Lessons From Fail Fest

Morning routine. Smoked two chickens. A recipe from a friend. Thanksgiving planning. A long AI conversation with Gwen. Edited a forest portrait. Fail Fest in Newport with Mary. Exploding Whale Day.

From brined turkey plans to a pub full of honest failures

Events and activities that occurred on Thursday, November 12, 2026

The morning started with a podcast on the geopolitics of bonds while I got ready, and then the smoker took over. WinCo only sells whole chickens in two-packs, so two spatchcocked birds went onto the Camp Chef together, one on each rack. I swapped the racks partway through and turned the heat up toward the end, and both came off at 165 degrees a little before lunch, glossy and dark, with more chicken than one person can reasonably eat this side of winter. I posted a picture, and my friend KC answered with his citrus-brine recipe. It went straight into the recipe file, earmarked for the Thanksgiving turkey, which is how a single post turns into a plan.

Thanksgiving is two weeks out and the questions have become practical. The informal count of who is coming sits somewhere between thirteen and seventeen, which puts the turkey at eighteen to twenty pounds, and I tracked down the farm that supplied last year's bird. A friend's citrus brine and a few hours of practice on two chickens felt like a reasonable dress rehearsal.

The afternoon belonged to Gwen, our first real conversation after several weeks of rain checks. She is weathering the kind of uncertainty at work that eats bandwidth even when you like the work itself, and we talked about why the best jobs still come through people who know you rather than through résumé filters. Then the conversation turned to the thing we both spend our evenings building. Gwen runs what amounts to a software factory of AI agents: supervisors that keep the agents below them on task, loops that run for days, experiment labs that tune prompts and models against metrics, and a permissions desk with a deliberately adversarial security reviewer. I walked her through the slide deck I have been assembling about my own system, which starts from motivations rather than tools: delegating efficiently, supporting thinking and research, managing what I own, and watching my own back. We compared notes on running models locally before the cloud spigot ever narrows, on my plan to put speech recognition on a home server and eventually retire Alexa, and on the odd satisfaction of building from scratch. We also agreed on an uncomfortable truth about software in a world of shifting requirements: code stops decaying only when requirements stop changing. Gwen had to leave before we reached her real question, which was how my working models for trade-offs have evolved, so that one waits for next time.

In between I finished editing a forest portrait of Lucy beside a burled tree, taking it through four versions until the light and the wood carried the image, and wrote a short poem for its caption under the title Heartwood. I also filed away my friend Jim's deck tracing how the country optimized for money from 1970 to 2020, which now anchors a new thread in my psychohistory work.

Mary picked me up for the drive to Newport and Fail Fest, a pub talk where local business people tell the stories of their failures. An internet marketer described a campaign that produced not one sale, only to discover that the business he was promoting was itself failing. A real-estate investor kept buying factories that were already in trouble despite plenty of warnings. An artist had become wildly successful making doormats, hated every minute of it, and told the story of walking away. The common lesson for the first two was simple: do the research before you start. Afterward I talked with people from a nonprofit that processes fish independently of the big local processor so fishermen keep more of their margin. It runs on grants, and I left with more questions than answers about how it knows when a fisherman no longer needs the help. A conversation with an economist from the sponsoring organization, who studies economics at the scale of a single harbor town, was a pleasure. The organizers had timed the evening to Exploding Whale Day, the anniversary of the November 1970 attempt to remove a dead whale from the beach near Florence with dynamite, which may be the most famous failure on the Oregon coast.

The drive home gave the stories time to settle. Every failure on that stage began with something skipped at the start, while the one success began with someone honest enough to admit she was succeeding at the wrong thing. Two chickens as a rehearsal for a turkey, a slide deck that begins with motivations, a count of guests before an order: the day kept returning to the same idea, that most of the work worth doing happens before anyone can see it.