Friday Links!
Leading off, and it's not surprising: ‘It’s the best job! But it will kill you’: four restaurant critics on the battle to stay healthy.
From Wally, an interesting article on promoting your book: Anatomy of a free BookBub featured deal. Well, this is quite a lot to remember: The new etiquette: 56 ways to do the right thing, from how to leave a party to texting after sex.
From David Gloier, and someone should be in jail for this (and not the librarians): Inside the two-year fight to bring charges against school librarians in Granbury, Texas.
From C. Lee, and it's quite strange: Giant clam outperforms solar cell, converts 67 percent of sunlight. Ugly: U.S., Germany foil alleged Russian plot to assassinate CEO of German arms firm sending weapons to Ukraine. It's positively surreal at this point: Republicans’ Project 2025 Would End Free Weather Reports. An excellent read: How cleaning up shipping cut pollution — and warmed the planet. Fascinating: Murder, birth and test scores: What scientists are learning about extreme heat. A thought-provoking study: Study links sperm to shorter life spans, eggs to longer ones. This is an absolutely fantastic read: PROGRAMMING PATTERNS: THE STORY OF THE JACQUARD LOOM. One of the many ways gaming has changed over time: How the checklist conquered the open world, from Morrowind to Skyrim. This has been happening for years, seemingly: Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds. This is extremely disappointing: Nintendo's systemic policy of miscrediting is harming external translators.
Montreal
We got back about 12:30 last night. Traveling to and from has been brutal. I'll have more thoughts on Monday, but my brain is fried.
Here are some more pictures. First a neighborhood. A long street was converted into pedestrian access only, and it's so peaceful to stroll through here.
Here's an ingenious bit of subway design:
Simple, but more people can hold on this way.
We stayed less than a hundred yards from the back of Notre-Dame Basilica, and went inside on Tuesday (after paying $16 for the privilege--good grief!). It's staggering:
It's one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen. The church is gross, for multiple reasons, but you can't argue with the brilliance of the architecture.
Sitting in the Montreal Airport
It's planes, trains, and automobiles on the way back. A metro train (Montreal's mass transit is superb), a cab, a flight to Toronto, a flight to Windsor, and a drive across the border and back home.
On the way to Montreal, it was automobiles and trains, because the flight out of Grand Rapids on Friday was a casualty of the CrowdStrike debacle. Getting there on Friday turned into waking up at 4:40 on Saturday, driving across the border at Detroit/Windsor (2.5 hour drive), then taking a 10-hour train ride to Montreal.
There was no way to get a flight on Saturday. Sunday, at best, and even that wasn't guaranteed.
It wasn't easy, and getting back doesn't look so easy, either. If absolutely everything goes right, we land in Windsor and retrieve the car around 8:30. We might be back home by 11:30, if--again--everything goes right.
We've walked almost 30 miles in the last three days, so it's been Japan-level physical activity, which is good, because I started out with the right shoes this time.
I'll have more pictures tomorrow. Right now, I'm so tired my brain is barely even functioning.
Pictures!
The first thing I noticed about Montreal is the beauty of its architecture:
There's a Metro station underneath this church, and a skyscraper behind it. You see juxtapositions like this all the time in the downtown area.
Nothing is built as a boring square. Every building has something a little special.
The colors are vibrant, too. Here are two examples:
Even in alleys, there's color.
Montreal
Theoretically, I've been in Montreal since late Friday.
I say 'theoretically' because I'm writing this Friday morning to auto-post on Tuesday, and IT systems are in chaos from the CrowdStrike debacle, and more than half of the flights are being delayed, and we might wind up driving, and I know nothing right now.
Hopefully, though, I'm in Montreal and will drop in to post some pictures. We may wind up living in Montreal, actually, so this is a both a trip to meet C's family and a scouting trip in general.
College Football 25
Considering it was the first graphically-based college football game in 11 years, it normally would have been a day one purchase for me.
This was EA, though, so I waited.
It launched Thursday at midnight (for the people who didn't pay $20 extra, which is a separate topic), and the forums are full of bug reports. Simple, simple problems that never should have made it into a released version.
This is EA, though. They never feel compelled to finishing a sports game before releasing it. They develop it until the scheduled release date, do triage on the outstanding bugs, and release it with a giant list of bugs still unfixed. In the case of Madden, some of these (substantial) bugs have been there for years.
It's discouraging.
It's tough when you finally admit that getting rid of bugs is not a developer's primary consideration. Games aren't products anymore. They're services, which has shifted the developer focus from fixing bugs to goosing the ongoing revenue stream.
What's really annoying is that almost every bug in this game is a solved problem. Having decent rushing stats in dynasty mode for simmed games isn't rocket science. It's not even difficult. It just times time to run the number of seasons and make the necessary adjustments to get it right. It just takes effort.
I'm sure I'll pick it up in a few weeks after the second or third substantial patch, because I still love college football, but let me remind you that the best college football simulation I've ever played is
Football Coach: College Dynasty. It's still in Early Access, but the game has been almost completely bug-free for the last year or so, and new features are all that's being added now. It's superb, and you can even use real teams (check the Discord Channel for universe files).
Football Coach: College Dynasty is the game I would have designed, if I'd wanted to make a college football game. It's ultra-nerdy and full of data and has a ton of personality, too. Even better, when you submit a bug report, it's fixed!
What a revolutionary concept.
Friday Links!
Leading off this week, rare footage of both Jimi Hendrix and Prince playing acoustic guitar:
Jimi Hendrix Goes Acoustic.
An Intimate Evening With Kale
C was making a kale salad for dinner last night.
"Do you mind massaging the kale?" she asked.
"I don't even know the kale," I said. "Wait, are you trying to get me into a throuple? Do we have a safe word?"
"It makes the kale more tender," she said. "Just massage until it gives up."
"How do I know when that happens? What does kale despair feel like?"
"If it gets to be too much," just say 'coastline,'" she said.
'Coastline' was originally the safe word for conversations going into too much detail (based on the coastline paradox). Now, it's used as an all-purpose block.
Eli 22.11
Eli's hitting 23.0 soon.
For about a month this summer, it looked like he was going to Afghanistan for field research. A circus (located in multiple countries) has been operating in Afghanistan for decades as a peacebuilding initiative, and its director presented at the Art as Peacebuilding seminar Eli sponsored at Oxford. It was a unique opportunity to gather data.
It was also, to me, very scary, for security reasons.
As it turns out, no Afghanistan, at least for this year. Instead, he's going back to Colombia for a month. He designed his master's thesis so that it wasn't dependent on him going to Afghanistan, so he'll be able to use the data he gathers in Colombia without any major rework. Plus his advisor will be in Colombia at the same time.
No, Colombia isn't completely safe, either, but unless you go to Japan, every country is either dangerous in some way or the government is dangerous. In many countries, both.
By the end of this year, in the last fifteen months I'll have traveled to Japan, Mexico, Canada, and England. I feel like James Bond, compared to my usual travel schedule. And it's still nothing compared to him.
This Doesn't Feel Like the Future
I finished the second draft of This Doesn't Feel Like the Future today.
95,000 words. It took nine months, which is three months less than I expected. It's better than I expected, too, even though there's still plenty of work to do.
If the timeline goes the way the first book did, the next draft should only six months, and the ones after that, only three. I think it will be done in two years, maybe even less.
In other news, there's a book club in Palo Alto reading The Man You Trust for their monthly selection, which is a nice moment.
Too Unlikely
If this country was a movie, no one would believe the plot was credible.
About Town
I live next to downtown now, so today I took a stroll.
Check out this fellow, just chillin' like a villain:
Here was a woman fishing, but in a mysterious way:
If you're wondering why she's fishing with that looks like an orange extension cord, I was wondering the same thing, so I watched her for a while. When she finally pulled up the line, it had a large magnet on the end. She was fishing for keys and phones and rings and whatnot. I wanted to ask her what was the most interesting thing she'd ever caught, but I decided to let it go and walked on by.
Rashomon
I spent a week with my dad when I was twelve. He drove down with his other son and another family in a Winnebago, and he picked me up on the way. We drove out to South Padre Island and fished for a week on the beach.
It was a week filled with so much anxiety and disappointment for me that I've thought about it many times over the years. How I perceive that week, though, has changed over the years, particularly after I started therapy. Each version of the story becomes different, even though the basic facts have never changed.
What strikes me most now is how naive I was, even though I was smart for my age. And I feel bad for my small self trying to fix what was unfixable and blaming myself when I failed.
I don't know why I wanted to see my dad. He never wrote, he didn't call. All he sent was a Christmas present each year. On the rare occasions I did see him, I made him deeply uncomfortable because I asked questions he couldn't answer.
In my mind, him coming down to take me fishing for a week was a watershed moment. He clearly wanted to make a new commitment to being a father. In that week, I would convince him of my absolute appeal, and somehow that would convert our relationship into something special.
In reality, Dad coming to see me wasn't some big sacrifice on his part. My house was less than five minutes off the road that would lead to the beach, and he loved to fish more than he loved any person. He always had. I was part of the trip because it was convenient, not essential.
I should have been tipped off that my perception of the week was wildly different from his when another family came with him. In all, it was six people, plus me. I realize now they were with him to act as a buffer from me.
I was vaguely aware as the week progressed that I was spending hardly any time with him. He was always with other people, and I strongly remember his progressive annoyance with me. Nothing I did was quite right.
He thought, quite strongly, that I was soft. To him, that was the worst quality a person could have, even in sixth grade. Dad served in Korea and came back profoundly disturbed, and he was like that for the rest of his life. It was always an irony of my childhood that I wanted someone to like me who was so unlikable himself.
I definitely was soft, by his standards. His standards were so toxic, though, that they damaged anyone who tried to live up to them. My stepbrother was one of the casualties.
As the week progressed, my anxiety steadily increased. Nothing seemed to be changing, and I didn't know how to change it. I clearly didn't fit in, because I wanted to talk about topics even the adults didn't know anything about. I felt so incredibly vulnerable, and there was no one to protect me.
By the fifth day, I had canker sores on my gums, and I'm sure it was because of sheer stress. And I was sunburned beyond belief (Mom was so angry when he dropped me off and she saw how burned I was).
I blamed myself after he left, though for what, I was never sure. For not being magical, I guess. That week made me retreat into myself in a way that made me even more introverted, and I didn't start to unravel that until I got into therapy over four decades later.
For a long time, even though my interpretation of the week changed, I never thought about forgiving myself. I didn't think I needed to. This last time, though, I realized it mattered.
So to me as a little dude, I know you were doing your best. I couldn't ask for anything more.
