Greetings, friends. (XXXV)

Greetings, friends. Fifteen minutes starts… now. I am in New Hampshire now. I am le tired. I did that very silly thing that I often do the night before a long flight and just stayed up late packing and doing random things like putting up beef jerky to dry and also writing for an hour when I could’ve just written for fifteen minutes like I promised myself.

One thing I did not do is bother to check whether I had anything on my laptop with which to amuse myself on a long flight, or, for that matter, check to see if I had actually packed my Kindle. You might think that I would have taken a moment last night to do this, since I was up late anyway, especially given that Alaska Airlines thoughtfully sent me an email and a text at just past 2 a.m. to say sorrie internet no worky on your flight tomorrow hurrr kthx bai!

Very thoughtful of them. No worries, I said to myself, I shall spend the flight Kerballing.

Kerbal Space Program is my favorite video game of all time, and that is absolutely saying something. I have spent probably thousands of hours playing it. Like, so many hours that I actually stopped launching it via Steam after 278 hours because I no longer wished to know just how many hours I have devoted to this game.

To master Kerbal Space Program you must have a basic understanding of both rocket science and orbital mechanics. And this is a game, you ask? Why, yes! You are the director of the space exploration program of a race of small green people who live on a planet that looks kinda like Earth in a solar system that kinda looks like our Solar System. You get a launch facility with a launch pad, a runway, and a vehicle assembly building stuffed with rocket parts. Also, the little green guys and gals who crew your spacecraft are super goofy and cute. Go!

Kerbal Space Program is fiendishly difficult to learn, but incredibly fun for a certain kind of nerd, and I must confess, I am that type of nerd. I’m not alone, because there is a massive community of modders and, I think, thousands of mods. I could talk about Kerbal Space Program for hours but I have allotted myself only 15 minutes today.

Anyway, I thought I would spend the flight catching up on the KSP game that I have been playing off and on for the last five or so years. I think I’ve got a couple dozen mods loaded in the game, and about 80 active missions in progress. I have crewed space stations in orbit around Minmus, Eve, Duna, and Dres, and I am planning a grand mission to Jool to wrap it all up, because…

The latest trailer came out three days ago, and I was literally out of my seat, cheering and pumping my fist in the air by the end.

The YouTubers are losing their minds over everything that is wrong with the upcoming release, but it does say EARLY ACCESS in big letters everywhere.

Me? I am beyond excited. Clear my calendar and hold all my calls. Do not expect me to return emails or texts before April. So I figured I’d invest a few more hours in my OG KSP game before that happens.

As an aside, I think I have conclusively determined that, at my size, it is better even to sit in the middle seat of an airline exit row, than to have an aisle seat anywhere else in coach. Normally, I sit in the aisle as a rule, because claustrophobia sucks when you are belted into an airline seat during take-off and landing.

I don’t have status on Alaska Airlines (yet), which is I assume why I can’t book exit row seats at purchase time. But I do get notifications from their app when check-in opens, and at that point I can claim exit row seats. This doesn’t seem to be guaranteed, as for example today a middle seat was the best I could manage, but by being on the ball when check-in opens online, I’ve managed to sit in the exit row on 4 of my last 4 flights on Alaska.

As big as I am, the extra leg room and, almost more importantly, the fact that the person in front of me cannot lean their seat back is, it turns out, far more important to me than sitting in an aisle seat.

Anyway, there I am, sandwiched between two dudes as big as I am, but reveling in my comfy leg room and extremely vertical forward seat back, when I discover that I do not in fact have my Kindle. In fact all I have for amusement is the iOS Kindle app on my phone, and the only book I have downloaded is Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself.

Incidentally, Bill Walsh’s unspoken secret of leadership success seems to be… being Bill Walsh. I am joking slightly, but I think you have to have a certain force of personality, and a certain inherent integrity that are both difficult to acquire and quite impossible to fake, before any of his leadership dictums are practically applicable.

So once the aircraft ascends above 10,000 feet, and we are welcome to take out our laptops and large portable electronics, I put Walsh’s ruminations aside, pull down the tray table from the seat back that the person in front of me cannot, thank God, recline, and I dig out the ol’ MacBook.

Wouldn’t you know, neither Steam nor Kerbal Space Program nor any of the couple dozen mods I use nor my saved game are on the laptop. In fact, that was on my old work laptop, before they swapped me out for an M1. I have backups, sure… on a hard drive at home. Worse, none of the three or so toy coding projects I had been working on in a parts-on-the-workshop floor sort of way were functional without some amount of Internet access to allow me to update libraries and/or view documentation.

I read a lot of Bill Walsh on the flight. Finally I got bored and started a new local Minecraft game. That went surprisingly well, although I find I feel a little bashful about being a 40-something year old man playing Minecraft in public.

And here we are at 25 minutes! I don’t know whether it’s worse to skip a day or to keep running over my time budget. If you’re reading this, I hope you are better rested than I am. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. Toodles!