the last blog I'll ever start
I saw my first Stamptown show today, very inspiring (and very long), and now it’s past midnight even though I’m going to backdate this post.
I love the chaos, the interweaving of random characters, feeling like you are in a fever dream.
It felt like being in Edinburgh (also the hit and miss nature of Edinburgh).
Watching the leading edge of comedy makes you feel young.
Zach Zucker is joyous.
I’m glad this show exists!
I started my new YouTube channel today, Noobs on the Gooftower, where I play Blood on the Clocktower with comedian friends on livestream. It peaked at 160 viewers, which is wild!
I actually woke up giddy yesterday thinking about it and the game was super fun. I did learn some stuff though:
Ah, life. It’s bigger. Bigger than you and you are not me. The lengths that I will go to to play this very fun game.
Almost 2000 people have watched the video by this point… this might be the most successful video content I’ve ever made.
2024, this is the year!
I had a very good set at The Good Nite tonight. I wrote out some new jokes on an index card. The crowd was extremely engaged (not because of me, they were like that before I got up). I went last. I was genuinely concerned that I was going to bomb.
I started from a place of expressing that genuine concern and the set went very well.
I am extremely fortunate to be where I am right now; I feel comfortable getting on stage with a few ideas and talking them out and they seem to be entertaining.
But like I’ve told a few friends and Eric over the last year or so, it’s slightly scary or unsettling because I’m not sure what I’m doing. Or rather, I’m not sure why it’s working.
I don’t know if I ever really over-thought this kind of proficiency in improv or acting. I think with improv I just felt after a decade or so of experience that it started to feel easy to me.
Standup doesn’t necessarily feel “easy” to me right now, but I have a very high success rate at the moment. Someone asked me tonight “When is the last time you bombed?” and while I could remember “meh” spots, I don’t remember the last time I actually full-on bombed.
That’s a sign that I should be taking more risks, which I did tonight by working out some brand new jokes.
It’s all going very well.
But I’m not sure why.
I had a coupon for a cheap annual subscription to BBC’s Maestro which is their version of Master Class. So today and yesterday I’ve been listening to Alan Moore talk about storytelling. And while it’s not a real hands-on practicum of a class, it’s chockfull of recommendations of things to read and other resources to get:
It’s very inspiring, he’s such an inspired mind. I think it’s more engaging than a lot of the Master Class material almost because it makes no attempt to be “practical”… there’s no real exercises or things to actually… do.
But I feel like a lot of my connections to culture these days have to do with people that… no, not people, experiences where my brain feels good to be in the thing. My brain feels good watching Daniel Kitson do standup, listening to Alan Moore talk about storytelling, or Mark Ronson about creating music, or Maria Bamford doing anything.
this is a barebones website, a stock installation of WordPress, and yet it takes about 20 seconds for even the rudimentary screen to show up.
I hope it isn’t that slow for you.
I changed out my keyboard today. I loved the feel of the old one, it was blue switches and a mechanical keyboard, but it was too loud.
Next week, I’m going to start streaming some online games of Blood on the Clocktower, and the keyboard is too loud and annoying.
ah, technology
Slice them in half, horizontally, so they are thinner. Heat up your pan.
Take out a bowl, put flour in it and whatever seasonings (salt, pepper, secret things, MSG, anything you like).
Put the breasts in the flour and coat them with the dry mix.
Put butter or oil in the pan. Lay the coated breasts in. About 4 minutes a side, flip them once, maybe twice. Sometimes I put a cover on to speed up cooking through. I don’t know a fancy way to check doneness, I just take one of the breasts and cut into it to make sure all the pink is gone.
Do all the breasts this way, put them in a dish while you make the sauce.
But, oh wait, first, when the breasts are all done, actually put them somewhere else. Then take the pan they were in, and pour the juices and bits back into the cooking pan.
Heat that pan to high. Put something like broth or wine into it. Boil it down until it’s thicker while you use a wooden spoon to scrape up the bits stuck to the pan.
After it’s reduced about half, turn the heat off and put in butter or heavy cream. Also season to taste at this point.
Spoon the sauce over the chicken.
Enjoy life.
I am somewhat indifferent to caffeine. For a while I thought it had no effect on me, but I’ve cut down on it recently (somehow avoided the crushing headache) and when I have it now I do tend to stay up later into the night.
I don’t mind caffeine free options like Sprite Zero or Diet Ginger Ale.
But I like the taste of Coke Zero. I would gladly get the caffeine-free version, but it’s quite difficult to find.
So sometimes I drink Coke Zero. And on those nights, I stay up late.
I don’t really have any personal resolutions this year except:
I want to become less resentful of people that have more resources than me.
I listen to How I Made This, a great podcast about entrepreneurs, and every episode ends with the question, “How much of your success do you attribute to hard work, and how much do you attribute to luck?”
Whenever the guest says “all of it to my hard work” my teeth clench, especially since many of the guests have stuff like a rich relative that invested, or connections from an Ivy League school.
But really, what does any of this have to do with me? I do think that these meritocratic views are damaging because they generate a lack of empathy for people that are underprivileged; but in reality, that’s not me. So while I think picking apart the view that our culture is meritocratic is worth doing, I don’t think it has much connection to my own situation. I’ve been fortunate in many ways.
Spending energy on this kind of resentment for me individually is not worth the expenditure.
This year I’m focusing on: comedy, acting, coding, and Blood on the Clocktower. I found last year that I’m not the best mono-tasker… I don’t think I can function just 24/7 going after standup, or television work, or software engineering, or … whatever Blood on the Clocktower is (hobby? side gig? lifestyle?).
If you don’t know what BotC is, just stick around this blog as I’ll be going on a bit about it. Suffice to say it’s in the same slot in my soul as chess, Dota 2, Valorant… but it’s more social and I don’t feel gross after those three things. Not only that, there’s a nonzero chance that I could actually make some money.
I could make money doing all four of the things above.
I’m reading/processing How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham and thinking about how it could help structure my thoughts around 2024.
For now, for this blog, I’m just taking a hint from Matt Mullenweg and Seth Godin that writing a little bit every day is a good thing, even if it’s to no audience for no reason.
I wanted to write every single day in 2024. And I’ve had various blogs through the years, but thought I’d keep a simple barebones WordPress site on my domain chrisgrace.com. I had one there before, how hard could it be? For some reason I couldn’t login to the WP install I had already, so I thought, oh, I’ll just delete the old one and put in a new one.
However, I installed the new one at the root level of my website, so all of my files from the site were deleted. There wasn’t anything super critical there but there was years of built up archives and other things. I didn’t want to lose it.
On top of that, the WP install itself was not working, I think because of some interaction between the site, the www subdomain, the SSH certificate, and CloudFlare. Out of all the domains I have hosted through my provider, chrisgrace.com is the only one with some kind of “Cloudflare-enabled” feature on it, which is really obtuse to disable.
But now it’s late in the day.
And I realized, I can’t wait up until this is all fixed (I filed a support ticket and I’m also trying to fix the DNS records myself to remove the Cloudflare part).
So I opened up Obsidian and I’m writing this in there.
In 2024, it’s time to just do things, and not worry if they are perfect.