How do you design?

I wrote an essay, How the sausage is made, on how I actually design on Heads or Tales, my blog for Chimera Creative. On the same day, I watched and participated in an interesting thread here on the Forge. The connection between the two was revealing.

In the thread, A wild and an untamed thing - how literature refuses gaming, I argued that waxing poetically about how a fiction author writes, specifically by claiming that the characters compel the writer to make choices, is baloney. In fact, the author (and maybe other influencers, like editors) is the only person deciding what happens in the story. The character "doesn't exist" and can't decide or force the writer to do anything.

But, in my blog post, I described a single day as I worked to design my next game. In the post, I provide a lot of colorful details about the restaurant I was in when I worked. Those details have nothing at all to do with game design; they merely attempt to color my place and state of mind as I did design. I could easily have written the explanation of my design without the details.

In essence, I was waxing poetically. I turned the essay into a piece of creative non-fiction. Contained within it are specific, nitty gritty details about how I actually design. But those are wrapped within colorful details, show-not-tell writing, and other tricks of the writing trade. I turned my explanation of how I design into an aesthetic in and of itself. That's exactly what I argued against in the thread here on the Forge.

How do I rectify those apparently contradictory positions? How do I live with myself?!?

Why did I include the details? Because I think it's better writing. Because I think my point is made uniquely this way, rather than simply describing things without the details. My message changes with the details, for better or worse. I chose to go with them.

But, at the same time, I really did make an effort to explain, very plainly and non-poetically, the process I go through to design a game. I think it's there. I talk about the question-and-answer process I put myself through, writing in my notebooks.

So, I'm curious, for those of you who might bother to read How the sausage is made -- do you learn anything? Do you care? Is the pizza parlour stuff nonsense? Or, does it shed light on the process somehow?

It's meant to shed light. It's meant to de-mystify the creative process. To show how relatively boring and mundane it is. My goal in writing this piece was to actually remove any notion that "divine inspiration" is part of design, that instantaneous inspiration only comes after some serious thinking and work.

What do you think?

This is wildly different from my creative process. It sounds slightly closer to how I write fiction, but wow.

A fascinating read. Thanks.

yrs--
---Ben

Okay, first off, I don't think these two ways of expressing yourself are contradictory. I think they just have different purposes.

You don't think that waxing poetical is going to get across the technical tools that one needs to design games. Neither do I. I didn't get much in the way of technical tools from the article. Sorry.

But I did get a good, warm sense of solidarity with another creative mind. And that's another kind of support. It shows me that there are many ways to do things, neither more nor less acceptable in the eyes of the almight God of Creating Stuff. You're giving people the emotional tools to deal with the rigors of creative work. And you can't do that without personalizing it.

So that's what I got from it. Oh, and the beautiful, spectacular, mind-opening typo ("love of fear" when you meant "love or fear") which I firmly intend to base a scenario and possibly a game design around some day. It's on my list. My long, long, incredibly long list.

Tony, it is indeed a typo, but a serendipitous one, apparently. Thanks for the comments!

I'm not sure it's possible to really lay out the tools of the trade for this kind of thing. The process is too personal. So I suspect explaining how the process effects you on a personal level is as close as you're likely to get. It's rather a poetic process in its own way, how better to describe it than by waxing poetic? It's certainly more informative than a dry disertation about how you write questions and answers in notebooks during lunch, without any insight into how that works for you.

And yes, I think it is very similar to what you were arguing against in the other thread. The way I see it, you asking a question about your game system, which inspires the answer to that question (an answer you didn't know until you wrote the question that triggered it) is all but identical to creating a fictional character who's "personality" has an influence or inspirational effect on the flow of a story. Your description of the process is just less flowery than Le Guin's.

But... after reading the rest of that other thread, I also got the impression that you were taking issue not so much with the process, or even the description of the process, so much as the idea of assuming that the poetic description should be taken literally.

So I'm not sure there's really a conflict between your position there, and your "How the sausage is made" essay.

And for what it's worth, I think your process is great.
It's almost exactly the approach I take with my half-assed attempts at writing. I've got piles of paper & notes floating around my desk, where I've been talking to myself trying to figure things out. I really should use the notebook approach to help things stay more organized.

Hi, Matt.

This was a fun read. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who scribbles in little notebooks in pizza parlors. (The With Great Power card mechanic was born in a little deli near my workplace and scribbled in a hardcover digest-sized unlined artist notebook.)

The sentence that brought a smile to my face, in light of the other thread, was:

The "gambit" mechanic I had been killing myself over finally revealed itself.

Dear Matt,

I think you're horribly misguided in your crusade. That's what I think.

I've been off these boards for quite a while because, well, I wanted to get back to writing. Writing stories. Which is what I wanted to do all my life. And which I did for a big chunk of my life. And then I stopped. And now it's time to get back to work.

And so I left. Because I couldn't afford anymore to keep thinking about the process of writing. All the discussion of CA and Egri's premise and more had turned me into the caterpillar looking at its legs as it walked. I couldn't go anywhere because I was so busy trying to get all my legs to walk "right."

And this isn't just something that happened because of the Forge. Blocked, I started reading a lot of books on writing, taking classes -- all of which looked at the process of writing from the "outside" to explain how its "really" done -- much like your agenda, Matt.

And so, I spent all my time trying to get my natural storytelling instincts to work "right," objectively and productively, and ended up tripping over myself and starting one draft of a script after another.

Interestingly, just before stopping here for a visit, I started a fresh draft of a script that's been hounding me. I thought, "You know how to write a story. No more Premise. No more carefully constructed character arcs. Just trust the characters will carry the day."

And it's been going gangbusters. The scenes are full of conflict. The story is moving forward. Everyone's got an agenda. The story arc is getting clear. And all that Premise stuff is taking care of itself. It's there -- but I don't need to think about it. (Ron pretty much nailed this issue in his last post.)

I think you're misguided in your comically rigid rational assumptions about the creative process. The way you spit out the word "poetic" in your posts -- as if you might as well be saying "peeing on the third rail, for all the good it will do you," is, to my mind, peculiar. Because it misses how many people -- actors, writers, directors -- actually work. Actually get good work done. Actually are productive.

Game design is a creative act. But like outlining or designing a marketing campaign, it's not the act of creation that anyone's shooting for. The purpose of game design is to design a tool that let's the vital act of creation happen. After all, you don't know if the game design is working until players experience it and report back. What they make, their pleasure in the process of the game is what says "Yes," or "No."

One can't really design everything from the outside in. I believe these days, when it comes to the private acts of creation -- like writing, acting, directing (shared activities, yes, but not anything I have to ship to strangers and make them understand it on the fly) -- that working from the outside is death to the act. (Others may work differently. Others have sex differently than I do. I don't think differences in practice nullify my point.)

Designing a game, I think, might well require this objectivity of the construction -- because it’s an instruction book on building a process. But it is not the process itself. That's up to the players to do. And that may well be a very inspired event for them indeed.

You seem to think little of "divine inspiration". We can, of course, go around this all day long. When has "enough" work been done to have "earned" the inspiration. And so on. What can one say. Jung perceived an "oceanic feeling" that connected all of us. Freud mocked him for it. Jung was a weirdo. Okay. So he was a weirdo. Does this mean he didn't feel what he said he felt? And Freud was no straight shooter either. His muscular claim on rational thinking didn't necessarily make his thinking more muscular or rational. In other words, how do you know you're right about how Le Guin works? Who are you to say? The fact that you are standing on the side of right thinking rationality? Really? And you know that how? Because you've made sure to partition off the proper ways of thinking from those bad ways that you know are already bad?

Here's my observation of people over the last five years: People are really weird. All of us. And the person who knows he knows how things "really" work is the guy I'm going to most calmly nod to, much like a crazy homeless guy out at the beach in Santa Monica raging at the government. Because, after all, what am I going to say?

You are, by the way, arguing against a straw man when you disparage Le Guin's comments. You keep twisting them around to make it sound like she's saying the character in her imagination is forcing her to do things against her will. She's never said that, I've never come across a quote from a writer who said such a thing. Such a person -- whether an actor or a writer claiming such a thing (meaning they were doing things they had no control over) would be psychotic. Which is not what the creative act is about.

What she said was that Ged, independent of her own expectations or desires ("I really need this chapter to wrap up," "Really, this speech is going on too long,") kept providing options of behavior that she would rather not be dealing with, didn't expect, didn’t match her idea of what would be happening, are inconvenient for her needs to wrapping up the book. Whatever. He didn't make her do anything.

But he did, in the moment of writing -- which again, is completely different than the moment of organizing material, plotting, determining theme from a rational point of view or whatnot -- provide unexpected choices, actions, words that she could never have seen coming. Because she was following the character.

Now, does Ged exist outside her brain? That's a rabbit hole I have no desire to go down. It doesn't matter to me.

What does matter to me that in the creative act -- writing, acting, directing -- if you're on your game, you will discover or find things if you follow the characters and the situations. This is the creative mind at work. There is an element of following the "dream" and writing it down. (Nobokov and others notwithstanding. Again, I'm speaking of the writers and actors who work this way -- not those that don't.)

All she's saying is that she imagines in her mind's eye a character, Ged, and transcribes what he's doing.

A lot of people who I really like and respect around here truly believe that writing is the stringing together of the words. Like instructive game text: making prose clear. The art of fiction, whether on the page or in the bodies of actors is a mix of clarity and following that strange inspiration.

Now, again, Le Guin might have all those elements of Ged inside her that make Ged do what Ged does (and she probably does) -- but if she's not aware of all that inside her, when Ged does something surprising she's still surprised.

She's not waxing poetic when she's saying this. She's stating the facts.

And this has everything to do with the process of writing. Her process, at least. And mine, too, apparently. And that process is getting the hell out of your own way and following the events as your strange little writer/actor/director brain tosses them up as you go.

Later on you (or your editor) can go back and make cuts, rephrase things, add a scene of connective tissue to make the plot whole. Whatever. But in that moment, to really trust these things, these characters, with a life of their own, and see what they/your imagination/the muses/random electrical sparks in the brain/God offers up is really the discipline of the creative act.

And I want to really repeat this. For many, but not all, this is the DISCIPLINE. To hold in one's mind the various fictional constructs, let them interact with each other, follow their lead, and transcribe or enact the results through their feelings, passions, thoughts and deeds.

It is not an easy thing to do -- in that it's easy to get caught up with trying to get it "right," to avoid "wasting time," and not produce anything that "doesn’t make sense" or "isn't clear." To trust in the moment, to leave the editing for later, is the tough call. And not everyone can do it. And some of us can forget out to do it and need to hit that discipline again.

You can, and might well, re-jigger everything I'm saying with all sorts of rational arguments and whatnot.

But does the character "exist". It depends on what you mean be exist. As a construct within the writer's mind, it certainly does. As a professional actor I can assure you that I have gone through the process of building and finding 'the character' and when the cameras rolled or the audience was in front of me, I did things as the character, not as I would do them. And I did them not with a beat by beat plan, but by simply responding to the stimulae. Was I the character? No. (See psychosis above.) But was there a character out there for me to find and build. Apparently yes. I mean, I'm the guy who did it. I'm the guy describing what it felt like to me.

You might -- and others on this board do -- seem to disparage this element of feeling and suggest it's really not what's "going on." Well, my friend. To that I must say, "Baloney."

That element of the experience is what lets me know I'm on track. It's the feedback let's me know I'm doing my job right. It may not make any sense to you, but all I can say ask is, "Do you need to do it?" That is, what in your actions requires you to be open to this process? How do you know that this discipline, this strange, nonsensical experience isn't exactly what happens as part of the creative process.

For Ron and others who suggest that Egri's got it right because he's looking at it from the outside -- wrong. Yes, he's recording an element of the artifact after it's made. But does that really tell us what the writer is doing? For some writers yes, perhaps. But others, like Le Guin, with a solid body of work behind her, no. Her experience is to record the fictional constructs as she watches them in her minds eye. Yes premise and all is happening whether she's aware of it or not (as Ron noted), but her process is following the character. Too bad for you if you don't know how that's possible. But that's what the woman's said.

Yeah, we could go in with cat scans and take apart her brain while she's working. But that wouldn't help her write better.

You've assumed that her experience of writing is actually some sort of layered poetry which actually obscures the process. Maybe not, Matt. To be blunt, maybe she's just doing something you can't, or won't, do. We all have different skills, different ambitions. Moreover, we all have different "delight buttons". And, maybe just as important, we all have the places and things we feel uncomfortable with, think are wrong, think are wastes of time, think are foolish, make no sense to us, or are even scary.

She described, actually and concretely, a portion of her writing experience -- the part of the actual writing. The part of actually writing a fictional tale There might have been the outlining phase, the thinking about it phase, the random note phase… but when it came down to it, she had to hit the writing phase. And that's when she did the things you simply don't believe she did.

Why you don't believe her, I don't know? I can only ask, "What was it like when you wrote your novels?" Not, "How would you write a novel?" But how did it go when you created a series of fictional events? And, how did they turn out. Because when I've read the fiction of those around here, I always, wonderfully, see all the intelletual gear churnining, the thematic stakes laid clearly on the table. But seldom am I caught up, seldom do I feel characters with beating hearts, never have I felt I was reading a story. The writing is like an essay gussied up with fictional characters. Which is a fine technique if one wants to make a point. But the story-tellers craft is a different set of priorities -- and a different set of win condidtions. (Ie, I don't win as a storyteller because I made my point well, but because the audience stayed to the end.)

Best,

Christopher

Matt Snyder wrote: In essence, I was waxing poetically. I turned the essay into a piece of creative non-fiction. Contained within it are specific, nitty gritty details about how I actually design. But those are wrapped within colorful details, show-not-tell writing, and other tricks of the writing trade. I turned my explanation of how I design into an aesthetic in and of itself. That's exactly what I argued against in the thread here on the Forge.
...
But, at the same time, I really did make an effort to explain, very plainly and non-poetically, the process I go through to design a game. I think it's there. I talk about the question-and-answer process I put myself through, writing in my notebooks.

Matt Snyder wrote: So, I'm curious, for those of you who might bother to read How the sausage is made -- do you learn anything? Do you care? Is the pizza parlour stuff nonsense? Or, does it shed light on the process somehow?

It's meant to shed light. It's meant to de-mystify the creative process.

John -- I haven't read the essay. Sounds like an interesting read. Then again, I've not read much LeGuin either.

Yes, my comments are based on your one quote of hers. I do not think LeGuin is a fool (nor are you). I used the verb. I could have said "tricked" without the name-calling connotation.

Anyway, LeGuin may indeed have much helpful to say about writing. She may not.

For my money, I much prefer John Gardner's The Art of Fiction. Great stuff within, and no bullshit. Well, some bullshit if you dont' think Gardner has anything worth saying on how to write. I think he does.

As for how I narrow notebooks, I'll explain a bit more.

I have one primary design journal. It contains any and every thought I have about gaming and game design. It's a thick, bound volume I picked up at Borders.

I also constantly use reporters notebooks. I use them at work often. When using them for design, I almost always dedicate a single notebook to one topic -- usually a particular game design. I sometimes even write the name of the game on the notebook's cover in huge letters so I can remember which one is which on my shelf.

For Dreamspire, I had a reporter's notebook that I wrote a lot in last winter. I kept lugging it around with me, reviewing those notes, and getting no where. So, I grabbed another volume -- the one described in the essay -- sitting around that I simply grabbed and started to use. It was black and white, which I liked because of the chess color.

My hopes with the notebook was that I'd trick myself into a fresh start. It worked (often, I try that trick on myself to no avail). Note that I don't believe the notebook is some kind of goodluck charm or is the thing that made me break the designer's block. That's silly. I did it on my own; my work and thinking broke the jam -- not the notebook itself. The notebook was me trying to trick myself, jumpstart myself into some new ideas. That's all.

I also stopped carrying my satchel and other notebooks. I did that to prevent myself from being distracted. For example, I've got my HeroQuest book in there an my larger notebook with notes for my current Fields of Freedom campaign. I didn't want to carry that with me to avoid the temptation of letting Dreamspire sit idle and tinkering with HeroQuest stuff.

Hi Christopher,

You wrote,

For Ron and others who suggest that Egri's got it right because he's looking at it from the outside -- wrong. Yes, he's recording an element of the artifact after it's made. But does that really tell us what the writer is doing? For some writers yes, perhaps. But others, like Le Guin, with a solid body of work behind her, no. Her experience is to record the fictional constructs as she watches them in her minds eye. Yes premise and all is happening whether she's aware of it or not (as Ron noted), but her process is following the character. Too bad for you if you don't know how that's possible. But that's what the woman's said.

Hi Ron,

My apologies.

A long post, and I grabbed the wrong words at the start of that paragraph.

We have been over it, and I have parsed it.

I'd stand by my statements on the phone that this distinction your making now was never so clearly made as your posts in the past -- which is why it came up in our discussions.

But you and I do already agree on this. And I spot you a great deal -- both on RPGs and many other matters.

Best,
Christopher

This reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago with a group of writers and artists. What came out of it was:

Everyone has something to say, and within the things they say there is always some insight to be gleened that can help, reassure, enlighten, solidify, or break out of a thought pattern in which you may find yourself trapped.

Design is personal.

As designers and writers mature, some start designing/writing for other designers and writers, and lose sight of the masses. There is nothing wrong with that, if that's what your muse is telling you to do.

Some people are born with the ability to always connect with their audience. They are just better at creating things that resonate with majority, rather than a minority, and seem to do no wrong. (Wish I was one of these people:)

Using someone else's design philosophy or rules (whether good, bad, clever, silly, and so on) can help you look at the way you creatively approach your own own problem(s).

Not knowing the full context of a (design) statement can sometimes cause it to be misunderstood. This can be bad...or good. It can lead you to a poor choice...or a personal epiphany.

When you're at a loss/standstill, just start (insert one) writing, drawing, painting, building, creating, doing.

Since coming to these boards I find can't believe the amount of mental-muscle and passion here. It reminds me of stories I hear of Parisian coffee houses during the Impressionists' era.

Gary,

Man o' man do I wish I had my Art of Fiction book handy; your comments remind of something Gardner says in the book. In the introduction in later editions, Gardner address the age-old argument about whether writing can be taught. He agrees that, yes, talent is a factor, but that we can teach writing. I agree with him, and I have found no reason to believe we couldn't do the same in game design.

I'll try to track down the quote later tonight.

Hi there -

If the LeGuin example is problematic, Dunsany provides a clear one. He claims that he got the name of a city in one of his stories 'wrong', where he means by that that the name he chose does not correspond to the name that the city actually had, not simply that it sounded bad.

This is of course nonsense. Let me wax uselessly Socratic for a moment: if you maintain that fictional characters are real you are, quite literally, contradicting yourself. That's why we call them fictional - to mark off their irreality.

The more interesting question, which Chris Kubasik seemed to be struggling with, is what an artist needs to believe, or do, in order to work. Granted that fictional characters don't exist: let's say that believing this rendered a LeGuin or Dunsany unable to write. Would we rather have the self-deception and the writing, or a world fuller of truth and emptier of art? Of course, we'd all like both best - that 'of course' reflects a generosity of spirit on my part - but that wasn't the question.

If you say bag the truth, let's take the art, I have a follow up question: what about Picasso beating his models and girlfriends senseless? If you don't just look at the masterpieces, if you stop by the Musee Picasso in Paris and look at the long catalogue of cubist sketches, you will see this violence embodied in the line. Picasso was a great master though - he did something with the souls he took. Was it worth it? (For the more bourgeois version of the same question, you may switch to the problem of Gauguin leaving his wife and children).

How you answer these questions about truth, beauty, and the good will tell you something about your values, as will the refusal to answer, or the desperate clinging to the belief that in the grand scheme of things you need not choose, because they all come to one and the same. The way you answer them through the actions you choose will tell you still more than the things you say when confronted with the questions abstractly, in comfort.

(By the way, Freud was a rationalist, but he was not deceived about the nature of human consciousness. On Freud's picture, it's true that the neurotic receives help by robbing the unconscious on behalf of the ego, but that process is never complete - the unconscious remains when the process of therapy is done. It's a matter of a greater degree of self-understanding, manifested in part by a greater sense of ownership of the desires motivating one's actions.)

If you value art over truth, of course the willingness to swallow any sort of insane bullshit will be present. It's not even an either-or for your whole life for that matter - you can be mostly rational and truth-loving except where the needs of your art are concerned. If you value truth over art, you may choose differently. Or you may not be able to decide which you value more, in which case you'll just keep twisting in the wind - that's my gig.

Best,

Sean

Sean wrote: If the LeGuin example is problematic, Dunsany provides a clear one. He claims that he got the name of a city in one of his stories 'wrong', where he means by that that the name he chose does not correspond to the name that the city actually had, not simply that it sounded bad.

This is of course nonsense. Let me wax uselessly Socratic for a moment: if you maintain that fictional characters are real you are, quite literally, contradicting yourself. That's why we call them fictional - to mark off their irreality.

Sean wrote: Would we rather have the self-deception and the writing, or a world fuller of truth and emptier of art? Of course, we'd all like both best - that 'of course' reflects a generosity of spirit on my part - but that wasn't the question.

If you say bag the truth, let's take the art, I have a follow up question: what about Picasso beating his models and girlfriends senseless?

Hi John -

Discussions threatening to veer into philosophy spring up on the Forge from time to time and cause me extreme frustration, because I have no idea about the appropriateness conditions of going off into purely philosophical discussion. (The reason I have no idea of course is that such conditions are vague, contextual, and ultimately determined by relevance to RPGing: the sort of thing that mature judgment rather than the necessary-and-sufficient conditions so beloved of logicians and adolescents are helpful in resolving.) In this case I thought I'd jump in because there are certain questions in the ethics and epistemology of artistic creation that come up again and again in the history of the subject which this thread seemed to be partly recapitulating.

I don't want to hijack Matt's thread about his creative process though, which is what we'd be doing to have this conversation here. Let me correct one misconception though: I don't say that the truth makes us angels; on the contrary, the superficial impression at least is that there are many kinds of knowledge which seem ethically mixed at best. (Making nuclear bombs, viral weapons, techniques for robbing your own workers, etc.) The form of my question was not pushing two kinds of truth; it was: Do you value art (beauty) over truth? If so, here's the next question: Do you value art over goodness? There was no intended implication that truth and goodness were one. Though some (e.g. Plato) have inclined to believe that, and I won't absolutely rule it out as false.

I believe that Dunsany intended his claim 'literally' but not 'physically', the problem immediately stemming therefrom being that with the possible exceptions of mathematics and certain core metaphysical principles I have no idea what 'literally but not physically' would mean. Superficially, I think it means Dunsany was delighting himself with perversity, a not unfamiliar nor even uncongenial preoccupation from my own point of view.

The problem of truth-conditions for imaginary objects are hard, of course. I would want to say that these sentences are false (interpreted relative to the real world) but true (interpreted relative to a system of dream- or imaginary-propositions which get erected on the basis of a certain kind of experience and linguistic convention - not just one or the other but both). That is,

- I saw a bear in my dream last night

is, literally, false, because there was no bear. On the other hand, you can lie and say that you did not see a bear in your dream when you did. How can you lie by denying a falsehood?

If you interpret a proposition as a truth-function over possible worlds what you can say about this is that the proposition is false at the actual ('physical') world but might be satisfied in some other system of objects and events; some other possible world. Dreams, shared imaginary activities, storytelling, and other creative pursuits allow human beings to as it were propose possible worlds for joint consideration. By itself, though, this still leaves us in the land of total freedom; I haven't yet explained the sense of constraint, except to note that having established a fictional proposition in the system of propositions erected by one's imaginary activity one is then bound to honor it by the usual strictures against inconsistency, etc. I suppose I believe it's ultimately our real-world associations which generate the rest of the constraint, but to argue that would require serious research into the psychology of creativity I haven't done. I hope that helps explain the position I hold in outline; it's only a prospectus though.

I've been meaning to start some threads on the Forge about fictional worlds for some time, but it would be a lot of work to both carry them out at a level that would feel meaningful and commit to earnest dialogue at the same time, work that I haven't marshalled the energy to do. Let me not derail Matt's thread with this stuff any further.

I have decided that all this discussion about LeGuin, her language and the literal truth or metaphorical truth is a pretty pointless discussion. People have consistently not understood the pretty tiny point I've tried, and failed, to make. My own language has been terrible in making th poitn. I was talking about LeGuin's particular use of language, not her larger point. Given that I understand and respect her larger point (and I do), does the much smaller matter of her chosen words (which I find slightly problematic) matter? Not really. It sure as hell isn't worth arguing over, because people keep defending LeGuin's larger point, and I keep agreeing with them. (shrug) Who gives a shit? I don't, certainly not anymore.

I'm aware of LeGuin's message and the importance of her meaning. I think Christopher's long, energetic post underestimated that a bit. I took some comments to Christopher in private message, and I think -- but am not certain -- we understand each other better now. I'm cool with that, and I have really found this thread help as people provide their reactions. Thanks!