Beating the Original Legend of Zelda with the Kids, Apple Now Allows You To Merge Your Old iTunes Accounts, the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter Was Released, and More

You may remember those awesome vintage-style NES controllers Aaron and I ordered for the Nintendo Switch back in 2019. They came in particularly handy lately because we made an exception to our no screentime rule with the kids – we are very much raising them in a predominately analogue world by design until they get older, which I should probably write about at some point – and started letting them play the original Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda with us for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, three times a week towards the end of the day.

The original intent was the help teach them patience because those older games require the ability to sit and wait, timing your moment with the consequences of failure being non-forgiving. It also creates that ritual and structure which is so important to early childhood development.

For the past month, our focus as been The Legend of Zelda in particular. We told them the stories of the original game lore and then played it together, the four of us in the living room as we worked our way through dungeon after dungeon. It has been surreal in the best possible way to look down and see my three year old sons excitedly navigating dungeons since I remember so clearly doing the same thing with my mom when I was a little boy in the 1980s. I was especially proud of them as they worked out how to open the entrance to Level 7. Once underground, Dorian’s strategy is to bomb all the walls to look for secrets – can’t risk missing something – while Graham goes full out with the Magical Rod + Book of Magic combo thus purifying the legions of Ganon with fire.

Last night our efforts came to fruition and we beat the game. We had secured every item except the red ring when we ended up in Ganon’s chamber ahead of schedule, vanquishing him. The kids still wanted to find the missing item, though, since it was the only thing we didn’t have – there is a reason that fourteen years ago, I named one of the challenges of building wealth The Red Ring Problem – so we loaded a checkpoint snapshot on the Nintendo Switch and made our way to it. That way, if they want to walk around the overworld or explore dungeons at some point in the future, it’s easier and they don’t have to start the second quest right now.

Today, we spent a lot of time together as a family but I did set aside a couple of hours for some maintenance items on my checklist.

I read the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter.

I thought about the continued rebalancing project we have undergoing at the firm so I can line up the next round of trades.

I went over the repainting project as Aaron and I continue to transform the real estate portfolio we’ve begun acquiring. I thought about some procurement orders we have going on at Kennon-Green & Co. as I optimize my investment research process a bit to reflect improvements in technology. On that note, I also took advantage of the surprise support documentation Apple dropped on February 14th this year, solving a problem that goes back almost a decade-and-a-half where early users from the Mac era had to have a separate Apple account for purchases than the ones they use for iCloud, etc. It worked so flawlessly, I was ecstatic. It has been a constant source of irritation to have to maintain multiple accounts for my personal iTunes and Apple TV licenses as it even adds to the workload when setting up a new iMac, MacBook, iPhone, or iPad.