meh hotel lost a bunch of my stuff (keyboard, mouse, cables, MY ALMOST FINISHED BOOK!! {unbearable lightness of being})

“serenity now”

upper west side where fairway market is located is so nice.. I think it’s some yuppie area.. people constantly stopping to ask if they can help you find anything..

fairway market is so cool… narrow aisles with tall shelves.. loads and loads of prepared items.. sandwiches.. dozens of deli items.. sushi.. guacamole.. soups.. quality ingredients.. how can I eat anything from safeway or togos ever again.. it’s like one of those yuppie stores you see in sitcoms. the fish is actually displayed unpackaged on ice.. like some fish market.

stumbled upon a magnolia bakery by chance. the cupcakes we’re used to are light and fluffy.. the ones in manhattan bakeries are more bread-y.

as I was leaving the Met and headed for central park, I witnessed a curious situation that was perhaps more interesting than anything in the Met. There were two schoolboys, one in gym shorts and a white tee on some weird skateboard thing, and the other in trousers with coat and Kippah on a scooter. I didn’t have camera handy and by the time I snapped a picture with my phone they were so far away =[ You can still sort of see them behind the large lady with the dog. I probably would not have noticed if the skateboarder didn't glance at me as he passed me by, which probably lent the whole thing some amusement.

okay I think that's enough

metropolitan museum is okay, probably more than okay if you like art

soho meh, my feet/legs were already dying so I only wandered around a couple hours… I guess all the interesting stores are hiding somewhere.. was just mass normal brands mostly.

fairway market is awesome! chicken salad sandwich was “good” too. I was expecting it to be amazing since NYT recommended it but I guess you can only get so good with a chicken salad sandwich.. prices in manhattan actually seem manageable if you stay outside touristy areas.. I’m going to go back to fairway market tomorrow morning

anime convention meh.

nothing extraordinary worth mentioning about wcg

brooklyn bridge meh, maybe if you’ve never been to a city or seen a bridge before.

wall street meh. I was around there friday morning, I kind of expected there to be some vitality in the air. nyse not open to visitors.

At the Jacob K. Javits Center with the NY Anime Festival

Hopefully it’s one group Friday, the other Saturday. I have a lot of touristing to do, don’t have it all planned yet :)

As always, I promise to take pictures.

No promises on keeping my promise though ;)

“As always”

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.

This concept is widely repeated: first, don’t lose. There are many other passages dealing with certainty.

He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be capture by them.

Move not unless you see an advantage… no general should fight a battle simply out of pique.

Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeed by content. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead be brought back to life.

But that’s not all Sun Tzu had to say.

Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been associated with long delays.

Rapidity is the essence of war. (granted this is out of context)

A soldier’s spirit is keenest in the morning; by noonday it has begun to flag; and in the evening, his mind is bent only on returning to camp.

If, in the midst of difficulties we are always ready to seize an advantage, we may extricate ourselves from misfortune.

Just as your courage must not be reckless, your caution should not make you timid.

In this post, I’m going to assume you already know what it means to call something “zero sum.” I’ll briefly explain it, but if you don’t get it it’s not because I’m bad. You need to go look it up. :)

If something is “zero sum”, for every winner there is a loser, or everything that someone wins, somebody else lost. Warcraft games are zero sum: every game has a winner and a loser; in a simplified form, gambling games such as poker are zero sum: every penny someone wins comes from another person’s bankroll; simplistically, trading is zero sum: every share someone buys, someone else sells.

What if you are playing poker at the Bellagio and the house takes a portion of every hand’s winnings? You are playing a negative sum game. The winnings and the losses add up to less than zero. What if you’re playing a sponsored tournament, and company ENONE has added 1,000,000 USD to the prize pool? It is now a positive sum game.

What if you counted the house and the sponsor as part of your game? Then again, it is zero sum. Whether something is zero, positive, or negative sum is a result of your perspective.

Let’s stay with the poker example and look at the universe of all players. There is no money going out of our universe, and no money coming in. They are playing only for each others’ bankrolls. The universe is zero sum.

Let’s categorize our players into two groups. There are regular players, whom we’ll call Sharks, and there are dabblers, whom we’ll call Toro. We don’t care about Shark Thick-Face or Shark Hot-Temper individually, but only as a group. We don’t care about their motivations for playing.

Now I’m going to say that the Sharks profit overall, and the Toro fall into the depths of doom. Whether this is the case with regulars and dabblers in real life is not our concern. Furthermore, when Sharks play against other Sharks, they break even. When Toro play amongst themselves, they break even. The Sharks profit from the Toro.

The Sharks, therefore, are playing a positive-sum game! Toro, in joining the universe, are “sponsoring” the Sharks.

Did you follow? The universe is zero-sum. Sharks playing sharks is zero-sum. But when Toro join the game, the Sharks collectively profit!

We could further subdivide into greater and lesser sharks, but much easier to feed off Toro.

Know your perspective. Know where your edge comes from.

30. … the experienced soldier, once in motion, is never bewildered; once he has broken camp, he is never at a loss.

(The reason being, according to Tu Mu, that he has taken his measures so thoroughly as to ensure victory beforehand. “He does not move recklessly,” says Chang Yu, “so that when he does move, he makes no mistakes.”)

31. Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.