History of Money

Continuing my eternal exploration of financial books, I recently finished reading "The History of Money: A Story of Humanity." I think a few people had recommended it to me. I enjoyed the book, but it also served as an indication of just how thoroughly I've been reading in this area. Some years ago every financial fact was new to me; now I find myself increasingly saying "Yes, I know that already... oh, that's another way of looking at it, I suppose... Hm, this seems a lot like this other thing..."

 

In contrast to some of the wonkier and more tightly focused books I've been reading lately, The History of Money is definitely aimed at popular audiences and doesn't presume any prior knowledge. It's a little bit like Investing In US Financial History in that it takes a chronological look through the history and evolution of economic topics, but this book spans roughly 5000 years in time and most of the globe in space, as opposed to just 250 years and one country. It doesn't go into huge depth on any particular incident, but I think its most valuable characteristic is for putting things in context. As one random example, I'd previously read William Bernstein's description of the importance of grain imports to the Athenian economy, so that wasn't a new topic for me; but in THoM you can see how that evolution fit in with the Lydian invention of metallic currency and Roman taxation of the provinces, as one stepping stone on a centuries-long process of evolving money.

This book is mostly a collection of stories, early on stories about nations, later on stories about individuals. I was most familiar with the content earlier in the book and just sort of glided over a lot of it. But as it gets into the 1700s or so I started learning a lot more. In particular, I don't think I've ever read about Talleyrand's role in the creation of French livres and the assignat system. It's very germane to this book, and the author David McWilliams talks through how the confiscation of church property gave the state a solid basis of value for the livre initially (a land-backed as opposed to metal-backed system), but after the revolution the radical government excessively printed paper money which led to hyperinflation. Again linking back to Bernstein, from "The Birth of Plenty" I was familiar with France's lack of faith in banking and how that caused a competitive disadvantage in their conflict with England, but THoM gives a gripping story about particular people and the sequence of events that may make this period more memorable for future recall, as well as directly illustrate the related financial ideas.

The book also kind of normalizes and contextualizes random things I've read or heard over the years. For example, I was already familiar with John Law, but I think that was from some on-off podcast or NPR program I had listened to, while other stories are from economic books I've read. So now I have a better understanding of how John Law fits in with Talleyrand and others.

When picking up this book, I had assumed that it was going to be focused on money in particular: what it is, how it's used, how it's valued, etc. It turned out to be a lot broader, and a lot of the book is about more general economic growth and development. To be fair you can't really write just about money unless you're purely talking about numismatics. Money exists for a reason, it is influenced by the economy and it influences the economy, so you can't easily separate the two. I think the book ends up being roughly half about money-as-money, and half about the economic (and political and social) world growing in a symbiotic relationship with money.

McWilliams mentions that similar developments were occurring simultaneously and independently in the Fertile Crescent, China and central America, but he focused on Western culture like I remember from World History class, with the story beginning in the Middle East and gradually migrating into the Levant, the Mediterranean, and eventually western Europe.

Like I said before, this book is aimed at a popular audience: the language tends to be pretty casual, and overall this doesn't feel as rigorous as other economic books I've read, for better and for worse. He seems to often note correlations and imply causation without demonstrating it. For example, with the decline of the Roman Empire in northwest Europe, metal coinage became very scarce and was replaced with a more primitive bartering and tithe system. He notes that small-denomination currency is required to support city living, and thinks that the decline in the physical supply of money contributed to the de-urbanization of this area. But I think you could just as easily argue the opposite: with the decline of great cities, there wasn't as much demand for small coinage, so people would be more likely to repurpose them for trinkets or jewelry or just reclaim the copper or silver metal from the coins and put them to practical use. Or the decline of cities and the decline of coinage could both be side-effects of other forces (raiders, plagues, etc.). It's interesting to note the correlation, but I wish he would more explicitly question the cause and effect instead of just generally implying that money was responsible for changes and not the result of those changes.

On page 191 he writes "Could Law, with his alleged accomplice Spencer, have encouraged not one but two revolutions?" His theory is that John Law helped inflate the South Sea Bubble, Charles Spencer and other highly placed British nobles corruptly benefited from the bubble, and outrage from the fallout was one of the precipitating factors of the American Revolution. But this is the kind of vague circumstantial suggestion that irritates me, implying something without proving it or thoroughly arguing it.

Or on page 204: "It could be said that suspect money - rather than suspect politics - greased the guillotine, in an environment of food shortages, denunciations and worthless currency." "It could be said that" is one of the classic weasel-word phrases. Is McWilliams saying that the Terror was primarily caused by an unstable currency? No, he's implying it without really standing behind it.

Overall this feels like a book designed for chatter at a dinner party. There are lots of interesting little anecdotes and factoids sprinkled throughout the book. He really loves giving the etymology behind various common words, which were almost all new to me and made me say "Huh!", but they also aren't really important. The stories tend to be sensational whenever possible, focusing on the wilder aspects of peoples' sexual scandals or rivalries or duels: he'd rather repeat some salacious hearsay than a boring fact. Sometimes these stories' connection to money feels extremely tenuous, but the stories do tend to be very entertaining.

The author is Irish and loves featuring Irishmen. I really liked that, it adds good color and personality to the book: I feel like I'm being told an entertaining story by a particular person with their own passions, not a dry account assembled by some committee.

I liked the book more the closer I got to the end, mostly because I learned more stuff that I hadn't known before. McWilliams is a professional economist with experience in both central banks and commercial banks and does know his stuff. This passage from page 266-267 may have been my favorite:

Gold has a fixed supply; if the economy grows, meaning the economy produces more things, the price of those things must fall in gold terms, because the supply of gold doesn't rise in response to the rise in the economy's output. Tethering a currency to gold is inherently deflationary. Falling prices sounds good, doesn't it? We are conditioned to think about prices in this way. It is good if the price of things you buy falls. But this cuts both ways. What if the things you sell, like your labor, also fall against gold? In a period of deflation, whose standard of living rises? The people with gold, of course. That means people in finance, people trading money or speculating on other commodities, those with access to money - the already wealthy. Currencies linked to gold will reward people with savings. Who in the late nineteenth century had savings? The same people who have always had savings: rich people, of course.

I really like the detail and cogent explanation there of how metal-based currency is inherently deflationary. I also really love the connection to the real-world class system. We aren't just discussing some abstract mathematical model, but a reality that has a social impact on our lives. He spends some productive time in this area, including describing how nations have realized after centuries of experience that it is much easier to recover from inflationary periods caused by fiat currencies than from deflationary recessions caused by gold-based or silver-based money.

While less wonky, I also really loved this passage from page 290:

Artists and entrepreneurs are blessed with similar outlooks; the type of minds that make art are also the type that create businesses. Sometimes artists don't see this similarity, schooled in an erroneous worldview that money is bad and poverty is noble, the artist expressive and free but the businessperson boring and conservative. In fact, both artist and entrepreneur see possibilities where others see limitations, bringing the previously unimagined into being. Both artist and entrepreneur have skin the the game, performing on the public stage of jeopardy. The creative - businessperson or artist - has strong opinions and is courageous enough to risk the ridicule of the crowd for their opinion to be heard. Success can only come after the effort has been made, making their entire existence inherently unstable. For both entrepreneur and artist, failure can be brutal and success is often a prelude to future disappointment. But they are driven by self-expression; it's in the DNA of these independent, sometimes unreasonable, often difficult sorts. Both the artist and the entrepreneur can suffocate when shackled by a boss, a wage, or an insurance premium. From a macroeconomy perspective, artists and entrepreneurs both create demand where no demand existed previously. The new products they offer create their own demand - and this is the key to all economic evolution.

The context for this passage is McWilliams' description of James Joyce's time living in Trieste, and how Joyce started a business to open Dublin's very first movie theater; we think of business and art as opposites, and I love how this passage draws them together. I think it's overstated: he uses "entrepreneur" and "businessperson" interchangeably, I think the argument applies to the former but not the latter. But the idea that "creation" is the main thing really resonates with me, as opposed to expanding or reproducing some existing thing.

This kind of reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's observation that entrepreneurs in particular and successful people in general tend to be more optimistic than the general population, and that optimism is not founded on a rational basis but can influence events towards a good outcome. Passion and a reckless risk-taking attitude can be ingredients for success in starting businesses and creating new art.

And, one last random quibble: on page 358 he writes: "When you buy the shares of a company, the understanding is that your money goes to the company and might be used to buy equipment or finance the expansion into a new market, from which you hope to profit." I don't think that's true. When you buy shares in, say, Microsoft, none of that money goes to Microsoft or can be used by it for anything. Your money just goes to the previous owner of those shares. What you are buying is the right to a portion of the future earnings of that company. (The one case where your money would actually go to the company is in an IPO event, but when is the last time you or anybody you knew bought shares in an IPO?) McWilliams' description here is closer to purchasing a bond issued by the company, in which case your money is going to the company and can be used for expansion; you aren't participating in the share of that additional profit, though, you are only collecting the interest due to you for the loan. 

The book ends with a "further reading" section, I haven't read any of those books before and a lot of them sound really interesting. I get the impressions at least some of those are more rigorous scholarly books, so they may be less readable but more satisfying to me.

So, yeah! I had slightly mixed feelings about this book. I think that for general education and entertaining economic stories it is excellent; for people like me who have already spent way too much time reading about financial topics it has value as a high-level contextualization of the broad sweep of economic and monetary development on planet Earth, which necessarily involved retreading some familiar ground but doing so in a pretty breezable and readable, though sometimes overly light, way.

Sad Scion

I've been meaning for a while now to write about Blue Prince, a fantastic puzzle game that I've grown increasingly obsessed with over the last month. I had initially planned to do an early-game checkin (once I realized that there was an early game and this wasn't just a small stand-alone experience), then thought of doing a post once I reached the credits. I'm now a ways past the credits, probably more than halfway through the content but it's hard to be certain. In any case I think I've experienced enough to pass a very positive judgment on it.

 

I've heard good things about the game, but otherwise had avoided any details about it prior to being generously gifted it by my brother (no, not that one: the other brother). When I hear "puzzle game" I tend to think of something like, say, Myst: a game you explore and figure out and solve. You might get stuck on something for a while and may ask for help or keep banging your head against it until you solve it. If you know what you're doing, the actual content tends to be on the light side, and a subsequent replay will go much faster than the first one.

 

 

MINI SPOILERS

The most important aspect of Blue Prince is that it is a rogue-lite. Each run consists of one day inside the mansion that you have inherited. The key mechanic of the game is "drafting": every time you open a door in the mansion, you are presented with three randomly selected rooms, and pick one of them to be what lies on the other side of the door. Other than the entryway and maybe one or two other rooms in the 45-room mansion, nothing is fixed, so every day the layout of the mansion is new. Unlike something like Diablo or Sunless Skies where the game decides the layout, here you get to pick, re-architecting the house anew each day.

 

 

The main goal of the game is to reach the 46th room of the 45-room mansion. There are several obstacles in your way, most of which come down to resource management:

 

 

Keys. As you move further north in the mansion, doors are increasingly likely to be locked. You can find keys as you explore, but each key only opens one door.

 

 

Security doors. These are un-openable to begin with, unless you can find a Security Card or another means to bypass them.

 

 

Dead ends. Any given door might lead to a hallways that branches in multiple directions, or a corridor that continues straight on, or a room with no other exits. You can always backtrack, but if you run out of doors, you can't draft any more rooms.

 

 

Steps. You have a certain amount of energy each day. You spend one point each time you move between rooms. There are plenty to reach the end of the manor, but not enough to carelessly backtrack back and forth multiple times. Once this reaches 0 you are forced to call it a day.

 

 

Gems. Certain valuable rooms will cost one or more gem to select and draft. These might be rooms that contain many exits, or useful tools, or additional resources. If you don't have enough gems, you can't select those rooms and will be stuck with others that may not take you where you want to go.

 

 

So, a lot of the mechanics of gameplay revolve around managing these resources. For example, drafting a Patio will spawn Gems in all existing Green Rooms in your house, so you can go back and collect those; but doing so will consume a fair number of Steps. You can spend Gold Coins on Food that will give you more Steps; but there's an opportunity cost since you could have instead spent Coins on Keys or other tools. A frequent quandary is whether to take a Dead End that will give you a lot of items but block off further exploration along this corridor versus a hallways that doesn't have any immediate rewards but opens up more space to explore. This resource-management aspect reminds me positively of the Sunless Skies / Sunless Seas games, where you were often trading off resources like Crew, Fuel and Terror as you tried to make progress towards your destinations and goals.

 

 

As with those games, though, this is a rogue-lite, so even though you almost certainly won't reach Room 46 on your first day, you also will almost certainly unlock some permanent rewards that will improve your chances on subsequent days. One early example is the Observatory: each time you draft it, a new star is added to the sky. The more stars there are, the more and better constellations you can see, each of which gives you special abilities for that day (like making apples extra delicious, or increasing the odds of drawing rooms with four exits). You can eventually unlock an Allowance, which can gradually grow over time, giving you a tidy collection of Coins at the start of your day. This can become a big help over the long haul, as you can just buy tools as you come across them, as opposed to waiting until you have collected enough coins on a day or debating between tradeoffs.

 

 

As I said up top, though, this isn't primarily a strategy game: it's a puzzle game. This game is filled with puzzles, of all kinds, from the smallest factor to the largest. Some puzzles are self-contained within a room: there's a Parlor that poses a logic puzzle which you can solve to earn Gems, and a Billiard Room with a math puzzle you can solve to earn Keys. A lot more are abstract and require careful observation and thinking, various riddles and word games and allegories. It's common to notice one thing, think "that's odd", then days later see something else, realize "Oh! That's what the first thing meant!", then try to get back to the first thing now that you know what to do. And the game as a whole is also a huge puzzle, trying to work out what it is you're doing and why.

 

 

The biggest risk with puzzle games is frustration: it stinks to get stuck on something and not be able to progress, berating yourself for being dumb and/or the designers for being obtuse. Considering the density and difficulty of puzzles in Blue Prince, I'm astonished by how pleasurable the puzzles felt. There are a few great things going for it.

 

 

First of all, while a particular puzzle may stump you for a while, there's just so much to do that I have never felt stuck on the game as a whole. Even if I don't know how to, say, get into a particular locked safe, I still know that I want to light the candles in the chapel, and that I want to take the Basement Key to the Foundation, and so on, so I can keep making progress towards those other things while I mull over the puzzle. Sometimes I'll encounter something in the game that clarifies things for me, but I also often have the experience of, say, walking down the sidewalk or taking a shower in the real world and getting a lightbulb moment like "Oh! That's March as in the month, not March as in the musical piece!" Which just makes me all the more excited to get back into the game and try it out.

 

 

Secondly, most of the puzzles have multiple solutions or multiple trails of hints. I'll often have the experience of coming across a diary or something in the game and quickly realizing that it's a hint towards a mystery I've already solved. But that's great: if I was still stuck on the mystery, finding that diary would have given me the nudge I needed. And they seem to generally be sequenced pretty well, such that the clues you're likely to encounter early on are the most opaque and challenging, while the latter clues are much more explicit hints or directions.

 

 

Finally, on the rare occasions I've felt compelled to seek outside help, I've found the community extremely helpful. I'm lucky enough to know someone else who has played the game and can give appropriate non-spoilery hints, but even more impressive, searches through Reddit or the Steam Community reveal that other players are highly respectful of the process and journey towards discovery. They won't just use spoiler tags: the spoilers themselves will contain hints and clues and rhetorical questions, not directly revealing the answer but guiding you to make the discovery yourself. Which feels great!

MEGA SPOILERS

Other than the scope of the game, the biggest surprise for me has been just how much story stands behind it. I had initially assumed that this was a quirky English manor or something. After some time exploring, though, you eventually realize that this is an entirely different planet, with its own continents and history and culture and religion and mathematics and everything. And that itself becomes yet another puzzle, as you must understand this new world to progress in the latter area of the game.

 

 

In terms of my overall progression: I did reach Room 46 on day... hm, I think 20 or thereabouts. I really lucked on on a run where I was almost out of rooms, then managed to get the Secret Garden Key and open the Garden just before the end.

 

 

I haven't looked this up yet, but it seems like some rooms may fall out of the rotation once certain conditions are satisfied. I haven't drawn the Bookshop once since I purchased all the books in it, which makes sense. I also haven't seen the Rumpus Room in ages, which makes me think it may disappear once you've heard all of the fortunes.

 

 

At this point I think I have all of the permanent outdoor unlocks (orchard, gemstone cavern, Blackridge). I usually start the day with 2 gems and around 60 coins. I probably have about a dozen Upgrade Disks loaded.

 

 

My most recent big accomplishment last night was opening the back area of the Blackstone Grotto. Pretty cool! I love the view back there. I haven't drafted the Throne Room yet but am curious to check that out.

 

 

I keep a list of my outstanding goals nearby while I'm playing, and will jot down notes as I find new things or cross them out as I accomplish them. I'll usually have some idea of what I'm going for, but will pivot early in a run based on the outer room and early stuff I find: maybe hoarding Gold for a Trophy, or trying to draft a ton of Mechanical rooms for the Mechanarium. There are still a bunch of things I want to do.

 

 

So far I've opened... I think four or five Sanctum doors. I've added quite a few new floorplans but I know there are still a good number left in the Drafting Studio. 

END SPOILERS

You'll hear this everywhere, but this is definitely a game that benefits from having a notebook and pen nearby. There's a lot of stuff worth jotting down. Since I'm playing on Steam I also get a good amount of use out of the F12 Screenshot key - it can be really handy to come back later and re-examine a book or picture that I had found earlier.

 

 

The music for this game is gorgeous, typically very minimalist and atmospheric, but highly effective.

 

 

Overall production values are surprisingly good. It looks like a walking simulator, and you'll never see yourself or another human in the game, but there's a lot of pretty and thoughtful animation and sound effects sprinkled throughout. There are a handful of cut-scenes in the game which all feel very meaningful and well-done.

 

 

My one major complaint with the game is the save system, or lack thereof. Once you start a new day, there's no option to pause it and come back: quitting the game ends the day and resets your daily progress. At this stage of the game, it isn't unusual for a single in-game day to last me nearly two hours: I might come across new books to read, spend time mulling over a new puzzle, flip through my notebook in search of a name, and carefully trace my steps back and forth through the mansion. There's no harm in keeping the game running, so I'll sometimes leave it up over dinner or dog walks and come back to it later, but there are also some nights where I've gone to bed later than I would have liked due to a frustratingly productive run.

 

That's really my only complaint, though! Blue Prince has been such a delight, a nice change from my standard RPG-and-strategy-game diet and a real pleasure to explore and absorb. 

Pandaemonium

I finished reading "The Secret Commonwealth," the second entry in Philip Pullman's new trilogy follow-up to His Dark Materials. I was originally thinking of waiting until finishing the third before writing up my thoughts, but I have some time now so I thought I'd go ahead and pop them in now!

 

 

MINI SPOILERS

It's been a while since I read the original trilogy, although I did watch the excellent TV adaptation not too long ago. From what I remember, I think that this second book "feels" like HDM more than the La Belle Sauvage did. LBS had a more folkloric and dreamlike quality to it, while TSC feels more like an urban fantasy. Traveling through Europe, trains, daemons, the Magisterium, the Alethiometer, spies, politics and more.

The most striking aspect of this novel is the separation between Lyra and Pan. It starts off with their emotional separation: there's a lot of coldness in their relationship, fraught silences, explosive arguments, mutual frustrations. Eventually this leads to a physical rupture and they spend most of the novel apart. This all ties back to Lyra's abandonment of Pan back in the Land of the Dead in the earlier trilogy: that was a brutal betrayal at the time, and it's great (though very sad!) to see that decision continue to reverberate all these years later. It adds even more weight to that action.

In the original series, it seemed like separating was extremely unusual: only witches could do it, and the ability to "sever" is a major plot point. In this book, it seems like tons and tons of people can do it: we keep bumping into people who have separated, sometimes due to infatuation or deception or accident or physical constraints. The greater occurrence of separation is just as surprising to Lyra and Pan as it is to us as readers: what seemed like a metaphysical law is actually only the most common type of relationship.

Lyra in particular is less sympathetic here that in the first series. I think her main character flaw in His Dark Materials was deception ("Liar"), but it never felt like Pullman really judged her for that, and her falsehood is usually a sign of cleverness that she deploys to achieve good ends. In my recollection, the original series ultimately comes across as an ode to reason: its heroes are scientists and explorers devoted to rational experimentation and discovery, while the villains are clergy devoted to upholding a system of belief. Lyra wins by being clever, and her happy ending is becoming a scholar herself.

But in this series, her rationality has kind of curdled into a meanness and pettiness. Pan says that she has "lost her imagination." She's developed a sort of sneering contempt towards abstract ideals. Her mind has been poisoned by a pair of books. One initially seems like a Nietzschean work of philosophy, though once we learn the details it is more specifically unique to Lyra's world. The other is a comedic novel that mocks idealism. Much of the emotional arc of this novel is Lyra reconnecting with non-rational things: the Secret Commonwealth of the title, the hidden world of jacky lanterns and will-o-the-wisps and other folkloric creatures. The novel seems to be arguing for a balance between rationality and creativity/imagination. Rationality is still important but does not stand on its own.

I do need to say that I felt a little bit of squick from the supposed attraction between Lyra and Malcolm. In the first novel she was a babe in arms and he was a boy; now she is 20 and he is 30. The relationship as written makes me immediately think of Charles Stross's phrase "Sad Boner Professor", the literary sub-genre of older male teachers who are drawn to their pretty young students. Pullman directly addresses this in the preface, saying "They are both adults!", which just highlights it and makes it more weird.

On the other hand, very late in this novel Lyra does directly address her "lying with" Will near the end of His Dark Materials and clarifies that they only kissed, which clears up something that had been bothering me for a while about that book.

Moving on: some of this book felt like direct commentary on contemporary issues. In particular, there's a scene later in the novel where a boat full of migrants and refugees from North Africa and the Middle East is accidentally destroyed, leading to a tumultuous scene as they try to rescue as many survivors as possible, care for them and ultimately resettle them. That definitely seemed to me like a clear parallel of the Syrian refugee crisis in particular, and more broadly the topic of European assimilation of immigrants from Muslim countries.

Ultimately this felt like a highly episodic novel. Particularly in the second half, each chapter is almost its own stand-alone story where Lyra, Pan or Malcolm travel to a new location and have an encounter there before moving on. There's the magician who turned his son into the element of fire and the son's daemon into the element of water; there's the princess whose daemon left her for an exotic dancer; there's the blind girl who reads romance novels written in Braille; there's life among the Untouchable daemon-less Tajik nightsoilmen; and on and on. It's fun, and feels a lot like an episodic TV show or something.

END SPOILERS

Oh, I also should mention that this book is a LOT longer than the first one. I was surprised when I checked it out at the library, noting it clocked in at over 600 pages. But of course it's highly readable and moves along quickly. The story definitely rambles at time, but I think that's part of the charm, as we get to explore more of Lyra's world, especially the areas controlled by the Magisterium.

I'm pleased to see that the third and final book came out fairly recently, I hope to track that down and wrap things up before too long! 

Piece of Cake

Some time back my dad recommended to me the book "A Walk in the Park" by Kevin Fedarko. Having just finished it, I can see why - it's an alternately funny and gripping memoir of a long-distance desert backpacking journey. In particular, Kevin and his hiking/photographer buddy Pete resolved to hike along the entire length of the Grand Canyon: not a north-south rim-to-rim jaunt, but an east-to-west hike following the course of the Colorado River throughout the entire length of the canyon.

 

 

In some ways, they seemed like natural fits for a journey like this: Kevin had worked for many years as a volunteer for the oar boats that travel down the Colorado River rapids through the Grand Canyon, and he and Pete had previously collaborated on a variety of adventurous photojournalism assignments, including foreign mountains and wintry tundras. But the book by far focuses on their incredible lack of preparation or suitability for it. Neither of them were particularly fit, especially the special kind of fitness needed for long-distance hiking. And more severely, at least as depicted in this book, they were cocky and sure that they wouldn't need to prepare for such an expedition: they could hike it "from off the couch," not needing to spend a lot of time researching the route, planning supplies, or talking with previous hikers.

I don't read a ton of hiking books, but enough for some elements to sound familiar, in particular Cheryl Strayed's "Wild" and  "A Blistered Kind of Love". It would be pretty boring for someone to write "I spent a year carefully reading and planning for a trip, and it all went smoothly without any unexpected developments, the end." It's far more entertaining to read about some disaster striking - ideally not life-threatening, hopefully humorous but bearable, providing a sort of cosmic rebuke to hubris but giving people a chance to recover, learn and grow from their experience. A Walk in the Park felt very much in line with that tradition.

One specific thing that comes up in all these books is people overpacking for their trip. As novice backpackers, they will bring along all the creature comforts that they think they need. And sooner or later they are lovingly set straight by a more veteran hiker who methodically goes through every item in their pack, asks "Do you need this?" "Do you need ALL of these?" and discards anything inessential. (There's a great depiction of this scene in the Reese Witherspoon adaptation of "Wild.") In A Walk in the Park, this comes even earlier, on the night before the hike begins. Kevin and Pete have acquired a quartet of guardian angels, much more experienced hikers who are embarking on their own journey and have lovingly but foolishly agreed to take this inept pair under their wings. As Kevin and Pete haven't yet actually hiked with their loads, though, they fail to appreciate the ritual, and sneak those heavy items back into their packs when they have the chance.

I found the description of their route really interesting. The naive way to do this hike would be to follow the course of the river. But there is no trail through the canyon, and you would essentially need to bushwack through a solid mass of vegetation to do it, much like through a thick jungle; and the ground itself is treacherous, as the river frequently floods and recedes, leaving behind a lot of scree and sand and various unstable surfaces. Hiking along the rim, or even at any point of the rim, is frowned upon: it's perfectly level and not "in" the canyon at all. In between are about 5500 feet of vertical space, essentially compressing climates from Canada to Mexico within much less than a single horizontal mile: the weather at the North Rim might be icy and have huge snow banks, while the weather at the river could be sweltering hot. In recent years, most through-hikes have picked their way along the middle elevations of the canyon, mostly for speed purposes: hiking over rock is vastly faster than through vegetation or sand. But it's also considerably more treacherous. Falls are a real risk, and people can and do fall to their deaths while hiking the cliffs. You're also far away from water - well, as the crow flies you're close, but it might take a whole day or more to descend to the river and refill your water bottle. This is where local knowledge becomes incredibly important. Depending on the area of the park, there might be some reliable springs, or unreliable springs, or "potholes" that retain (scummy) water for some time after rain, which you can use an eye dropper to painstakingly collect.

One upshot of all this is that the hike ended up being even longer than you would think, which was long to begin with. While hiking along the rock was faster, it also adds a lot more miles as you need to navigate into and out of the side-canyons that feed into the Grand Canyon, and you also need to vertically ascend and descend (using ropes!) to navigate between the layers of geological strata. All very hard! Not something to do "off the couch"! 

The injuries and indignities they pick up on their journey are painful to read about, and I frequently found myself wincing in sympathetic pain: blistering feet, cactus prickers stuck in skin, grains of sand wedged into tear ducts. It sounds absolutely miserable. In addition to their physical pain, the duo felt emotional guilt at how they were slowing down their companions' own long-planned-for and ambitious hike. It eventually gets to a point where Kevin and Pete need to call it quits: they are dehydrated, depleted of electrolytes, feverish, miserable, sick. But this is only a temporary setback - I don't think they had ever intended to do the whole hike in a single go, but like many people tackling long journeys like this or the Pacific Crest Trail, they planned to hike it in sections until they traversed the entire thing.

I kind of idly thought about technology and "purity" while reading this. Rich and his friends are very prepared for their hike; in particular, they have access to satellite phones and can send and receive text messages even from within the remote backcountry of the canyon. This is life-saving, as they can summon help and evacuate injured hikers. They also make use of "caches", plastic buckets that are securely placed within the canyon by helpers in advance of their trek, that they can use to resupply along the way. Obviously, these are huge conveniences that wouldn't be available to "true" explorers traveling this way for the first time. I suspect that older veteran hikers would scoff at this and say it invalidates their accomplishments. And they in turn might scoff at someone who, say, floats down the river or hikes along the rim for a section of the hike (or rides a tram into the canyon bottom).

In my trip through the Southwest national parks, the rangers emphasized that the National Parks Service has a fundamentally contradictory mission: "To preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations". If you want to "preserve unimpaired" the resources, the best thing to do would be to close off the parks entirely and not allow any humans to enter them. If you want to provide enjoyment for this generation, you should let as many people as possible into the park and use it as many ways as they would enjoy: driving, helicoptering, offroading, hooking up an RV, etc. In the early years of the NPS they leaned more on the "accessibility" part of their mission, building great hotels and train lines to the parks. More modern parks have focused more on the "preserve unimpaired" aspect, trying to keep a minimal footprint and minimizing human impact on the natural lands. That tension will always exist.

Anyways, back to the book: there are a few storylines that get woven together throughout the book. The first and the narrative spine is the journey itself, the description of the terrain and obstacles as they gradually move from east to west. In parallel is the change in themselves, physically and mentally, as they adapt to the challenges of the canyon: growing stronger muscles, thicker calluses, but more importantly a deeply-seated sense of caution and respect for the dangers of their journey.

Later in the book Kevin also begins to weave in social threads of environmentalism and native history. Quite a few distinct native American tribes have historically lived in various areas in and around the canyon, and those tribes have followed different roads as they seek to preserve their lives and culture in the 21st century. In some cases these are congruent, as the tribes advocate for maintaining the serenity of the canyon, but in one case they are strongly opposed, as a western tribe allows an unlimited number of helicopter tours to descend into their area of the canyon, inflicting immense damage on the peacefulness of nature (but also providing a livelihood for their tribal members for the first time in 150 years).

The final major storyline is a more personal one centered on Kevin Fedarko's father. He grew up near Pittsburgh in a horribly polluted town, and was introduced to the Grand Canyon as a child thanks to a paperback book. Many decades later, the father is dying of terminal cancer, which casts a pall over... well, everything. Kevin deals with some guilt - in all his years living near and working in the canyon, he never invited his father to visit. In between the major sections of the trail, Kevin checks in with his father, tracking his decline or traveling home for a visit. In a touching account near the end of the book, Kevin flies his entire extended family, including his dad, out to visit the canyon. They're doing more of the touristy thing, remaining near the rim, but it's still an amazing chance to witness the beauty of the place in person. 

I had a sort of personal connection to the book since the Grand Canyon was the last place where I went on an honest-to-goodness backpacking trip, back in 2019. Mine was orders of magnitude shorter and easier, just a thru-hike along defined trails from the North Rim to the South Rim, with a couple of nights at Bright Angel Campground and a pretty gentle hike up the length of the canyon. But having those memories helped me connect with Kevin's descriptions of the amazing colors of the rock, the elusiveness of the (enormous!) river, at least some of the impossible-to-communicate sense of the scope and size of the canyon.

So, yeah! I liked this book a lot. It looks like Kevin has written a few other things, including books and quite a few magazine articles. I enjoyed his humor, vivid descriptions, well-crafted storytelling and broader awareness of the context shaping an adventure, so I'd be interested in seeing more of his work in the future. 

Xatu, I Choose You!

I just finished my first-ever playthrough of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. This was a very generous gift from my youngest brother, not tied to any birthday or holiday, just "Oh this is a fun game and you should play it." And he was right, I should!

 

It has been on my radar for quite some time. I played the original X-COM back in the 90s; I don't think I ever owned it, but have vague memories of playing it at a friend's house, where I thought it was (1) very fun, and (2) extremely hard. The series has evolved a lot since then, adding a vertical dimension and a lot of new features, but those two points continue to be true.

 

 

More recently, it's been adjacent to my interests in strategic and tactical games. In particular, there's a sort of second-cousins relationship to the Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun Returns series. They are fairly different - Shadowrun is primarily an RPG that also has a turn-based tactical combat system, while XCOM 2 is a tactical turn-based strategy game that has a strong story and character customizations but isn't really an RPG. There's a pretty strong overlap in the fandom, though. Over the years I've collected quite a few Steam Friends solely on the basis of my Shadowrun campaigns, and a good 40 of them are also XCOM 2 players.

 

 

Shadowrun and XCOM 2 share some visual similarities, like an isometric camera and a near-future grimy cyberpunky aesthetic. But XCOM 2 has much more elaborate maps, true 3D environments that you can rotate, vertical movement, and just overall higher production values with a lot more animations, clutter in the environment, vocal barks and dialogue, and so on. In terms of gameplay, they share some elements like Action Points, Overwatch, grenades, hit points, armor, cover, flanking and critical hits. Shadowrun ultimately goes broader, with its arcane spells, shamanistic spirit totems, cyberware and Matrix, while X-COM 2 goes deeper, with destructible environments, fall damage, weapon modifications, teamwork bonuses and more.

 

 

All that to say, they are very different games, but I felt like my many hours in Shadowrun gave me at least a bit of a head start in XCOM 2. I debated what difficulty mode to play in; my initial playthrough of an RPG will usually be in the "Normal" difficulty, but I haven't played any XCOM for nearly two decades so I opted for the easiest "Rookie" mode instead. I also played without Ironman mode; if I do another playthrough at some point I'll probably both bump the difficulty and turn on Ironman, but while learning the game I was really thankful to be able to reload. I didn't do it very often, but there were cases when, like, I was right-clicking to close a submenu and accidentally issued a Move order, and I don't feel bad about reloading for essentially a mis-click. Overall I felt like the game was still pretty challenging for the first couple of missions on Rookie mode, with at least one or two casualties for every mission. After I got multiple promotions, though, it got a lot easier - of course, my growing familiarity with the game mechanics must have helped a lot, too. I don't think I had any deaths after the first in-game month (though, again, I did reload a couple of times).

 

 

Having knowledge goes a very long way. Whenever I encountered a new enemy for the first time, there was a really high chance of things going sideways. Usually, when you get an enemy down to 0HP, they die and are removed from the field... but a Codex may split in two when near death, creating an additional body that may last into the Alien Turn and cause you mischief; and an ADVENT Priest will always survive one "death" before being revived on the following turn. One of the roughest encounters for me was a Gatekeeper, and I swore out loud the first time it unleashed a MASSIVE AOE attack that did high damage to my entire squad, dispersed over a large enough area to avoid grenade clusters but not enough for the Gateway. But once the swearing ends, I figure out how things work, and eventually all the enemies end up feeling fair. If you know what's upcoming (thanks to a Shadow Chamber), you can equip and plan for the enemy appropriately, and have a counter up your sleeve that can neutralize the threat or at least manage it. In the case of the Gatekeeper, I started to have my Grenadier pack in one or two EMP Bombs. These have an enormous radius, so you can launch them towards the Gatekeeper from far off; they will often disable the Gatekeeper for multiple turns, letting you ignore them entirely while you plink off the rest of the enemy pod; or worst case take off half their health, letting you finish them with a second EMP Bomb or focused fire from the rest of your team. Once again, it comes down to the strategy layer (research, investment, and equipping) and the tactical layer (holding items in reserve, keeping your grenadier close enough to the front to react to a new threat).

 

 

Your soldier classes all feel pretty balanced. I think that at the max promotion Grenadiers shine the best, with multiple AOE attacks and multiple attacks per turn. Sharpshooters are also great once they get Death From Above for a kill-shot action refund; this also makes for a a good pairing with the grenadiers, as the grenadiers can soften up a pod with their bombs, and then the sharpshooters can take down all the survivors. Specialists are really important early on to keep people alive, later on they're more situational. Skullmine and Haywire are very useful, and you can extract more rewards from some missions via hacking. Their weapons tend to be the first to be upgraded, so they are often better fighters than you would expect. Rangers are very versatile, good for scouting and combat. In retrospect I shouldn't have mixed my upgrades between sneak attack and melee since you lose stealth while approaching into melee range. Bladestorm can be amazing though, I've parked a ranger near a door and killed 4 enemies during the alien turn as they run past.

 

 

Of the War of the Chosen faction classes, I think I like the Reaper the best. There's huge utility from being able to scout ahead - for most units, enemies' vision range for concealment is just slightly shorter than your units' vision range, so it's very easy to accidentally get spotted even if you're making cautious advances. But the Reaper needs to be standing right next to an enemy to be spotted, letting you much more freely range ahead. I gave as many Mobility upgrades as possible to my Reaper, so she can reveal much of the map in just two turns or so, letting me properly set up ambushes or whatever with the rest of my units. The flip side is that she doesn't engage in much combat, and often is never revealed during the entire mission. Because of that, she lagged behind my regular XCom soldiers for promotions. I never used her Claymore much.

 

 

The Skirmisher (Pratal Mox in my game) is also fantastic. Right off the bat he can attack twice in one turn. Unlike other units, attacking doesn't immediately end his turn, so he could do two regular full attacks, or fire and then run behind a wall. He also has great utility, including a Grapple ability to quickly reposition over a wide area, and can use the hook to drag an enemy to him and then deliver a strong melee attack. He's basically Boba Fett.

 

 

The Templar was probably the weakest of the three, but also the most fun to play as. Mostly melee, he feels kind of like a Monk class. He builds Focus, which is kind of like Chi, and can use it passively to buff his attacks or spend it on powerful abilities. Melee can be dicey in this game since quite a few enemies can explode on death, but it's a lot of fun.

 

Narratively, XCOM has an interesting mix where all of your soldiers, the characters you actually control in combat, are all randomly generated: different names, personalities, gender, nationality, appearance, etc. But you do get really attached to them over the course of multiple runs. Key moments where, like, "Rooster" managed to use Haywire Protocol to take over a scary mech that was about to wipe out the team, or Elena Drugova consistently staying in Reaper stealth through to the end, shepherding the team to their objective and then landing a killing blow. The voice lines for combat barks are short, but great for establishing just enough personality for you to hang a mental image of the soldier off of.

 

 

MINI SPOILERS

Other than your soldiers, the characters on the ship are all fully written, animated and voice-acted NPCs. They're great too: Shen, the whiz-kid engineer who manufactures equipment, is probably my favorite, but I also like Dr. Tyson, who claims to be squeamish but seems to tackle alien autopsies with great gusto, and who researches all of the weapons that Shen will then build. The various faction leaders and the Chosen also get a good amount of screen time, have vivid personalities that clash with their supposed allies and lead to the sense of complexity in the two opposing sides.

 

 

I really like the after-mission reports where you hearing the propaganda broadcast from ADVENT. It makes me think of a Paul Verhoeven film.

 

 

MEGA SPOILERS

As noted above, this isn't an RPG, and as far as I can tell there really aren't any branching plotlines or story-based decisions to make. You can make a lot of gameplay decisions, like which soldiers to risk in a given mission and how long to put off the main storyline and whether to focus on taking down the Chosen or race to grow your contacted Resistance regions; but the story itself is always the same and will play out the same no matter what route you take to reach it.

 

 

My X-COM memory is fuzzy, but I think this is essentially the inversion of the original game. You were originally a global defense organization, fighting against the stealthy aliens attempting to infiltrate and corrupt Earth. In X-COM 2, the world government is now essentially a Vichy collaboration with the aliens. The main global defense organization is ADVENT, a Human/Alien genetic hybrid, serving the will of the alien masters. X-COM is now a global insurgency, with local resistance cells using infiltration and targeted violence to fight back against the alien invasion. You're also more mobile, zipping around the globe in a souped-up captured UFO, while ADVENT operates from fixed bases, again an inversion from the original.

 

 

I enjoyed the story, but honestly it wasn't the highlight of the game for me: the combat was. Much like, say, the Divinity Original Sin games, this is essentially a really fun and challenging tactical puzzle to overcome, and the story is an entertaining side-course along the way.

 

 

END SPOILERS

Super fun! X-COM 2 nicely scratched that tactical/strategic itch, and with a refreshing near-science-fiction setting that's a fun break from my fantasy standards. If I revisit this in the future, I'll be interested to try a higher difficulty and Ironman setting. I'm sure that the hard-earned lessons I've learned in my rookie playthrough will come in very handy in future outings.