Transcript
Years ago, back when I was still shooting video on miniDV tape, I interviewed this weird sorta fringe-y scientist guy in Palm Desert, California. I actually had responded to a craigslist ad. Yeah, Craigslist is how I started out in freelance video production. I still work with a director today that hired me originally on Craigslist like 20 years ago to shoot commercials for the Karl Strauss Brewing company. Excellent beer and an excellent project to work on.
But this one day I responded to an ad that said a mathematician was looking for a “live-in” videographer to produce a documentary on him. The pay rate was conveniently left out of the ad, which was typical, but the whole thing just sounded so weird to me. A “live-in” documentarian? For a documentary about a mathematician? It was too bizarre not to call the number.
I had no intention of doing the live-in thing because I only lived an hour away so I figured if the job paid okay I could probably convince the guy to just let me drive in daily or whatever. I only met him that one time and I rolled tape during our initial conversation and he was definitely a strange dude. But after that trippy meeting, I was hit with this kinda cool idea that is the strange topic for today’s episode.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we do more twisting of strange philosophical concepts to make ‘em relate to our tabletop hobbies! And we thank our patrons for supporting this pursuit for perfection. You’ll get that TLDR a the end. As per usual.
So my meeting with this guy was pretty interesting. I’ll try to make this quick and get to the point, but, you know, this is me talking at ya, so good luck.
I called the number and spoke to the guy, his name was Marko Rodin. I didn’t know who he was or anything and back then it never even occurred to me to look him up online. I just drove out to meet him at his house in the Palm Desert Country Club. I grew up out there in that area and I even lived in the Palm Desert Country Club after being discharged from the Army. Yes, honorably, contrary to most people’s assumptions. One thing of note is that despite it’s name, the Palm Desert Country Club isn’t an actual country club, it was just a collection of open neighborhoods built around a couple of golf courses, more like a Home Owner’s Association than anything else.
So I get to Rodin’s house, it’s just one of the normal places facing the golf course and I knock on the door and I don’t quite remember who answered the door, I think it was a kiddo let me in. I do remember that the house was dark inside, all the windows curtained or shuttered and coupled with the big Spanish tile flooring, it was definitely nice and cool in there when it was like, you know, a hundred and fifty degrees outside cause it was summertime in the desert. Rodin himself greeted me and this was when I started tripping out. He was in his early 40s maybe, he was nice, kinda chill but in that weird hippy way, where you’re not sure, you know, how weird things are gonna get. And he’s wearing red swim trunks and nothing else. He leads me into the living room, and it’s not set up like a normal living room at all.
First off, all the blinds are drawn and I can hear a bunch of kids playing and swimming in a backyard pool or something. There’s a table with a computer on it in the middle of the room with a couple of monitors, and all the other furniture in the room are beds. Not like a barracks or anything, more like a hippie wonderland, just a bunch of futons and mattresses piled with fluffy comforters and pillows, completely ringing the room, basically wall to wall. And being projected across one entire wall is the movie Doctor Strangelove, playing with the sound off. I ask him if I can shoot our initial conversation, he says sure and while I’m digging out my gear, he just flops down onto the bed nearest the computer and that’s how we chat for over an hour, me standing there with my camera and him lounging in this bed.
So we talked about this pretty fringe-y math counting and geometry concept – it’s called Vortex Math – and I’m pretty sure it’s been shown to not necessarily be a viable thing, but he was also showing me how it could map any organic object, like a flower as it grows, for example. There’s too much to rabbit hole about all this, but he showed me something that’s now called a Rodin coil and said he’d invented it and – this is where it gets even weirder – the military actually uses these things in their satellites. If you google Rodin coil, you can see how to make one yourself. He explained to me that most coils of this nature are wrapped a certain way with a pair of copper wires to generate a magnetic field, but he’d tweaked the wrapping technique to allow space for the spirit, cause everything should take into account the metaphysical … spirit of the universe or something like that. And his coil design does actually work better than traditional designs in certain capacities, and like I said, his design is used in satellites today that have to account for time relativity, albeit on a very small scale, but still, that’s pretty wild right? I mean, the fact that we’re using technology that essentially incorporates time dilation, that’s … that’s just trippy to me. And that’s just satellites, not anything specific to Rodin.
All right, where the hell am I going with all this, where’s the tabletop gaming hobby stuff?! I get it, I get it, I’m too long-winded for YouTube. And most parties. But I swear I’m gonna make this relate to our hobby. Sort of.
So, back then, after talking to this pretty weird dude, and not taking the job – not because he wasn’t cool or anything, he just didn’t want to pay anything for his video production. He essentially needed someone to work on spec, meaning someone who would shoot and edit a documentary for a year and then sell it to get paid. I couldn’t afford to do that, I don’t really know who could, but you know, it’s always about the money, right? I mean, I wish I’d been in a financial position to do this weird gig, just for the experience but, unfortunately you know, I wasn’t.
So a few days after having met Rodin, I was back home and I had a thought, that came outta nowhere, as thoughts do, and it was geometrical and mathematical in nature, so I called him up to ask if this idea I’d had was valid. He agreed that it was, but that may not really mean anything, I’m sure there are folks out there who could set me straight, but you know, whatever. I like this concept because of what it means for me in my daily life, and not for any sort of practical scientific purpose. And here it is.
Perfection as we think of it doesn’t actually exist, and therefore, the pursuit of perfection is perfection. To illustrate what I’m getting at, I asked my buddy Zaziggi to do a little 3d animation for us.
We think, casually, that there is such a thing as a perfect circle. But in reality we know that because of pi, there is no mathematically perfect circle. And this is because every circle is actually just a cross-section of a spiral. And of course there are spirals everywhere, because our universe is in constant motion. We’re never in the same place, ever. Even though we’re standing on a ball of rock and we think we’re in the same place every day, we’re not, we’re moving through space all the time because the ball of rock we’re standing on is moving through space, all the time. So we’re never in the same place, ever. We’re always on the move and we’re always somewhere new.
So, I found this whole idea to be really trippy and vastly comforting, this idea that perfection doesn’t exist. But we are always trying to achieve perfection and so that attempt or pursuit of perfection must be perfection because it’s as close as we’re ever going to get. At least in our universe. Or our reality. The pursuit of perfection is perfection.
Now, this might not mean anything at all to you. It might strike you as dumber than a shoe without a tongue. Totally cool. For me, though, it’s helped lighten some loads so to speak.
Here’s just one quick example using our tabletop hobby. Couple videos ago I speed-crafted some forest terrain and I thought about painting up the Woodland Scenics tree armature trunks and branches. But I decided I didn’t have enough time to bother with that and that they’d work just fine on the tabletop without that extra work. And they do, they work totally fine on the table for me, for the purposes of the games I play with ‘em, they don’t bother me that they haven’t been painted up. So they turned out as perfect as I needed them to be, which for me was successfully answering the equation of time plus effort.
So while these little trees are far from being objectively perfect finished models, they’re perfect enough for what I needed. And as we just established, since literal perfection doesn’t actually exist, there’s always an element of subjective emotion in the perception of perfection and this has allowed me to be okay, even happy with – or at least satisfied with, stuff that ain’t perfect. This subjective emotional thing is what ultimately matters. We know when we could have practically done something better. Or when we should have done something better. You know, projects or social engagements or personal growth situations, or a whole host of things that might continue to bother us when we look back on them. And that’s all fine. But we don’t need to let that stuff weigh us down too much. We want to learn from those things we call mistakes, we want to do better in the future, 100 percent. But knowing perfection is the pursuit of perfection means that we should ultimately feel good about trying to do better, because if we’re trying to do better, we’re doing better.
It may take a long time to achieve real world better results in things we do, but we’re only gonna get those better results by constant practice. Practice makes perfect, right? But practice never ends.
So the bottom line here is some stuff is just as perfect as it needs to be. And if we feel like we want to or need to do better at something, then we can, and should, try again, simple as that. And we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves for not achieving perfection. Yes, we should self-critique and face our shortcomings and learn from our mistakes, but too much self-criticism might just be an over-indulgence that hampers our ability to progress.
So, go do something to a level you wanna do it to and be okay feeling satisfied with it. And if you want to try to do something better, give it a shot. Pursue perfection and know that the trying is where the value is.
See ya!