Excited to taste your creations tonight! (Which sounds vaguely dirty but it isn’t.)

Since we can’t know things beyond doubt or be perfectly certain, we shouldn’t wait for perfect certainty – we should try to carefully estimate how certain we are about our beliefs and act on them when we think is right, taking into account our own ignorance and biases. When the balance of probability has shifted enough, we should act confidently and untroubled, because we are acting as best we can in a world where perfect certainty is impossible.

Dear Dave Guskin,
Regarding your article “Magic: The Gathering Toolbox”:

I’d like to start out by saying that Toolbox looks awesome. I can tell from your more detailed rundown that this app was designed by people that love Magic and actually play Magic and care deeply about the play experience of others. I can’t wait to get it for Android.

Now, I don’t play competitively very often so it probably wouldn’t be worth the dollar for me to update the deckbuilder feature. I’m actually patient and cheap enough to wait a year between updates. That being said, I know that somebody somewhere over there at WotC is going to be looking at this from a financial perspective and I’m considering buying the updates anyway just as a show of support. I want whoever is tracking numbers on this thing to see it as nothing but a total success.

On a side note, one thing that I’ve wanted for a while is a personal digital card organizer. Like a Gatherer that’s just for my collection. It looks like the wish list function might give me something like that but I know that it isn’t really designed for that. Also, now that I think of it, there probably isn’t a huge market for something like that. It seems like it would be pretty work intensive on the user’s side to have to update their “inventory” every time they open a booster pack. I may be the only one that has such an obsessive desire for organization. So instead of the question I was originally going to ask (something along the lines of Ooh Ooh add this feature to the Toolbox) I’ll instead ask you how you organize your physical collection of Magic Cards. Do you have any sort of list that you can check to see whether you have a certain card in your boxes/binders/GiantPileOnTheFloor? Also, do you have any suggestions for me for a way that I could create such a list? The thing of it is, I could always just go through my whole collection and put them in Excel or Access but I would love to have the Gatherer database with the Oracle text for all of the cards linked in. I’m not sure how to do that. I guess it would be something like a deckbuilder that just has the capacity for a 2000 card deck. That way I could sort everything and know what I have without having to dig for it.

Sorry, I seem to have started rabmling. These e-mails I send tend to degenerate into “stream of thought” brainstorming sometimes. I’m leaving it all in, though, just in case you do read it and have a suggestion or two. Anyway, thanks for your time, thanks for what looks like an awesome app, and thanks for caring about what you do. It shows.

Sincerely,
Josh R.
a.k.a.
@MrKltpzyxm

One thing I thought of in reading this–and this is weird–is that as I get older, I find myself coming to terms with who I am, faults and all. At some point I found it to be a huge relief to say, here’s this thing about myself that I don’t really think is great, but I’m going to be okay with it for now, and spend my internal energy elsewhere.

So I hope that in the spirit of no excuses, you can still say, “the reason I’m not addressing issue A right now is because issue B is more important.”

Anyway I love the honesty and the introspection, and I wish I was that brave. Looking forward to reading more