[Saadia] D&D & Identity

How Dungeons & Dragons enables us to play with who we are and who we want to be. Freeform, ReMarkable, and Johnny Decimal.

https://johnnydecimal.com/

An async podcast by Saadia Carbis and Joshua Wold.

Chapters

• 0:00 Off-script
• 0:44 Dungeons & Dragons
• 6:29 Unoffice Hours
• 7:43 Freeform vs. ReMarkable
• 10:22 Johnny Decimal System

Transcript

0:00

Hi, welcome to Async. This is Saadia. Async is a back and forth conversation between Joshua and myself about technology, app development, and remote work. And Joshua, you know, I've got that little intro segment that I just said. I've got it written down on my laptop, so each time I just read it, I could not but notice you in your sort of fugue state, your fevered sickness, tiredness, whatever. You went a bit off script on the last episode. I had a little chuckle to myself. I thought it was great. And I'm not saying you need to do the same. I'm not saying you should also write it down and read the same thing each week. But, you know, consistency is sometimes a good thing. Okay. Dungeons and Dragons. You asked me about what's the pitch for Dungeons and Dragons. You do have to be a bit of a nerd to be into Dungeons and Dragons because it does require that you learn a particular set of rules, that you play a particular way. And I guess, like, what's the pitch? Okay. Well, what's the pitch for a teenager? Let's go with that. The pitch is that... I'll tell it as a story. I, uh, one of the members of our group, a teenager, who, she's, she's, like, quiet, you know, bookish, a little introverted. And if you didn't, you know, know her better, you might say she's, like, very shy. Once you get to know her, of course, everybody sort of wants to get to know anyone. They come out of their shell a bit. But she's this kind of person, you know, doesn't really speak up a lot. And we were, you know, making our Dungeons and Dragons characters. We'd been playing with these characters for a while. And so I was introducing the concept as we started a new campaign. Said, well, I want you to start to think about some of the internal goals for your character. We have our obvious external goal, you know, it's, uh, there is the soulmonger that the demon lich Acererak is using to harvest everybody's souls when they die. So that people who have become revivified are now suffering from an awful disease. And so now you need to go and destroy the soulmonger in the jungles of Chult, hidden away in the lost city of Omu. So, you know, like that sort of style of thing, that's fun. That's an external goal. It's obvious. But what about your character's internal goals? I want you to start thinking about that. And she said something like, well, you know, when the group is making a plan, my character tends to be quiet and just go along with what everybody else wants. And I think for my goal, my internal goal is to be more outspoken, stand up for myself a little more often. And I just thought that was beautiful because, of course, that's just what she's often like in real life. And it just became really obvious, really clear to me that Dungeons and Dragons in this case is being used as a way to explore identity. What sort of person could I be in this using fiction to explore different ideas for, you know, self-growth? What would it feel like if I was more outspoken as a person? What would that look like? I can practice that. I can see how other people respond to that and so forth. You know, another one of my characters is actually one of my players is doing the opposite. This boy is very thoughtful person. He puts a lot of consideration into his in regular life, into the sorts of things that he does. And he's playing a character who loves to rush in headfirst and just hit everything with an axe. You know, his sort of character's whole thing is don't think, just rush in and do it. And that's great for him because that's something he needs practice with internally in his own personality. He needs sometimes to get out of his head. And Dungeons and Dragons affords him the opportunity to do that. Now, of course, this is particularly applicable to teenagers. But it's also applicable to adults. It's also applicable to us. There are, we are constantly growing and learning and changing and our life situation changes. Maybe we're having a new kid and we're wrestling with the concept of new responsibilities. Maybe work is crazy at the moment and we're trying to find better time balance, life work balance. You know, all of these sorts of things. And we don't ever really take the time to practice different approaches, to ask ourselves about different approaches. And none of this is usually, most of the time, none of this is direct, intentional self-practice. You know, it's not intentional improving on my personality. I'm not going and making a character because I recognize I need to work on my ability to, I don't know, perceive what's in the world around me. No. It's all subconscious and that's what the beauty is in. That's where the beauty is. It's a game. It's a fun game. But subconsciously, it's really focused on helping me to understand who I am and play with who I want to be. That probably does a good job of summarizing it. So that's why I like Dungeons and Dragons. Aside from that, it's a screen optional. Usually we play with no screens. It's, it's, uh, uses imagination. It is, it's hilarious fun. It's, uh, you know, working together as a team and all of this sort of stuff, you know, it's got all of those added benefits as well. All right. You asked me how I've added this new feature to my website where people can schedule in a call with me just to chat. Maybe it's to chat about a blog post or it can be about anything else. And I had one person, uh, contact me to do that. But they happen to live local. So we just went out for coffee instead. So nobody really has done that yet. Uh, so we'll see. It might just disappear after a few months because nobody's clicking on the link to schedule a call. And that's fine. I'm just not as popular as I thought I was. Now, I didn't really think it would get that much traction. But it is a great idea for your podcast. If you've got this podcast around having interesting, meaningful conversations with people and hearing their stories, a little bit like, um, you should check out conversations with Richard Feidler on ABC. It's an Australian radio show. A bit like that. Uh, well, of course, you've got a ton of friends and contacts to do that with. But also, you know, people, random people, listeners could get in touch and you could do it that way. Let's talk about Freeform, the Apple app. And in typical Apple fashion, it's not really getting a lot of love. It's not getting a lot of updates. You sort of wonder if there's even a team working on Freeform or if they've been repurposed to work on something else. Maybe they're all working on the AI stuff or Siri or, uh, I don't know, Vision Pro. No, that team's also pulled off. So it's not getting a lot of updates and it's really hard to maintain a passion about a system that could disappear just out of negligence from the, you know, the software provider. So I get it. I get why you want to explore other options. I don't think my workflow is necessarily the right workflow for you, though. You know, I'm a pretty capable developer and I think that that's key in how I design. And if you're learning still to program, then maybe programming with code isn't the right way. You'll just spend ages trying to figure out how do I do this thing and then decide you don't like how it looks. And that could be good if your main goal is to learn to code. That's actually a really, really good way to do it. But if your main goal is to get something that looks nice really quickly, then not such a good way. I'm sure you'll figure something out. But the thing I want you to do, the thing that I think would be most interesting is I think you should get a remarkable tablet. I think these new e-ink high refresh rate displays that come with a pen and that sort of thing is perfect for what you need. It's actually more freeform, like literally freeform. And maybe that's an adaption for you is, you know, maybe it'll be harder to be more freeform than the freeform app is. But I think it'll be less of an adaption than switching to my way of designing in code. And the Paper Pro is priced pretty similar to the remarkable Paper Pro is pretty similar to an iPad. And they have a lot of similar like design philosophies in terms of how the product design actually works. I think you should give that a shot. That could be a really, really cool way of designing. And I feel like it sort of aligns well with your personality, with your style. You're an amazing illustrator. And so that's somewhere else, something else that's good for. That could be cool. Just this morning, I have been messing around on my computer a bit, implementing something called the Johnny Decimal System. Now, I don't know if this is going to stick, but Johnny Decimal is a way of organizing your files and notes. And emails and things like this, according to a particular decimal-based system, you know, numbering. Say like, for me, I have, let's see, 42.02 is this podcast, is async. And I'm not going to go into the details on how that works. I'll pop a link to it. There's a really good website that explains everything there in the show notes. But I want to keep you updated on how that goes. I'm not sure if I'm ready to fully commit to it, but I've just been playing with it. I think I might end up committing. And it's like a really structured way of thinking about your life, really. All of the different aspects of your life, what makes you you, keeping your digital aspects of that organized in a specific way. I'm wondering if you've ever come across Johnny Decimal. And if you have any particular strategies for organizing your life, whether it's maybe you have a file system strategy, like keeping your documents in a particular way, in a particular order. Does that strategy include your Apple Notes or your Apple Voice Memos or your email? Or are they separate systems entirely? Johnny Decimal tends to combine them together. I'm keen to keep you updated, but also hear your thoughts on how you handle this sort of problem.