My son came home from preschool talking about megas. He was four, maybe five, and he described them like robots, so for a while I thought he meant mechas. He’d go on about them, this one turns into that one, this one’s stronger, the way he goes on about everything he loves. Turns out he was talking about Mega Pokémon. I was a teenager when Pokémon first showed up and I skipped the whole thing, the cards, the games, all of it. So my kid found a world I’d walked right past, and he was trying to hand it to me, and at first I didn’t take it.
Then he went to a trade swap. He came home with a stack of commons. The older kids, the ones with a year or two more cunning, had traded him out of everything good for bulk, and he was proud of the deal. I was a little frustrated with those kids. Maybe his situation hit a little too close to home. I got over it. But something in me had already sat up.
Because I know this. I grew up in the hunt. My dad collects baseball cards and coins. My grandmother collected Satsuma. My mom collected little porcelain cats (the uglier the better). I collected comic books, or I told myself I did; mostly I read them. I played the Decipher card games, Star Trek and Star Wars, back when you could still find people to play. I was there for the whole 90s collecting fever, the Beanie Babies, the comics, the cards. I remember the card shows, one table of comics if I was lucky, two on a good day, and me flipping through longboxes for What If, the Marvel line where the Watcher shows you how every story could have gone another way. That was the one I hunted. Alternate universes years before anyone was into alternate universes, a little Hugh Everett in the making. When I couldn’t turn one up I’d go by cover price, the cheapest on the table, because old meant valuable, or that was my heuristic at the time. Spawn was a big deal. I’d flip and flip.
I didn’t top out so much as get my heart broken. What I loved was never the cardboard, it was the stories and the characters, Impulse, Cassandra Cain. Then a change in management at DC took them apart, and I felt betrayed enough to walk away from all of it. For a while I even fought it, built a website, went to conventions, tried to rally people to bring them back. Then I put it down. Played Magic later but didn’t collect it. I thought I was done with the hunt.
I took both boys to Frank & Sons. I gave each of them a roll of dollar coins and told them to go find what they love. And standing there I realized I’d just handed my kids coins to go buy cards, which is my dad’s coins and the card hunt fused into one motion and passed down a generation without me planning it. I wanted to teach them to collect. Not just to accumulate, to collect. To build a binder around a theme. To chase the ones they can’t stop thinking about. To complete a set.
And I had no idea how. I didn’t know Pokémon. I couldn’t tell my son which cards were the cute ones, or which ones would finish his set, or which he should hold instead of trade. The person who was supposed to guide him through the hunt didn’t know the terrain.
So I did the thing I know how to do. I started to build. The first idea was small and a little strange: a way to make a binder out of a feeling. Point at “cute Pokémon” and let the machine go find the cards that match, because a five-year-old collects by feeling long before he collects by anything else. I reached for the math, the embeddings, not to be clever but so my kid could point at a vibe and get back a shelf of it.
Then two things happened I didn’t plan for. The first is that the building felt easy in a way it never had. Not the obsession, I knew that part, the nights early in my career burning through code on too much coffee. What was new was the ceiling. The thing that always stopped me was my own hands, my thoughts running faster than my fingers could move, the same wall that kept me from ever finishing a novel. Working with Claude, the output finally kept up with the thinking. I set myself a rule. I’d only take it as far as my limit. This was just for fun. The rule didn’t survive. I started thinking about it all the time.
The second thing is that I fell back in love with collecting, and it happened through the building. To teach a machine to recognize a card I had to learn what made each one distinct, the sets, the symbols, the artists, the small tells. To teach it to grade a card I had to learn what a grader’s eye is looking for. I set out to teach my kids the hunt, and somewhere in teaching a machine to see the cards, the hunt reached up and grabbed me by the collar again.
I’ve always been like this. All the way in or not at all. Powerlifting down to researching every variation of every lift. Learning to row properly. Meditation. Civ and SimCity and RimWorld until three in the morning. The startups. Whatever the thing was, it was an obsession, and it burned hot and then it burned out, because eventually you finish, or your body gives out, or you win the save. This one has run longer than any of them. Months. I think because for once the limit wasn’t me.
I won’t pretend it’s been clean. I didn’t want to sit at a desk while my family lived their lives around me, so I figured out how to carry the work in my pocket, terminal on my phone, agents running while I’m at the table. Some days that means I’m present and building. Some days it means I’m tapping away when I should be looking up. I know which days those are. I’m not going to write the version where the dad always chose right.
But here’s the shape of it. This isn’t a business I’m dressing up as a passion. It’s a passion I’m trying to make sustainable enough to keep doing, and maybe one day do instead of working for someone else, so I can choose how I spend my time and spend more of it with my kids. Underneath all the engineering, I’ve always wanted to write, to leave a record of how I think that my kids could read later, and I never had the vehicle. This is the vehicle.
That’s what this is for me. Not a scanner, not a pricing model, not a card app. A shadow I’m casting on purpose, in the shape of a dad who never learned Pokémon learning it for his son.
That’s what maybe human means. A very human thing, the wanting, the hunt, the handing down, thrown up on the wall by a machine turned all the way up. You’re looking at the shadow. I’ll let you decide what it’s the shape of.