The Hash Off — The Path to Mount How

The irony wasn’t lost on me. 

Everything around me was antiseptic — the walls, the sheets, the clothes, every surface. 

My wife was in her hospital bed, fighting off sepsis. We had come to a place whose very purpose was anti-sepsis.

Hospitals are temples of sterility. They wage a quiet war against chaos using monotonous beeps, beige walls, predictable routines, and precise practices.

Beige walls. Matching clothes. Interchangeable staff. And that incessant, looping monotony. It starts to scrape at your sanity by Day 3.

I was spending every waking hour with her in her room, but I didn’t complain—she had it worse. I could go home and shower and sleep in my bed, after all.

To deal with the monotony, I took walks.  At first to clear my head. Then to feel sunlight. Then to explore every hallway, stairwell, and tucked-away bench. Eventually, I found little nooks where I could sit and doodle, just to feel like something was happening.

That’s when I realized: this place didn’t just suppress pathogens. It suppressed ideas.

The antiseptic environment scrubbed away the wild and the weird.

And for someone like me—someone who doesn’t just tolerate creativity but depends on it—it was suffocating. 

Boredom is a good sign in a hospital. It means people are healing. Doctors and nurses and lab techs love boredom, because the alternative means something nasty is killing people. Boredom for them means everything is going okay, people are healing and resting. Boredom is painted on the walls and regulated in every action. 

But boredom, to me, is toxic.

Creativity’s Endless Hooks

So what do you do when you're trapped in a space designed to keep anything from taking root—be it a germ or a thought?

You doomscroll. You binge watch Netflix. You read email.

That last one saved me. 

On Day 4, the tee-printer Raw Paw sent out an announcement: a one-color tee design contest, themed around the World Wide Web.

Boom. That was it. One little hook—and my creativity had something to latch onto.

I wasn’t just going to design a shirt. I was going to turn the shirt into a game. 

Why a game? Because that’s how my brain works.

I have a foundational philosophy — I believe anything can be a game piece. Doesn’t matter if it’s physical, imaginary, or straight-up supernatural, if someone, somewhere can hold it in their mind and say this matters to the game,  then it does.

With that logic, a tee shirt isn’t just a tee shirt. It’s a starting tile. A secret code. A battlefield.

The only real question was how.

And most people stop at “how.”

Designers? We treat “how” like a mountain we have to climb, a challenge we must defeat.

Planning the Ascent of Mount How

I had no map. No idea what obstacles I’d face. No clue how high the summit was.

But I had constraints—and constraints are gifts. Constraints are toeholds for creativity.

One color. One shirt. One theme: the World Wide Web.

I started climbing.

Sketches. Jokes. Notes. Thinks. Walks. Re-thinks. Repeat.

It was the design process in pure form, alive in a place built to sterilize anything unpredictable.

As I explored the area around the base of Mount How, I had a better idea of the heights. 

But I knew I couldn’t spend months on this. Time was short. Resources even shorter.

This game had to be cheap (because I’m broke), fast (because I’m solo), and doable with just an iPad and a laptop.

That defined the height of the mountain, but I still needed a path to the summit.

Waiting (Room) for Inspiration

There was a waiting room down the hall from my wife’s ward, a quiet, neutral, predictably beige space I usually had to myself. I started working there while she rested.

The TV was always on, the volume never was. One day, I was doomscrolling Instagram and on hold with her doctor’s office.

The recorded voice told me: “Press # to return to the main menu.”

At the same time, I was adding a hashtag to a post.

That’s when it hit me.

In grad school, we were trained to always pay attention to the strange little moments like that. That’s where the story lives.

This was one of those moments.

The hash ---> #

It was in web pages. On phones. In weight measurements. In social media. So many domains used it—each claiming it for their own.

And then, on the muted TV in front of me, one wrestler hit another with a folding chair and screamed into the void.

That was it.

The Hash Off was born.

The Hash Off Climb Begins

Wrestlers, each representing a different domain where the hash symbol holds meaning.Their locked in a melodramatic battle for symbolic control.

A joke, yes, but one I know would connect to a lot of people.

Over the next two weeks, I built out the concept. Designed the characters. I refined the mechanics. To meet the tight timeline I set for myself, I narrowed the first test match to just two factions:

• The DOMinators: Web devs who see the hash as structure, order, precision.

• The Socials: Social media stars who use it for flair, clout, chaos.

It had to be simple. Cheap. Playable. The tee design and the website had to look good in black and white and still carry the punchline. The game had to be accessible enough to spread, but clever enough to spark curiosity. I needed to connect to player, fast.

Because a game without players is just cardboard and dry ink.

Reaching The Hash Off Base Camp 1

The shirt launches May 9 on the Raw paw website. That’s set in stone.

The Hash-Off site will follow—soon.

The peak of Mount How still looms, but now I see the path to the summit now.

That’s how it all started, in a sterile box built to kill infection, I invented a game meant to spread. The Hash Off is weird. I hope it’s potentially viral. It’s over-the-top dramatic. It’s maybe stupid. But it’s mine.

And it started in the quietest, most boring place I’ve ever been.