I was watching World Cup football and something was driving me crazy.

I don’t follow the sport. I don’t know the history. I just saw this offside thing and couldn’t understand why everyone was so worked up about it. Players can’t just stand where they want? Why not? What’s wrong with playing the game that way?

I asked my friend Kevin about it and he explained the logic. Without the offside rule, apparently the whole middle of the field becomes useless. Attackers just camp by the goal, defenders drop back to cover them, and nobody plays through the midfield anymore. The rule exists to force attackers to time their runs instead of just standing there.

Okay, fine. I get that. The rule makes sense in theory.

But the way they enforce it is insane. They freeze the frame, draw lines, check if someone’s armpit was two centimeters past a defender’s heel. Three minutes later they disallow a goal and nobody in the stadium understands why.

So I asked Kevin: what if you just judged it by the feet?

Not the shoulder. Not the armpit. Not the knee or the leaning torso. Just where you’re planted. The ground is the truth.

Kevin ran with it and laid out the trade-offs. It would be faster — VAR decisions in seconds instead of minutes. It would be simpler — one line, one foot, done. Attackers could lean and stretch and fight for position, which is actually a skill worth having. You lose a little precision — a striker with their foot square but their whole upper body past the defender gains an advantage. But is that trade worth the cost of the current system?

For me? Yeah. I think it is.

The funny thing is, I don’t even follow football. I just saw a system that felt broken and asked a simple question. Kevin told me the rule exists for a good reason, and I believe him. But the implementation — the millimeter armpit checks, the three-minute VAR delays, the goals disallowed because of a kneecap — that part doesn’t have to be this way.

I don’t know if FIFA will ever listen to someone who doesn’t know the sport. But I know my idea is cleaner than what they’ve got. Sometimes that’s enough.

— Brent

When you shoot an airgun at a paper target, you are not trying to hit the bullseye.

That sounds wrong, I know. But hear me out.

The bullseye is just the reference point. What you are actually chasing is grouping — how tight your shots cluster together. A tight group two inches low and left tells you more than a lucky bullseye surrounded by flyers. The group is honest. It tells you about your form, your breathing, your follow-through, the pellet consistency, the breeze you did not notice.

Your group is the signal. The bullseye is just where you aimed.

I have been thinking about this because I caught myself applying the same logic to everything I actually care about:

Turn-based games (Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, old-school XCOM) — they are not about winning the run. They are about consistency. Can I make good decisions, one after another, even when the RNG is feeling spiteful? The tightness of my decision-making under uncertainty — that is the group.

Self-hosting a server — it is not about having the most elegant stack or the fastest response times. It is about whether my little ecosystem stays up, quietly, day after day. One container crashing is a flyer. A week without touching the config is a tight group.

Reading philosophy — you do not “win” Wittgenstein. But over months, your thoughts cluster tighter. The flyers (enthusiastic but half-baked takes) get rarer. The group tightens.

I think the modern internet optimizes for bullseyes. Viral posts. Growth curves. A/B-tested headlines. It celebrates the lucky shot, the outlier, the one-hit wonder.

But there is something more interesting happening in the group — in the pattern of repeated, imperfect attempts. The little adjustments between shots. The slow drift as you learn something new. The outliers that tell you something is wrong with your process, not with the target.

That is where the actual learning lives. In the noise between the hits, not in the hits themselves.

Amaia helped me set up this server. She is probably going to post this while I go make coffee. And I bet the next post will be tighter than this one.

That is the whole game, really. Keep shooting. Keep adjusting. Watch the group improve.

🖖

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