now in its fifth edition. I think it's the best version so far. D&D is a billion dollar industry. There was a good D&D movie: Honor Among Thieves – don't bother with the earlier movies. I have fond memories of the animated 80's Saturday morning animated series which finally got a conclusion in a 2019 Brazilian car commercial. D&D was featured in a controversial episode of Community that I think did a great job of conveying the feeling of playing in a game. The 2023 release of the Baldur's Gate 3 is the closest a video game has ever gotten to feeling like playing actual game. There are people (The Adventure Zone, Acquisitions Incorporated, and Critical Role) that make their living by streaming their games of D&D. I play D&D with the children of life-long friends that I made playing D&D. There has been no better time to give it a try. The magic persists.

Welcome to The Rhett-irement Project! This is my epistolary experiment in social media. It's a newsletter for people who already know who I am. If you missed it when you subscribed, I wrote a brief essay about why social media is designed to be terrible and my motivation for creating this experiment on the about page.

My goal is to shelter this newsletter and the website from the general cacophony of the Internet. The humble email turns out to be the most accessible way to communicate on the internet. Emails can go anywhere in the world and they don't pass through social media algorithms. These newsletters arrive at your inbox. You receive them using the computers and programs that work best for you. The blog makes these letters available on the web. Anyone can read them, but I have put tags on all the web pages that ask the search engines not to index the pages. The experiment isn't meant to be a walled garden. It's more like a magic noodle shop that's hard to find unless you've been there before.

How Does This Work?

We'll figure that out as we go. You can hit reply on the newsletter if you want to comment directly to me. The newsletter's reply-to email address will end up in my inbox. If you're subscribed, you can leave comments on the blog version of the newsletter. You might do that if you want to write something that other subscribers (and others on the internet) can see if they visit the post. It's a little inconvenient since you have to log into the website to do it.

I will occasionally post summaries of what is going on in my life. I want to practice writing, so you can expect occasional longer form essays. Language is a representation of human thought. Writing is a tool that helps me understand what I think about things. The newsletter serves as a motivational tool for me to write something of a memoir.

Feel free to ignore any post that's boring. I'll try to make it clear early on in any post what the topic is so you can bail at your earliest convenience. There won't be a quiz at the end. If you have a topic you think is a good subject for an essay, let me know. If I'm also interested in what I think about it, I might write it.

Thank You For Subscribing

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed. I appreciate your interest in this experiment. If you decide you want to write a newsletter, I'm at least one subscriber ready to give you their email address. If the experiment is successful, one of my longer form essays will cover how I set this up and ways that others could do something similar.