Thoughts on Nolan's Odyssey

2026-07-28T12:41:36Z

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I recently saw Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.

Ignoring the advice I often dispense in situations like these, I decided to read the poem beforehand. I originally bought a cheap, used, prose translation by W. H. D. Rouse that I found difficult to get through, so I pivoted early on to Emily Wilson's version and found it much more accessible. I'll likely have much more to say about the experience of reading the Odyssey, particularly since I was in the unusual position, for an amateur, of having two translations at my fingertips at the same time, but that is a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that I read the poem before seeing the movie and it unsurprisingly coloured my experience of the whole thing.

The Short of It

Let's get this out of the way first. I liked the movie, but I didn't love it. I thought it looked amazing and found myself genuinely on the edge of my seat during certain sequences (the scenes with Circe come to mind). The Sirens were handled (almost) perfectly. I loved how Agamemnon was portrayed as a sort of towering, larger than life, yet mysterious figure who casts a long shadow over the whole movie (Nolan's decision to show only glimpses of his face was a good one. He's like the ancient Greek version of Darth Vader). And the Trojan Horse itself felt - I never thought I would say this - fresh.

The Long of It

With all that said, I did have some problems with the movie, most of them sourced, as you might expect, in differences from the poem. This is why I usually advise people to watch a movie before reading the source material on which it's based - you won't have any preconceived notions muddying your experience.

The first problem is that book Odysseus is supposed to be clever and wily. Film Odysseus is neither; he's basically a tortured soldier with PTSD. In the Emily Wilson translation, Odysseus is famously described as "complicated"; in the film, he is very much not.

This mostly works, but not always. Nolan restructures enough of the plot so that Odysseus' cleverness isn't actually required, in most cases, to move it forward. The movie barely mentions that he's the one that came up with the idea for the Trojan Horse. It omits the memorable scene with Odysseus and his men clinging to the undersides of the Cyclops' sheep. It omits the famous "Nobody" ruse. Your mileage may vary, but I found it genuinely disappointing.

Please don't misunderstand me. I don't think that faithfulness to source material is the metric by which we should judge an adaptation - particularly not the adaptation of a 3000 year poem, itself likely an amalgamation of different versions of the mythology. It's kind of crazy to talk about narrative purity in this context. Book Odysseus and film Odysseus are two different characters and that is not, in itself, a bad thing.

Except, of course, that certain story beats only make sense when we're talking about one version of the character over the other. Film Odysseus is apparently the kind of guy who plucks his bow to give the animal he's hunting a fighting chance. It seems strange that a guy like that would fire a random arrow at a retreating Cyclops, just to be mean. This happens in the poem, but it tracks because poem Odysseus can be kind of a dick. It felt out of character for film Odysseus and I'm not sure why Nolan bothered to keep it in at all.

Even the Sirens felt a little out of place. I loved the sequence itself, but the logic behind it didn't make much sense. Odysseus avoids putting wax in his ears because he wants to be the first one to hear the Siren song and live? That's something poem Odysseus would want. I saw literally nothing to make me believe that film Odysseus would want the same thing.

Omitting Phaeacia

All in all, Nolan seemed to be aiming for a more grounded approach to the source material. The Greek pantheon forms a major part of the poem - Athena, Zeus, Hermes and Poseidon all figure quite heavily in the plot. Nolan more or less leaches them all out of the film, except for Athena - and even she was a bit of a psych (if you know, you know). Zeus and Poseidon have cameos as bad weather.

Which makes it all the more odd that Nolan decided to omit the whole Phaeacia episode of the story. In the book, after leaving Calypso but before returning to Ithaca, Odysseus crash lands on an island of seafarers (the aforementioned Phaeacia), where he's forced to be their guest while waiting for a chance to leave. Some of the most famous elements of the story, like the Cyclops and Circe and the Sirens, essentially unfold as a flashback at this point - a tale spun by Odysseus to entertain his hosts. It's ambiguous as to how much of it is real.

Nolan got rid of this section entirely, and instead folded it into Odysseus' time with Calypso, now retooled so that Odysseus suffers from lotus flower induced amnesia. The flashback, where we meet the Cyclops and the rest, is reimagined as Odysseus regaining his lost memories.

This undermines the whole idea of "grounding" the narrative. The fantastical elements of the story are effectively portrayed as real memories in the film. It's frustrating because if you were looking for a way to ground the story, the poem's "story within a story" mechanism, with its inherent ambiguity, already seemed like a perfectly good way to do it. It was frankly baffling that Nolan would choose to turn the gods and goddesses of the poem into psychological trauma and thunderstorms - but then choose to keep the Cyclops, Sirens, and witches as something tangible in a way that the source material does not.

Unimportant Details

Much has been made of Nolan's other choices for the film, like casting a black actress as Helen of Troy, and his use of modern language. I debated even mentioning them, for fear of giving undeserved oxygen to assholes who think that "historical accuracy" applies to a fucking myth, but I finally concluded that either a) no one is going is to read this anyway or b) people will read it and it's an oppourtunity to call these people out.

With respect to the use of modern words like "dad", you get used to it really quickly. I always marvel at people who complain about this. Anything other than ancient Greek is going to be "wrong" so if you're doing the film in English anyway, you might as well use words that seem appropriate and modern to your ears.

And once you accept that the Nolan is going for a more modern take on this story, the diversity of the cast doesn't feel out of place in the slightest. I would take it even further: the scenes with Helen and Clytemnestra are just really good - probably some of the best scenes of the entire film. I'll credit those scenes with making me actually want to read the Oresteia.

And that's all I'm going to say on this subject.

Bottom Line

If you want my unvarnished advice, it's this: watch the movie and then read the poem. The film is genuinely entertaining, and as far as spectacles go, it's masterful. But knowing anything more than the basic outlines of the myths won't increase your enjoyment of it.

After you watch the movie, you should read the poem! The film leaves a lot out, despite the three hour length. There are lots of versions to choose from. I choose Emily Wilson's, and I liked it, but I hear good things about Robert Fagles' translation as well.

Maybe the whole experience will make you want to explore this corner of the literary world. These things are classics for a reason, right?

When I finally get around to reading the Iliad, I'll let you know what I think!

Linus Torvalds on being 'woke'

2026-06-04T01:02:15Z

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"I'm a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman's right to choose is very important, I think that 'well regulated militia' means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn't care less if you decided to dress up in the 'wrong' clothes or decided you'd rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me 'woke', then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race."

The Soapbox and the Display Case

2026-03-28T13:04:40Z

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As a participant in the IndieWeb, I post the occasional photo on my blog. These photos tend to be unedited and off-the-cuff, often taken from my phone and posted with Quill via my Micropub server.

In addition to these spur-of-the-moment photos, I also take a fair number of more deliberate shots, often when I'm visiting someplace new. These will usually be taken with my standalone camera as opposed to my phone, and it's not uncommon for me to try and clean them up a bit with an image editor before publication. These photos are almost always organized into albums.

I've made a significant number of these albums over the years, and they house a significant number of photos - over 1000 at some point. This number obviously goes up as I add more albums, but it can also go down as I'll sometimes remove photos from albums if I feel they're not really pulling their weight. The number is closer to 700 photos now - still not small.

If I'm being honest, my relationship to my photos albums feels different than my relationship to my blog. My blog is like a chronicle of life, and my personal soapbox. It's designed to be updated frequently (even if I don't update it as frequently as I should). My photo albums are more like a display case, aimed at family, friends, and the world, showing off a heavily curated subset of my life in visual form. I'm lucky if I update them more than a couple of times a year.

I think it's this difference that informs how seamlessly - or not - photo albums are represented on the IndieWeb.

Photo Albums and the IndieWeb

The IndieWeb revolves around the notion of a post, i.e. a permalinked, timestamped bit of content that usually ends up on a reverse chronological feed somewhere. Since the IndieWeb supports the concept of photo posts, in particular multi-photo posts which house more than one photo, one might wonder how photo albums differ in this regard.

The short answer is that a (multi-)photo post is an indivisible unit. Even when the post contains multiple photos, those photos don't have a separate identity on the web; the only permalink is the post itself. The photos in an album, on the other hand, have their own identities (i.e. their own permalinks) and the album post simply collects these individual photos onto one (also permalinked) page.

I personally find this relationship between an album post and its individual photos leads to awkwardness when you try to map it onto the IndieWeb framework. It makes sense to treat an album as a post - it has a date, title, permalink, and intuitively feels like it belongs on a feed. On the other hand, the album photos themselves are sort of posts, in that they have permalinks, but also sort of not in that we usually want to exclude them from feeds to avoid clutter. And you also need a way of expressing the connection between the photos and the album to which they belong.

The IndieWeb community, to be fair, has ways of supporting these features. Though it's standard practice, nothing explicitly forces you to include a post on a feed, for example. And the IndieWeb does (sort of) have a notion of a collection post which exists to house other posts in a kind of parent/child relationship.

But these are not what I would call "typical" features. If you use Micropub, for example, excluding posts from a feed isn't part of the standard protocol; it requires the visibility extension to be enabled. Publishing an album via Micropub also requires the client and server to support collections, which also isn't standard. Collections, in general, seem to be a bit of a half-baked feature of the IndieWeb ecosystem.

The issues become clearer when you try to use PhotoPostr, an application which actually implements a Micropub-based album posting client. To my knowledge it's the only app of its kind - and it only works with Micropub servers that implement the features I described above - a small number at best.

Here's the thing. One of the reasons one would use Micropub for posting at all at all is interoperability - a Micropub server is supposed to work with an array of Micropub clients, and a Micropub client is supposed to work with a variety of Micropub servers. If there's only one Micropub based album posting client for you to use, and it only works with a small fraction of Micropub servers, then I'm not sure what Micropub is doing in this equation at all. In the end, PhotoPostr feels like a bespoke piece of software, built by and for the author - which is fair enough, but it does say something about how photo albums fit into the

Add to this: I like grouping whole albums into collections as well. I'll often create a handful of photo albums after a vacation, for example, and file them all under one "album group" for the whole trip. How do we implement that? A collection of albums makes sense here but do any Micropub frameworks support that? What about tags? Do the album group tags get mixed in with the tags you may have defined for your photos? Do the individual albums that make up the album group show up on a feed somewhere or are they hidden like the photos, to avoid clutter?

That's a lot of questions and they are not, in my opinion, so trivial to answer. Basically, I find that my album preferences do not map cleanly onto standard IndieWeb and Micropub concepts.

Photo Albums and Eleventy

Also problematic is the fact that the Micropub protocol is based around the idea of publishing a single post. Publishing a whole album of photos via Micropub therefore involves publishing each photo one at a time. This doesn't work well when you use a static site generator like Eleventy - at least not the way I use it.

My blog is currently hosted on Github. Publishing a new post involves committing it to the main branch, followed by a rebuild of the site. My Micropub server will do this for you when it receives a create POST.

So, each post is published via a single commit which triggers a new build - which can sometimes take a minute or two. Publishing a whole album of 30 photos one at a time using this method (as PhotoPostr does) is, as you might imagine, a pretty awful user experience.

Not to mention, the sheer number of photos can be a problem. Before I added albums to my blog, it built in under 10 seconds. Adding all my photo albums nearly doubled the build time, even when the images were already pre-processed and cached. And if they weren't? Well then you better get a cup of coffee because it might take a while.

It got so bad that my VPS was killing the build process because it was taking too long. Something had to be done.

Moving my Albums

There's no clever solution here. I ended up moving my albums from my blog to a dedicated website that I build and deploy from my home computer - no automated publishing.

It's not ideal, but it's also not so bad. For one thing, my home computer is much faster than my VPS so the build doesn't take as long. And the way I have historically interacted with my photo albums was always different than my blog. I was always a lot more deliberate and manual with my albums, and I never really took advantage of the Micropub protocol here, for the reasons above. And my blog, sans albums, builds much quicker now, for obvious reasons, so that's a plus.

Generally speaking, I don't like spreading my content across different sites. At some point, my website sported not only my blog but also recipes, bookmarks and photo albums. But the thing is, these features don't really overlap, and it adds complexity to an already complicated build process. I'll admit that it does feel cleaner to split these things out. I had already moved my recipes out to my garden, so my albums we're bound to be next.

I guess we'll see how this goes!

Moving My Bookmarks to My Garden

2026-01-11T02:20:53Z

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I've previously written about the idiosyncrasies of IndieWeb bookmarks, and how I consider them to be qualitatively different from other IndieWeb posts. The differences boil down to my relationship with them. For me, they are primarily a collection of references, not a way I interact with the world. Unlike notes or articles, sharing them isn't a priority; I don't particularly care about shouting my bookmarks from the digital soapbox that is my blog.

Other people obviously differ here, and I'm vaguely aware of the notion of social bookmarking, and now defunct services like delicious, but that's just not how I use them. My bookmark posts always felt a bit out of place on my website, much more subject to whims of deletion and reorganization than other forms of content.

I've been wanting to revamp them for a while. But how?

Emacs...Again

In the end I decided, unsurprisingly (if you know me), to leverage Emacs, Org mode and my digital garden to manage my bookmarks, much as I did with my reading list. It turns out that using Org mode to maintain a pile of links is quite common and there are a number of articles on the subject.

Most of the information seems to revolve around org-cliplink, a useful little package that takes a URL on the clipboard, parses out the HTML to extract the title, and inserts it as an org hyperlink into your current buffer. It's actually quite straightforward to build a simple Org mode based bookmarking system around this functionality, taking advantage of Org mode's built-in tagging functionality to organize them.

One thing that I gave up in the name of expediency is unfurling the shared link, as I do on my blog. My unfurling system uses a bespoke cocktail of Open Graph data, favicons and Microformats that I feel works pretty well across a spectrum of IndieWeb and non-IndieWeb sites. For whatever reason, I wasn't able to find any Emacs packages for extracting this metadata and since I wasn't willing to write any of it myself at this time, I simply did without.

One approach that I briefly considered was extracting my unfurling code into a standalone REST service and using an Emacs JSON package to interact with it, but while I haven't completely dismissed that possibility for the future, it felt like too much work for what I was trying to accomplish, which was a simple replacement for managing my bookmarks. In any case, integrating icons and images into an Org mode file in a way that looks reasonable while editing the text but which also exports to HTML that doesn't look like garbage is no picnic, as creating my reading list taught me.

All this to say is that, in the end, I created a very simple bookmarks page on my digital garden, and removed the corresponding links on my blog. I also removed the Lifestream feed since I felt it was becoming a bit redundant and I also felt a better argument could be made for including all my posts by default once the bookmarks were gone.

Will this last? Who can say? To be fair, it's not like I was making much use of the bookmarks on my blog when they were there. Maybe this will teach me to be more aware of what I record. Time will tell, I suppose.

Implementing a Reading List in Org Mode

2025-09-29T00:20:15Z

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I joined Goodreads in 2012, at roughly the same time I joined Twitter, in what might be called a more innocent age of social networking. The idea of a social network for book readers appealed to me at the time.

Fast forward to 2025, and the world looks different. Twitter/X has turned into a hellscape run by a super villain, and Goodreads, though not quite a hellscape, is slow, dated and run by a company with dubious ethics.

I ended up deactivating my Twitter account - not that difficult given that I never really gained a following. As it turns out, my use of Goodreads as a social network never really took off either - I don't think my friend list ever exceeded 20 people. I used it much more as a log of my reading habits, a record of every book I ever read or wanted to read. That made it easier to think about finding a replacement.

Alternatives to Goodreads

There are several viable alternatives to Goodreads particularly if, like me, you aren't that invested in the social aspect of maintaining a reading list. In 2025, the contenders seem to include, but are not necessarily limited to:

BookWyrm, in particular, is interesting as it's part of the Fediverse and uses the ActivityPub protocol. It's therefore truly decentralized service, like Mastodon.

Here's the thing, though. Ever since I began participating in the IndieWeb back in 2019, I've been been trying to live up to its principles - in particular the part about owning your data. And while all these services may have the best of intentions, there's no predicting the future. Any one of them might go out of business, or might simply evolve to the point where you want to leave - like Twitter did.

So what can you do?

Settling on Emacs and Org Mode

If you read my blog, you might know that I'm a fan of keeping my data in plain text. You might also know that I'm an Emacs enthusiast who cobbled together a vaguely GTD like system using Org Mode. Given that a reading list is, fundamentally, nothing more than a specialized TODO list, it makes sense to try and do something similar here.

Please note that, as usual, this will not be an Emacs or Org Mode tutorial. If you want to learn more about these tools, please consult the fine documentation.

So how do we go about doing this? Plain vanilla Org mode itself gets us about 80% of the way there. Here's a small example file:

#+TODO: TOREAD READING | READ DNF

* READ The Neverending Story  :fantasy:youngadult:translation:
CLOSED: [2025-03-06]
:PROPERTIES:
:Author:   Michael Ende, Ralph Manheim
:Added:    [2015-07-24]
:Rating:   :star::star::star:
:END:

* TOREAD The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language     :linguistics:
:PROPERTIES:
:Author:   Steven Pinker
:Added:    [2025-01-12]
:END:

There's nothing fancy here. The first line defines the TODO states that apply to this file. Since this file is a reading list, we have two actionable states: TOREAD, READING and two terminal or DONE states: READ and DNF (for Did Not Finish). Org mode automatically puts in a CLOSED line (as seen above) when the state of a headline moves from an actionable one to a terminal one. You can use this to record when you finished (or did not finish) a book.

Each title is entered as a headline with a TODO state. Extra information like Author and Added date is recorded via org mode's properties feature. I've also leveraged org mode's built in tagging system to define a basic taxonomy for the reading list.

To display your books using org-agenda, you can add this section in your org-agenda-custom-commands block:

("r" "All Books"
 ((todo "READING")
 (todo "TOREAD")
 (todo "READ")
 (todo "DNF"))
 ((org-agenda-files (file-expand-wildcards "~/org-roam-garden/books.org"))
 (org-overriding-columns-format "%TODO %50ITEM(TITLE) %30AUTHOR %30RATING")))

Now you can type "r" when calling up an org agenda and you'll get a basic, compact reading list. Even better, you can leverage org mode's agenda column view by typing C-c C-x C-c to get a nice tabular format.

Leveraging org-books

You can type out the books in your reading list manually, but since this is Emacs, it would be weird if there weren't a way to automate the process.

Help exists in the form of a Emacs package called org-books which advertises itself simply as "Reading list management using org-mode". Mostly, that means it provides a collection of elisp functions to quickly add a book to your reading list via a URL (org-books-add-url) or ISBN (org-books-add-isbn).

The org-books-add-url function, in particular, claims to support Amazon, Goodreads and Open Library as sources. What this means is that you can interactively call org-books-add-url and paste in, for example, an Amazon book URL when prompted. Press enter and voila - a new entry will be added to your book file. It looks like this:

* TOREAD Piranesi                                                       :fantasy:
:PROPERTIES:
:AUTHOR:   Susanna Clarke 
:ADDED:    [2015-07-31]
:AMAZON:   https://www.amazon.ca/Piranesi-Susanna-Clarke/dp/1635577802
:END:

Formatting with an Eye Towards Export

To be honest, I found org-books a bit rough around the edges. While Amazon and Goodreads URLs seemed to work, Open Library URLs would only work with the book's JSON API endpoint, not the actual web page, which I found annoying.

In addition, I wasn't totally happy with the way the package formatted the book entries. Informing my opinion was my desire to be able to easily export my reading to HTML, for publication on my garden.

Org mode isn't primarily a CMS and while it does support HTML export out of the box, it doesn't really come with what I would describe as an easy to use templating system. What this means in practice is that, without some fairly major configuration, org-mode HTML export will result in HTML that more or less mirrors the original content in terms of structure and semantics.

What I'm trying to say is that if you want your exported HTML to be structured a certain way, it's often easiest to arrange for your org-mode source to be structured in a similar way.

Related to this is the fact that org-books, seemingly as a matter of policy, formats all of its book entries exclusively as "headlines + properties", presumably reserving the content area for extra comments about work itself.

This can be a problem when it comes time to export the entry to HTML, because properties are treated as special in org-mode's export system - they are rendered as plain text by default, not HTML. So that URL in the AMAZON property you see above? Because it's a property, it's rendered in HTML as a plain, unclickable URL. After some amount of research, I came to the conclusion that the easiest way to get an actual link in the output was to embed the Amazon URL as a real org-mode link, in the content of the entry, not the properties - since proper org-mode links do get turned into HTML links during export, as you might expect.

I also thought it would be nice to have display cover image for each book entry, particularly in the exported HTML, and Open Library does have a public covers API that I suspected I could leverage. Org-books, so far as I could tell, doesn't insert any cover images at all. In any case, the right place for it, assuming we wanted it to appear in the exported HTML, would be as an image in the content, not as a property.

All this to say, org-books wasn't totally cutting it. So what to do?

Hacking org-books

In the end I decided to fork org-books and make some changes:

I capitalized the data properties, but I didn't make them all uppercase like they were originally. The property names appear in the HTML as is so I wanted something less "in-your-face".
I embedded the source URLs as proper links in the entry's content, rather than as properties.
When adding a book via Open Library, I also inserted a link in the entry's content to the cover via their covers API.
I added a function, org-books-add-olb, that accepts an Open Library web page URL as a data source, in a similar manner to Amazon or Goodreads.

I made sure that the entries were formatted in a way that made it easier to later produce the layout I wanted via CSS. In the end, a typical entry looked like this:

* READ Redshirts                   :scifi:
CLOSED: [2025-01-28]
:PROPERTIES:
:Author:   John Scalzi
:Added:    [2015-07-31]
:ISBN:     9780765316998
:Rating:   :star::star::star::star:
:END:

#+BEGIN_aside
#+ATTR_HTML: :loading lazy
[[https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/ISBN/9780765316998-M.jpg]]

[[https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25253043M/Redshirts][Open Library]] \\
[[https://openlibrary.org/api/books?bibkeys=ISBN:9780765316998&jscmd=data&format=json][Open Library Data]]
#+END_aside

I expected this book to be funny, and it was.  What I was *not* expecting
was that this book would make me emotional.  I nearly cried.

The content has a preamble that I wrapped in a #+BEGIN_aside/#+END_aside pair; when exported to HTML, this results in the enclosed content being wrapped in an aside tag that can be easily styled by CSS.

The formatting of the cover image is worth noting. It looks like this:

#+ATTR_HTML: :loading lazy
[[https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/ISBN/9780765316998-M.jpg]]

This results in a loading="lazy" attribute added to the cover img tag in the exported HTML:

<img src="https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/ISBN/9780765316998-M.jpg" alt="9780765316998-M.jpg" loading="lazy">

The effect is to only load the image when it's scrolled into view. Given that I have hundreds of books in my reading list, the exported page loads much faster as a result.

Example and Final Thoughts

I publish my reading list to my garden. You can peruse it there.

Is this thing a Goodreads killer? Will it replace a real book tracking app for the average person? Good God, no. I'm the first to admit the whole process is clunky as hell.

But apps comes with trade offs, as any IndeWeb enthusiast is aware, and one of the things you give up when you use one is full control over your data. The one big advantage of all this trouble is that my reading list is mine and mine alone. I consider that important.

Important enough to always resist the siren son of a dedicated service for years to come? Maybe not - that's why the IndeWeb has a prescribed way for sharing your data with the rest of the world: POSSE. This is the practice of publishing to your own site first and then deciding how you tell the world about it. It's something I do on my blog - all posts are automatically shared to Mastodon once published.

To be honest I'm not sure how POSSE would look in this case; I'm not even sure what service I'd share to, or how I'd figure out what to share. Still, it's an interesting idea worth exploring.

In the meantime, this serves my needs, and it was fun to do.

It's Not Nostalgia, Exactly

2025-01-31T02:36:57Z

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I have spent most of my life in Montreal but there was a decent sized chunk in the middle, spanning high school and university, when I lived in Toronto.

I still visit Toronto not infrequently. I have a soft spot for it; at the very least, I don't harbour quite the same level visceral hatred a lot of people seem to lob at the city.

But I haven't lived there for over 20 years. Obviously, a lot has changed in that time. I'm not sure I could live there now. I mean, I guess I could but my life would look very different. The place is so huge, and the housing so expensive, that I'm not sure it would be a good trade.

Going back, even just to visit, feels strange. I don't think it's nostalgia, exactly. My old haunts, such as they were, are long gone, so it never feels like I'm going home. I liked my time there well enough, and I have a tendency to jump to its defence when people start getting snarky about it, but I'm not like Woody Allen in Manhattan, "romanticizing it all out of proportion."

Actually, I think I know what it is. It's not nostalgia, a longing for a past that may or may not have existed. It's more like irrational indignation that the city had the audacity to move on without me.

I mean, how narcissistic can you get, right? To believe, in your heart of hearts, that a city should stop moving when you're not there? I never realized I had such a big ego.

Maybe the right thing to do is just acknowledge that the Toronto where I spent a good portion of my formative years just doesn't exist anymore. You can never go home again, as they say. Maybe I should just lean into the tourist thing when I visit. There is, after all, a lot to see and do.

And maybe it would help to finally internalize the notion, so abstractly obvious but still sometimes a tough pill to swallow, that the city in which you once lived doesn't know you exist. It's a freeing idea, all things considered.

I Never Considered Myself Naive

2025-01-20T00:35:39Z

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I never thought that the law applied equally to rich people and poor people. I never considered myself that naive. I had always understood that rich people could break the law in ways that poor people simply couldn't.

But I had always assumed that the way this worked in practice was that being rich just came with a heightened ability to cover your tracks. I had always assumed that, rich or poor, it was of supreme importance not to get caught, and that being rich simply bought you more options in that regard. Maybe you could bribe a police officer, or a judge, and make the charges go away. Maybe you could afford to hire someone to do the dirty work for you, or take the fall for you if it came to that.

But, and here's where I was a profoundly naive, I had always assumed that if, for whatever reason, you were caught, and it was blindingly clear, from a legal standpoint, that you did the thing of which you were accused, then, rich or poor, you'd be charged and convicted. Like...I had always assumed, for example, that if you committed a murder and it was caught on camera then, rich or poor, it was game over for you.

What's that expression about assuming things?

What the past few years have taught me, of course, is that this is bullshit. Once you reach a certain level of wealth, you don't even have to cover your tracks. You can brazenly commit your crimes in broad daylight, and you just have to convince the right people not to care. To ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears. And, of course, it doesn't hurt that the highest court in the land says that the law just...doesn't apply to you.

I'm not trying to sound dramatic, but the last few years have broken whatever paltry sense of justice I used to have. Laws only matter if people are willing to enforce them, and I don't believe there's anyone left in power to do so.

Anatomy of a Post

2024-12-07T17:07:47Z

]]>

My blog is based around Eleventy, which means I write my entries in plain text, using Markdown and YAML front matter, a combo which I'm sure is familiar to most users of static site generators.

I also participate in the IndieWeb, which means I post many different kinds of content other than your standard blog posts - notes, likes, photos, etc.

I find it useful to divide my content in two main types: original content, where the focus is on my own published material, and derivative content, which only makes sense in the context of another, external URL.

The main original content posts are:

Articles
Notes
Photos
Multi-Photo

I would include albums and album collections here as well, but we'll deal with those in a bit.

I've written a bit before about how I format my posts, but for the sake of reference, an article looks like this:

---
date: 2022-03-01T13:57:07-05:00
title: 'Much Ado About (Indieweb) Bookmarks'
blurb: 'The ins and outs of owning your bookmarks on the #indieweb'
tags:
- indieweb
mp-syndicate-to:
- twitter
---

Like many Indieweb participants, I post...

And a note looks like:

---
date: 2022-02-24T01:27:35Z
---

I am grateful that Wordle exists if for no other reason...

Here's a photo post with multiple photos in it - a multi-photo, in other words:

---
date: '2023-01-15T21:09:31-05:00'
mp-syndicate-to:
- twitter
photo:
- alt: Book nook contents
  value: https://media.desmondrivet.com/84/b3/2d/b8/e8de337b847a14ebac309f113fe28f1a572692c05795ca41caf435b0.jpg
- alt: Book nook started, partially built
  value: https://media.desmondrivet.com/04/5e/62/95/632d1dff8038533ba4114c0dadce31784f1a2746323e7c1b7af84c86.jpg
- alt: Miniature bookcase
  value: https://media.desmondrivet.com/2b/2a/50/dc/d18b6e980e029b94757a3e9ff500594d7ab218da940ab4f7885c5743.jpg
- alt: Book nook halfway finished
  value: https://media.desmondrivet.com/fb/c4/7c/3e/ff27aafb08dcbb24c3d08dd82ee879acbb642a968acd85f853bbb96f.jpg
- alt: Miniature book
  value: https://media.desmondrivet.com/70/a8/d8/80/25e8a621770fbe49354001c0a70e614afc9a21ecd75bb4b87e0f9c73.jpg
- alt: Miniature book with pages
  value: https://media.desmondrivet.com/26/69/87/7f/ca703fd7f6d2a8c5fa60bf69d5d0dd82b657e97a6e1141d2018c01a4.jpg
- alt: Miniature wall bookcase with many books 
  value: https://media.desmondrivet.com/e5/54/84/1a/9f396871304906351237e67c2cd5dd20b4e543a0398729cdd0a33ef8.jpg
- alt: Completed book nook on shelf with books
  value: https://media.desmondrivet.com/0c/7c/3f/a7/681cbb1930b6b6367f35ebeceeb61e16a1c620bfd73c62af76d75f67.jpg
---

I got a "book nook" for Christmas - kind of like a book end, but more elaborate.  Super fun, I want them all.

So how do I render these posts? One very simple and direct way is create a separate template for each type, but would result in a significant amount of repetition. A photo post and multi-photo post are virtually the same, for example, and both of them share a lot in common with a note, in that they're basically just notes with photos added. An article could be considered a longer note with a title added.

Deciding how to render them all on my blog in a relatively DRY way i.e. a way that doesn't require me to sprinkle the same snippets of HTML among a batch of templates of varying degrees of similarity is actually, in my opinion, a non-trivial problem, which is worth recording here for posterity. Most of what I write will be very specific to my workflow, but it's not entirely inconceivable that someone might gain some inspiration for their own blog

In any case, my main strategy for dealing with these posts is to treat them all as variations on the same theme and hence to create a single generic post template which captures them all. To start with, it includes:

an optional title (mandatory for articles)
optional content (mandatory for notes and articles but photos may not have any text) and
optional photos

If we're dealing with a multi-photo, then one more piece of content is implied: a line telling you how many photos are in the post, if there's more than 1 (I don't put any extra line at all if I just have one photo). A good place to put that would be after the title, but before the content, so you would get something like this:

Title
Photo count (for multi-photos)
Content
Photos

Although these are all optional, there is an implicit understanding that at least some of these pieces have to be present in some combination, otherwise you have no post at all, right? And some parts come as a pair; you would never have a line that said "3 photos" without showing any photos at the end.

Derived Posts

The other form of content I post are "derivative" posts. The main derivative post types are:

Likes
Reposts
Replies
Bookmarks

These are all posts that are "about" another URL, which I call a referenced URL. The posts make no sense without it, so it needs to be included in the post somehow. With the exception of a reply, these types are often without content, though there's nothing stopping you from adding some. In addition, these posts should all show an unfurled "link preview" or "reply context" (the IndieWeb wiki distinguishes between these two things, but I don't find the distinction useful, so I don't make one) for the referenced URL.

To give you some context, here's a "like" post:

---
date: '2024-11-09T12:53:58-05:00'
like-of: https://adactio.com/journal/21548
---

Super simple right? Here's a reply post:

---
date: '2023-09-15T06:41:24-04:00'
in-reply-to: https://nerdculture.de/@titaniumbiscuit/111067559683462120
mp-syndicate-to:
- mastodon
---

Yeah I may have judged too quickly with regard to Obsidian. Do you use or recommend it?

The difference in format between the derivative posts is quite superficial. They all have a referenced URL, tagged with their respective identifiers ("like-of" for likes, "in-reply-to" for replies, etc.), and optional content.

The template for these posts would seem correspondingly obvious. They would include an optional referenced URL, and optional content, followed by an unfurled link preview.

Does it make sense to have a separate template for these kinds of posts? My first instinct was yes, since the only overlap with the "original content" template appeared to be the content. Upon further reflection, I realized that notes sometimes have article links in them that would benefit from a link preview as well. And, though it might be unusual for a like or a reply to have a title, there's no particular reason to enforce this as a rule.

The bottom line is that a "derivative" template can pretty much take advantage of the "original content" template and just add the things that are unique to these kinds of posts: the referenced URL and the unfurled link. A good place to show them is after the title, and before the content. With that, we have a new unified template with:

Title
Referenced URL
Photo count
Content
Photos
Link preview

As before, all of these elements are optional, but at least some of them must be present at any one time, and not all combinations are really valid (I'm having a hard time imagining how a link preview would work with a photo post, for example).

List Context Versus Full Context

Blogs tend to have two main contexts in which posts are rendered: a full post, shown on its own page, located at a permalink, and something which for lack of a better name we shall call a post entry, shown in contexts where it's part of a list, such as on a timeline or a feed.

There are some differences in how full posts are rendered versus post entries:

Articles are shown truncated in a post entry, with a "Read more" link to take you to the full article
A multi-photo post would show thumbnails in the post entry, and the larger photos in the full post.

So, this discussion now implies two templates - one for posts in a list context, aka as post entries, and one for posts in a full context.

A post entry template looks like this:

Title
Referenced link
Photo count
Truncated content (with Read more link)
if multi-photo show thumbnails, otherwise show one large photo
Link preview

For a full post template we have this:

Title
Referenced link
Photo count
Content
Large photos
Link preview

Open Graph Versus Featured Images

Open Graph is a standard created by Meta (Facebook) for annotating URLs with metadata that can used in the unfurling of said URLs in other contexts. One of these bits of metadata is the image associated with the post that is displayed in such contexts.

Wordpress reportedly has a similar concept called the "featured image", which has been copied by the IndieWeb community in the form of a u-featured microformat. A featured image, like Open Graph's image metadata, can be displayed in a link preview context.

The two concepts work differently. The Open Graph image URL is true metadata; it's configured in a meta tag of a post's HTML. As such, you never see the image in the rendered post unless you explicitly put it in there. The IndieWeb featured image concept, on the other hand, is designed to be embedded in the post itself, so that you have something to which you can add the u-featured microformat. You can, of course, turn the image off with a good, old-fashioned "display: none" but those kinds of shenanigans, while sometimes unavoidable, are generally frowned upon.

The featured image is easy to add to an IndieWeb post if you're dealing with one that incorporates such an image organically, such as a photo post, or an article with some images embedded. In such a case, the featured image can also be used as the Open Graph image for maximum unfurling capabilities.

I'll usually pick the first photo as the featured image in a multi-photo post.

On the other hand, if you have an article with no natural image to display, then the situation becomes more complicated. Some people will actually incorporate a featured image into their content and display it in their posts but that feels somewhat forced and artificial to me, so I don't bother to do it. I do certainly add an Open Graph image if I remember to.

Photo Album Format

I also post photo albums. Photo albums are similar to multi-photo posts in that they both house multiple photos, but an album differs from a multi-photo post in the following ways:

Each photo in an album post has its own permalink
An album is more curated and less spontaneous than a photo post. The photos are more processed and I'm more selective with them
An album tends to have more photos than a photo post, so that showing all the thumbnails in a list context isn't always feasible

Under the hood, as far as the post format is concerned, the two are nearly indistinguishable, except for the following:

A multi-photo post tends to have no title, although there's nothing really enforcing that.
More importantly, an album post has an explicit flag, album: true, that concretely identifies the post as an album

---
date: '2024-10-05T20:30:30-04:00'
title: Plaza De Espana
featured:
  alt: ''
  value: >-
    https://media.desmondrivet.com/27/82/0a/cd/c834418f3eb97df08ead1fc9ee4839e43218bef19c42c728aab27fde.jpg
album: true
excludeFromPosts: true
parent: '2024-spain'
photo:
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/3a/41/39/00/6a65b1d3b2cea7a36d7c4b5e97deddbaea74bb3004ce61c46b93cb97.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/66/f0/05/c5/db2ed1d9fb53d937883170044fd37ce4a49e3b8ac6f6d0cddf4b3205.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/a8/49/b6/5e/0e5b9dd0d44f6602045dbc2b29a478c8abfed3b6ec26799f6ce8871f.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/9b/ce/73/e9/f001794447336d239fa507a1a57db357fef181d1dcc79375b8e50980.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/0c/57/30/34/902a01992fb105db4009d923ec25c582dcf13a63bdc8776e736d0ff6.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/0b/6a/12/4b/283a2e598bf020e67474cee6baa83826f2b640472a252d70eb514830.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/f2/c2/49/48/19b7a46adf598e35d82b35ca8572dcb31c81397913422bda35ef3ac3.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/0d/9f/fd/c8/68dc185b232fa7a466a2eb440b3b2d733ae6bb911b7e34349541bcef.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/d0/65/70/97/fac5397a015dc4a1f37b78b716df7c5b0cd75cfadbac0eab619836e5.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/f3/0e/15/77/f312e468e2776b055f04bd795bf0989e8dc0f505a4e44439ec08307d.jpg
  - alt: ''
    value: >-
      https://media.desmondrivet.com/27/82/0a/cd/c834418f3eb97df08ead1fc9ee4839e43218bef19c42c728aab27fde.jpg
---

Plaza de Espana is one of Seville's main postcard shots.  A huge, colourful building, it's hard to get it all in one photo.

Some things to note:

As mentioned, I have an explicit album flag defined.
I've explicitly defined a featured photo here, because the first one won't do. I should probably move the featured flag into the photo list, but I was lazy.
I have a flag called "excludeFromPosts" which will remove this album from direct feeds. I only want the album to appear as the child of my "Spain" album collection (see below), defined by the parent key.

Rendering Photo Albums

I could, in theory, choose to render the photo album in a similar way to a multi-photo post, but I've opted instead to do it a bit differently:

Because a photo album is meant to be more "curated", and may have many photos in it, I want to show just the featured image when it appears in a list context, instead of the thumbnails.
Since each photo has its own URL, when showing the full album post, I want to show just the thumbnails and let the user navigate to the photo URL when they click on it.

This means that my post entry template now looks like this:

Title
Referenced link
Photo count (shown for multi-photos and albums)
Truncated content
If album, featured image. If multi-photo, thumbnails. If one photo, just the photo.
Link preview

For full posts we have:

Title
Referenced link
Photo count (shown for multi-photos or albums)
Content
If album, thumbnails. If not, a stack of full photos.
Link preview

One idiosyncrasy of an album post, when compared with a multi-photo post, is that while we have conceptually defined a featured photo for the album, we won't show it in the rendered post. The reason is that all we're showing on the post is thumbnails, and none of these are suitable for a featured image. This is one major downside to using microformats to define a featured image - you need to have the actual image in the post so that the microformat has something to grab on to.

You can of course continue set the Open Graph image metadata to whatever you want, and we do, in fact, set it here to the featured image so that the permalink will unfurl correctly in most situations.

Album Collections with Explicit Featured Images

A photo album collection, as you might guess, is a collection of photo albums, i.e. a post that houses other photo albums. It can also house other album collections. Such a post houses no photos directly, but it is still is photo oriented, so it makes sense, in my opinion, to explicitly define a conceptual featured image here, even if it's not "organically" part of the post.

Format-wise, an album collection looks a lot like a really, really short blog entry - it has a title, and a line or two of content, describing the collection. But there are some things which set it apart:

The metadata will have an eleventyNavigation key, which child photo albums point to as their "parent". In theory this feature doesn't have to be restricted to photo albums, but that's all I'm using it for at the moment.
Crucially, the metadata will have an album: true flag, which firmly identifies this as an album collection - and notably not an album, since there are also no photos defined in the post directly.

An album collection will have an explicit featured image defined in the top level metadata.

Rendering Album Collections

When rendering an album collection in a list context, it makes sense to me to show its featured image, like a proper photo album. In addition, I want to display the number of albums in the collection. This means I enhance my post entry template so that it looks like this:

Title
Referenced link
Photo count (for multi-photos or albums)
Album count
Truncated content
If one photo, just the photo. If multi-photo, thumbnails. If album or album collection, featured image.
Link preview

The full post for album collections will render, in some fashion, the list of albums for that collection. Our template is therefore augmented to include albums, like this:

Title
Referenced link
Photo count (for multi-photos or albums)
Album count
Content
If album, thumbnails. If not, a stack of full photos.
Children of the album collection, either albums or more album collections. Either way, each child should have a featured image to display.
Link preview

Like a regular photo album post, we don't render a featured photo for full album collection posts, since the photo is not really shown organically in the post. And again, like the photo album post, we will continue to define the Open Graph image from the defined featured photo in the raw source post, so the URL can continue to unfurl correctly.

Madrid Is the Toronto of Spain, and That's Okay

2024-11-26T00:58:42Z

]]>

Madrid marked the end of our trip to Spain. Our plane home flew out of there and so we decided to spend the evening before exploring what we could of the city. We boarded a train from Seville and arrived at our hotel around 4pm that day.

I would argue Madrid is the Toronto of Spain from the point of view of visiting Canadians because, like Toronto, it's the largest city in the country as well as its economic hub and also the city that everyone loves to hate.

I've said this before but I'll say it again - everyone loves Barcelona. No one loves Madrid. Madrid, by all popular accounts, is mediocre at best.

Side note: if Madrid is the Toronto of Spain, does this mean that Barcelona is the Montreal of Spain? I don't think the comparison is crazy - everyone loves Montreal.

Having visited Madrid, I can now say that, like Toronto, I feel its reputation is somewhat undeserved - at least from the little I saw of it. It appears to be a clean, attractive, organized city, marred only by the confusing public transit system. The buildings seem newer and less distinctive, which I imagine puts some people off, but I thought they looked pretty decent. It's definitely not as dynamic as Barcelona or as colourful as Seville but I honestly found the calm, almost placid vibe rather refreshing after 10 days of hustle and bustle.

Like Barcelona, it feels like there's a real city here, with a life of its own beyond the tourists. I could certainly see myself visiting again.

A Distinct Lack of Barbers

2024-11-26T00:10:38Z

]]>

I'm 47 years old, and most of the people I work with are much younger than I am - often in their 20's and 30's. Cultural references that I think are universal sometimes turn out to be pretty specific to my age group in ways that surprise me.

Take something like Bugs Bunny. Most people, young and old, have of course heard of Bugs Bunny but it turns out that not a lot of young people grew up watching it. I have, and it is because of this cartoon that I happen to vaguely know some of the music to The Barber of Seville.

So when I told some of my workmates that I was visiting Seville, and that I would be visiting all the famous sites as well as a barber, no one got the joke. They took one look at my shaved head and with genuine confusion would proceed to inform me that I have no hair and hence would not need the services of a barber.

Growing old is awful, y'all.

Anyway! After Barcelona, Evelyn and I hopped on a high-speed train and headed to Seville. We had booked 3 nights. It's not a destination you often hear about in connection with a trip to Spain, but I had heard that it was beautiful, and well worth the visit.

I had also heard that it was "underrated" and so I had assumed that it would be less crowded than Barcelona. Was I right? Let's find out!

Arrival

Our apartment was located across from Las Setas, an odd, mushroom shaped structure a short walk from the Old Town. The accommodations were a cross between an Airbnb and a hotel - it was a full apartment with fridge and stove, but we didn't have to share the place with anyone. Nice enough digs, and a damn sight quieter than Barcelona.

In terms of location, we were about a half hour walk from the Plaza de Espana, which I was desperate to see right away. Plaza de Espana is the "postcard" attraction of Seville - it's what shows up when you search for "Seville" in a search engine and choose "images". Try it and you'll see what I mean, and you'll also understand why I wanted to see this thing so bad.

The best way to get to the Plaza de Espana is to go through the Barrio de Santa Cruz, otherwise known as the Old Town, or Jewish Quarter, a gorgeously colourful collection of narrow streets, alleyways and squares. It reminded me a bit of El Born in Barcelona but way less gritty and better maintained - so well maintained, in fact, that Evelyn thought the whole thing looked a bit unreal, like a theme park. I could see where she was coming from and I didn't entirely disagree, but I still found myself enjoying the neighbourhood's twists and turns, even if I was sharing the experience with thousands of other tourists.

So...Seville is definitely not some kinda of underrated "secret". It was definitely crowded, though the tourist demographic may have skewed a little bit older than Barcelona.

Santa Cruz is home to some of the most popular tourist attractions in the city, like the Cathedral and the Royal Alcazar and though these were definitely on my list of things to see - I had already bought tickets for both of them for the following day - at the moment I had my sights set on the Plaza. From the direction we were going, we approached it from behind, turned a corner and...voila.

It's hard to describe what hits your eyes when you turn the corner. It's...immense, certainly, and your breath catches, but that's not quite the whole story. The entire package just sort of catches your eye, from the square in front of the building, to the colourful, tiled mosaics, to the symmetrical twin towers on either end, to the little stream running through it all. It's just...stunning, in a quite literal way - I was speechless for a few seconds when I saw it.

I was surprised to learn that the Plaza de Espana isn't actually very old; it was built in 1929 for the Seville World Fair. It was designed to impress, and accomplishes the goal effortlessly. I was more disappointed to learn that the building now houses mostly government offices but I guess you got to do something with all that space.

Also: not that I was looking very hard, but I did not find a barber this day. I did however, find Rosina's Balcony, by all accounts the inspiration for the opera.

Second Day

The next day was reserved for our two main paid attractions in Seville: the Royal Alcazar and the Seville Cathedral.

First up was the Royal Alcazar, the Spanish royal family's official residence when they stay in Seville. It looks like something out of Morocco. At first I thought it was actually built by Moorish invaders but, alas, the truth is a bit more mundane. Though originally the site of a 10th century Islamic citadel, progressive conquests and reconstructions have led to current palace, a Mudéjar-style estate dating back to the 14th century, near the end of Islamic rule in Spain. It looks like something Scheherazade may have cooked up but it was actually built by European Christians as a Christian residence, though very much in the style of the conquering Moors.

The place is mind-blowing. To some extent, I suppose, it must have been the novelty of the whole thing - I'd never seen anything quite it. When you visit Europe, you're used to seeing a lot of churches and castles and palaces of a certain look and feel, and the Alcazar just doesn't fit that mould.

When the tour was over, we had lunch, walked a bit and then stood in line for the Seville Cathedral. Like the Alcazar, the church has Islamic origins and was originally the site of a large mosque. Nothing remains of the original structure except, notably, the Giralda tower, which totally looks the part.

I usually don't bother with church tours when I visit Europe, but this one came highly recommended, for reasons I didn't fully grasp until I saw it. The Seville Cathedral is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world and although I understand what that means abstractly it's still a big hit to the brain when you go inside and see just what that means in practice.

I could say that it's huge, but what does that even mean? Legend has it that the architects wanted to build a church so big the world thought they were crazy. Mission accomplished - the size is impossible to convey in words, and difficult in photos (I tried, and mostly failed, I think). Let's just say that when you go inside you feel very, very, very small. My first reaction was to wonder how on earth they keep the ceilings clean.

There are, reportedly, over 80 chapels (distinct altars or areas where people can kneel and pray) inside but, again, I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to do with that information. How many chapels does a church usually have? I have no idea.

What I do know is that the main chapel is called, unsurprisingly, the Main Chapel, and that it houses one of the most breathtaking works of art I've ever seen in my life: the Ritablo Mayor, or Main Altarpiece, an unassuming name for something so incredibly extra.

The Ritablo Mayor stands roughly 60 feet tall and consists of matrix or grid of Bible scenes, all carved out of wood and gilded to the hilt. In a time when most people couldn't read, this was meant to familiarize them with selected Bible stories, the way a comic book might today.

Oh! And the Cathedral is also the final resting place of one Christopher Columbus. An asshole, to be sure, but the history is deep here.

Side note: on this second day, I still did not find a barber. Is there just one barber in Seville, the one the opera's about? It feels like it. Anyway I didn't find him.

Third Day

The third day in Seville was mostly just exploration and if you're going to do that, one neighbourhood stands out: Triana. At least, that's what the Internet and guidebooks say, which means that it's still just as touristy as the rest of town.

I'm being a bit unfair. Triana definitely had a lot of tourists but it also had a lot of stretches that just seemed...uninteresting. Therein lies rub when it comes to the dichotomy between "authentic" and "touristy". Generally speaking, touristy places are like that for a reason - and, by contrast, the non-touristy, authentic spots are also like that for a reason.

When we first crossed the bridge to Trina, for example, after a bit of wandering, we settled on a bar that felt pretty local. It wasn't a bad spot, and the food was okay, but...it was definitely not catering to us. I think people sometimes don't realize that "real" Spaniards drink local beer and eat fries and pizza like the rest of us. I honestly think the place could have become better over upon multiple visits but we never got the chance.

It turns out that we actually crossed the wrong bridge. We meant to cross the Puente de Isabel II, which was supposed to take us directly into the main part of the neighbourhood, with all the popular restaurants and bars, but instead we crossed a bridge or two earlier and ended up in a part of town that was much more residential and local - as represented by the bar we settled on. We didn't quite know where we were, and we couldn't quite figure out why there wasn't anything interesting around us. Again, it all comes back to be authentic versus touristy, and being careful what you wish for.

Anyway, Trina as a whole definitely had a totally different vibe from the Old Town. While the Old Town felt a bit like a theme park, Trina felt like a real neighbourhood, like people actually lived there. It probably deserves more exploration.

(Seriously, where are all the barbers? I couldn't even find one in Triana, and this time I was actually looking. I guess tourists don't really need their hair cut)

Comparison with Barcelona

Inevitably, when I tell people that I went to both Seville and Barcelona, people will ask me which I prefer.

It's a tough question to answer, because I genuinely liked both cities. I will say, however, that while I think Seville is a prettier town than Barcelona, I felt that there was more going on in the latter. Seville felt like a town of tourist attractions, and you begin to think that there's maybe not much going on beyond that. Barcelona also has a ton of tourist attractions, but one gets the impression that there's an honest-to-goodness city to be explored once you move past them.

So on the whole I guess Barcelona has a slight edge here, though I would gladly revisit both.

(Ironically, on the train out of Seville to Madrid...we finally caught sight of a barber shop. I think Seville is missing out on a lucrative opportunity here)

Looking for Paella in All the Wrong Places

2024-10-26T00:38:02Z

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The COVID-19 pandemic put a cramp in my travel habits, as it did with everyone. The last overseas trip that Evelyn and I went on was to Poland in 2016 for a wedding and the last one that we actually planned was to Greece in 2015 (and, my God, it's hard for me to accept that Greece 9 years ago). We've been to a handful of relatively local destinations in the interim (Vancouver, New York, PEI) but nothing particularly foreign.

And while I do remain part of an increasingly small minority of people who still thinks about the pandemic in the present tense, I also wanted to finally visit someplace a bit more exotic.

So...with our vaccines topped up, we choose Spain. Or rather I choose it, and I dragged Evelyn along.

I wanted to avoid a repeat of the madness of Greece. We managed to pack a lot into 10 days for that trip, and it was all great, but the trade off was that we were constantly on the move, never staying more than a couple of days in one spot. I wanted something a bit more stable this time so we settled on 6 nights in Barcelona, 3 nights in Seville and 1 night in Madrid since we were flying out of there the next day.

The trip was planned just as locals started protesting mass tourism in Spain and other parts of Europe, and while I'd hoped that travelling in September would spare us the worst of it, I also got some advice on how to blend in...or at least on how to avoid walking around with a giant neon arrow pointed at my head flashing "tourist". Mostly this involved dressing plainly and not being obnoxious.

I started making inquiries. What was Spain like? What was worth seeing? What wasn't? From the very few people I talked to, the consensus seemed to be that:

Barcelona was amazing
Seville was amazing
The food was amazing
Madrid was...not amazing

Were we attacked with water guns? Was the food indeed amazing? Exactly how disappointing was Madrid? Read on to find out!

(Or rather, read on to find out more about Barcelona! Seville and Madrid will be dealt with in a future blog entry since this one is getting quite long).

There is No Barcelona Syndrome

Our first stop was Barcelona, our home for the next few days. Before we get into it though, I want to take a small detour and talk about another famous and tourist-laden European city: Paris. In particular, I want to talk about something called Paris Syndrome.

Paris Syndrome is the cognitive dissonance felt by many tourists when they visit a legendary city like Paris. It's the contrast between knowing in your heart of hearts that Paris is the very epitome of European high-culture and the fact that, when you visit, there are rude people and dog shit everywhere. It's particularly common among Japanese tourists, who tend to put the city on a pedestal and who tend to come from places where, I can only assume, people are more polite and tend to pick up after their pets.

One interesting twist to all of this is that I didn't actually experience Paris Syndrome when I first visited the city 20 odd years ago. I wasn't very well-travelled, and Europe was still so new to me back then, that every street, every back alley, no matter how mundane, took on an air of the exotic for the simple reason that it wasn't home. It's not that I didn't notice the dog shit - I most definitely noticed it - but rather that it lent an "interesting" texture to a place that was already bearing down on me with the weight of its history.

Or maybe part of it is that I come from Montreal, a city with its share of grime. The dog shit didn't faze me as much as some people. Who knows?

So, with that in mind, I would like to point out that there doesn't appear to be such a thing as Barcelona Syndrome - at least, not according to Wikipedia. Everyone I've talked to raves about the place. Madrid? You can skip it. Barcelona? Don't you fucking dare. The food, the architecture, the beaches - by all accounts Barcelona walks on water in a way that Paris does not.

Why is this? Is Barcelona that amazing? Or is it that it doesn't have quite the same lofty reputation as Paris, and so people's expectations are lower? I don't know, but I'll say this. When I was discussing with Evelyn how long we would stay, she expressed concern that 5 days would too much. She was genuinely concerned that we would be bored after day 3.

Since Paris, of course, I've been back to Europe several times and while many parts of it are indeed achingly beautiful, I've now "been there" and "done that", so to speak. I'm no longer impressed by something just because it's different or "exotic" and I can safely say that it takes more than just a slightly foreign looking alleyway to engage my sense of wonder. And dog shit, no two ways about it, is a blight on society.

So, given that this isn't my first rodeo, but also that everyone really, really seems to love Barcelona...how was it?

Less Vibes, More Sights, and Gaudi All Around

Let's start with the Airbnb. It was located in the Barcelona Sans district, right near the train station, and only a 5 minute walk from the metro. While our accommodations were modest, our hostess was legitimately one of the friendliest people I've ever met in my life.

Here's where I learned that Duo Lingo is a lie. Our hostess spoke Ukrainian and Spanish - but not much English. No problem, I think to myself - I've been Duo Lingo-ing Spanish for a over a year and we should be fine, right? Right?

Hahahahaha! I don't know if I'm just bad at this but my Spanish was rough, y'all. As in, non-existent. We desperately ended up relying on Google Translate here. This linguistic problem actually cropped up more than you might imagine given that we were tourists in one of the most heavily visited cities in the world. You see, our attempts to blend in actually worked - kind of. Random people would stop us to ask for directions, in Spanish, only to be met with a laughably broken "No hablo espanol". Devastating.

Still, our room was decent enough and very well situated, so it was hard to complain. And while no part of Barcelona is completely tourist-free, this area wasn't completely overrun with them, so that was a win. The neighbourhood felt...lived in. Pleasant enough, but I didn't get the impression that everything was there for us.

Our first touristy thing to do was booked for the night we flew in - a tour of Casa Batllo, by all accounts a "must see", and so we decided we "had to" see it. It's a building designed by Antoni Gaudi, a name that comes up again and again in connection to Barcelona - it sometimes feels like he designed half the city. For what it's worth, it's an impressive structure - the thing looked like it was made from bones; indeed, I later discovered that the locals sometimes call it the House of Bones.

This feels like a good spot to point out something that immediately sets Barcelona apart from Paris in my mind, either because I'm less of a wide-eyed traveller nowadays or because of something intrinsically different between the two cities. Paris, to me at least, is the type of city where you can just kind of...soak up the vibe. Obviously, there are a ton of specific things to see and do, but it's also possible to just amble along aimlessly and still feel like you're experiencing something special and unique. There's less of that in Barcelona. The city feels grittier, and lazily strolling around is a less interesting experience. Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of cool things to see and do, but it's less vibe and more sights, if that makes sense.

Despite being so crowded, there isn't much dog shit or trash in Barcelona and that night, in bed, we discovered why. It's because the city empties out the garbage bins every single night. We were woken up to the sounds of glass bottles being crushed in a garbage truck around 2 am. Good thing we brought earplugs. I was prepared the next night.

(Interesting philosophical question: if this had happened while I was in Paris, would I have chalked it up to the "texture" of the city? I don't know but I can tell you that I was certainly not impressed this time around).

The next day we toured the Sagrada Familia, another Gaudi special. Nominally a Catholic Basilica, I can safely say that the Sagrada Familia was one of the top things I'll forever remember about Barcelona. As one starts to experience more of Gaudi's work, you begin to notice similar themes. The guy was really into making his creations look organic - grown rather than designed. Sometimes that meant making them look like they were built from bones, and sometimes it meant making them look like they were crystals jutting out of the ground. In the case of the Sagrada Familia, it looked like both. I was surprised to learn that it's not the official Cathedral of Barcelona (that title goes to the much more aptly name Barcelona Cathedral - by all accounts a much less impressive structure) but given that, due to Gaudi's untimely death, it's still not finished after 150 years, I suppose it's not surprising.

Later that day we visited Park Guell, yet another Gaudi creation (this guy is everywhere in Barcelona). Not quite the jaw dropping spectacle of the Sagrada Familia, Park Guell still looks like something out of Dr. Seuss.

A Brief Culinary Detour

We obviously had to eat that night and so now might be good time to talk about the food. It's definitely one of things people tend to comment on when they talk about Spain. People seem to love it. When questioned on the subject, a friend of mine remarked: "Two words: jamón ibérico". Another friend won't stop talking about the paella and yet another friend raves about the tapas, which is weird because tapas aren't really a recipe, right? More of a...portion size?

So I'll get this out of the way: the food was...fine. Tasty, but not mind blowing. Just okay.

Maybe it's because I've visited France and Italy where the food was, indeed, mind blowing, but I found the food in Spain a bit lackluster. I'm honestly not sure what the big deal is about paella; I tried it three times and it was certainly good each time but people treat this dish like it's some kind of religious experience it just...was not that for me. To be fair, it's possible that we simply picked the wrong spots - I'm pretty sure at least of them was a tourist trap - but it's hard for me to imagine even a professionally prepared paella changing my life. I'm willing to be corrected here!

And the jamón ibérico? People will yell at you if you call it prosciutto, so I won't call it prosciutto, but it's definitely prosciutto adjacent, you know? It's delicious, but I've had similar stuff before.

One Spanish culinary item that did, in fact, stand out for me might not be what you expect: it was the vermouth. Vermerterias, bars that specialize in vermouth, are everywhere in Spain, many of them with their own house blends. Vermouth gets a bad rap in North America - it's the stuff you grudgingly mix into a Martini or a Manhattan - but good vermouth is criminally underrated, and Spain is awash in the stuff. It was great.

Oh! And the cheesecake. I actually really, really liked the cheesecake. It's definitely not like the firm, dense, almost crumbly cheesecake you get here, which I also love. Spanish cheesecake is less cake and more creamy custard. You almost eat it like a pudding. It's amazing.

El Born and the Gothic Quarter

On the advice of a friend, we booked a free (sort of - these people work on donations) walking tour for the next day. While the walking tour was extremely informative, and our tour guide was very knowledgeable and very nice, I know that years from now the only thing I'm going to really remember about it is that the tour took us through the Old Town of Barcelona.

The Old Town, consisting of two areas called El Born and the Gothic Quarter, effectively constitutes a giant exception to my idea that Barcelona doesn't have much of a "vibe". The Old Town is all vibe. The entire neighbourhood is bursting with charming little cafes, restaurants, side streets and alleyways, many of which date back to the medieval era, but I can't think of a single thing that stuck out more than the neighbourhood as a whole. It's very easy to get lost here, and it's very easy not to care.

And there's a whole set of Roman ruins underneath! You can buy a ticket to see them at the local History Museum. They were discovered relatively recently; there's a black and white photograph of it in the museum. Fascinating stuff. Evelyn and I spent way longer looking at old garum factories than I thought was humanly possible.

How To Visit a Beach in Barcelona

Barcelona actually has a city beach, in the Barceloneta district, that dates back to 1992, when the city hosted the Olympics. It's serviceable but is nonetheless not the one many people think of when they want to take a dip. No, the town that crosses everyone's minds when they think of "Barcelona" and "beaches" is Sitges, which isn't actually in Barcelona.

In theory, getting there should have been easy for us. We were right near the train station. It's only a 45 minute ride. This should have been a cake walk.

Alas, we...did not fully understand how the train ticketing system worked, and ended buying a ticket to someplace completely different. Luckily, Evelyn discovered our mistake before we got too far. Still...28 Euros down the drain and we only got to Sitges around 4pm.

It was worth it, though. The town itself is pretty, sports 17 beaches, none of which were crowded at that time of year and all of which were beautiful. The Mediterranean waters were choppy but warm, and became much less choppy the more you swam out. I can only imagine how pleasant the excursion would have been if we had, you know, actually gotten on the right train.

So that's the lesson I took from that day. Take it from someone who's been there: make sure you get on the right train! Words to live by.

Final Thoughts

Barcelona definitely feels like a place that would reward repeated visits. I can imagine spending months or even years looking for that one hole in the wall that serves up the best paella you've ever had, or that one underground cavern with the secret vermouth barrel that will become the gold standard by which you will judge all other vermouths.

And it feels more real than Paris, like people actually work and live there. I think the city isn't burdened by the weight of expectations, and it lets you have more fun. I definitely want to go back.

Maybe with, you know, some actual Spanish under my belt this time.

As I mentioned, Barcelona was the first part of a longer trip to Spain. Stay tuned for my thoughts on Seville and Madrid.

Yes, I Know That Chai Means Tea

2024-06-28T14:21:26Z

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Yes, I know that the word "chai" literally just means "tea" in Hindi (and other languages) and that the term "chai tea" is therefore technically redundant. I don't care. I will still occasionally say "chai tea" and I don't feel like I'm committing some kind of linguistic sin by doing so.

The English translation of "chai" is, of course, "tea" and it refers to a very generic category of usually hot and often caffeinated beverages made from steeping various kinds of leaves. On the other hand, the word "chai" in English usually refers to a very specific kind of spiced tea, often taken with milk, that Westerners typically associate with the culinary tradition of South Asia. One would not normally use the word "chai" in English to refer to the bog standard Orange Pekoe that one might drink for a caffeine fix in the morning before work.

I could just use the word "chai" on its own to refer to this spiced beverage and leave it at that, but if I'm comparing it to other kinds of tea, like Earl Grey or Irish Breakfast, then I might add the word "tea" after each item to stress the unifying concept. So I might say "Earl Grey tea", "Irish Breakfast tea" or (the horror!) "chai tea".

My point is that the word "chai" in English doesn't mean the same thing as it does in other languages, despite being borrowed from those languages. Sometimes chai is used as more of an adjective than a noun, and that's just how languages work. They borrow words and they change them.

It's exactly the same battle with a word like "naan". I know it just means "bread" in Persian but that's simply not how the word is used in English. In English it refers to a specific kind of flat bread, usually made in a specific kind of oven. I mean, a French baguette is just "bread" as well, but I suspect you wouldn't use the word "naan" to describe it.

And yes, I would use the (technically redundant) combination "naan bread" if, like the tea example above, I was trying to differentiate naan from various other kinds of bread, like sourdough or pita, and I wanted to emphasize the unifying characteristic of all the things I was talking about.

So stop with the sanctimonious word policing, already! Languages evolve and trade, and this is just one example in a very long line of examples.

Five Years on the IndieWeb

2024-06-08T01:33:22Z

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About five years ago, in early 2019, I stumbled upon the IndieWeb, a movement and community dedicated to modernizing the personal website. I quickly became enamoured with its ideas and spent the next year revamping my website and blog to make it more compliant with their standards.

I've written about the IndieWeb before but if you're just tuning in, there are several dimensions to it:

There's an emphasis on owning your own domain and on integrating IndieAuth, a way of using your domain as a form of authentication - something of a spiritual successor to OpenID .
There's the formalization of the notion of a post (via a technology called microformats) and a relatively sophisticated taxonomy system and algorithm for identifying different kinds of posts "in the wild", so to speak.
There are webmentions, a way for websites to talk to each other, after a fashion, allowing a kind of decentralized social network to emerge out of the cacophony of standalone blogs.
There's a conceptual framework for cross posting your content to third party applications and for harvesting interactions on said applications to your own site.
There's a standard, known as Micropub, for publishing new posts on your website.

I pretty much went whole hog here; my website and publishing workflow supports all of the above, and link previews to boot. Not particularly well, mind you, but that's a different conversation.

Owning your own data, and collecting it in one place, just felt right to me, as I've always been a bit uneasy with the idea of leaving my online presence spread out among a handful of third party applications. The nerd in me also appreciated the way the IndieWeb both generalized the notion of a post, and classified individual posts into specific types, like articles or notes; I'd often mulled over rudimentary versions of this kind of scheme in the past, but never really had the wherewithal to implement it.

(To be fair, the IndieWeb post classification scheme is not perfect. In particular, I don't find it particularly useful to distinguish between certain types of posts, like notes or photos or videos; to me, these are all just different variations of a note. In general, I think it's more useful to firmly distinguish between original content, such as articles or notes, which have their roots in traditional blogging, and derivative content, such as likes, reposts and replies, which seem to have come about as a response to the emergence of social networking. This personal preference surfaces in my blog via my "Lifestream" feed which houses all my original content into one feed)

My blog never had a lot of readers, and I never had a ton of followers on social media, so while the social networking aspects of the IndieWeb, particularly the webmentions, certainly intrigued me, they were never what sold me. I wrote this a few years ago, for example, in my inaugural post introducing myself to the IndieWeb at large:

Even if the entire IndieWeb consisted of a single personal website, it would still "work", in the sense that the owner of the website would be in control of their own content and would still be able to share that content with their friends on (say) Twitter.

This reveals something of my mindset at the time, I think. The IndieWeb, for me at least, was mainly about owning and organizing your content in one place, under your control. It was about curating your online presence and identity. It was about an efficient publication flow. It wasn't really about talking to other people.

A good thing too, because while the IndieWeb is a very cool idea, I can't honestly say that it ever really took off. It remains, five years after I joined, a niche concept, for various reasons that others have explored. So if you made your website IndieWeb compliant with the express purpose of connecting with other people on the IndieWeb...well, I'm not saying that you'll find a ghost town, but you certainly won't find the bustling metropolis that is Facebook or Twitter (I will never call it X).

Don't get me wrong - after the Musk takeover of Twitter, decentralized social networking is certainly having a moment, but it's mostly in the form of ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and a host of other applications specializing in different things, such as photo or book sharing. And while these applications are certainly a step up from the standard crop of corporate backed silos, they aren't a replacement for a personal website; your online presence and content, while nominally under your control, is still spread out across different platforms - platforms which come with a certain amount of lock-in. As I've mentioned before, it's not something that really appeals to me. One of the main advantages of using something like microformats instead is that your posts remain plain, vanilla HTML. It's basically the old school web - with some extra metadata for the sake of interoperability. This does appeal to me.

Still, if you joined the IndieWeb in the hopes of being part of a conversation and have been disappointed, these ActivityPub based applications might do the trick. You can even self-host them, if you've got the time and inclination.

But while I do use these applications, they will never be my main presence online. And I think, at the end of the day, this is what the IndieWeb has truly offered me - a framework for me to have a discoverable online presence in a way that doesn't put me at the mercy of companies or applications that may disappear at a moment's notice. Even if I'm just one voice shouting into a silent void, there is value in that.

Breaking The Wheel

2024-03-16T18:33:22Z

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It's safe to say that The Wheel of Time TV series, streaming on Amazon Prime, has divided fans of the source material, namely Robert Jordan's enormous, sprawling, epic book series of the same name, spanning 14 door-stopping volumes published over a period of 24 years (1989-2013).

I would not call myself a great connoisseur of fantasy, but I do know something about these particular books, having been introduced to them as a teenager by a high school friend in the early nineties. I have warm memories of the series, and less warm memories of the tense, multi-year waits in between installments.

Their publication also coincided with the birth of the Web and the popularization of the Internet that came with that. It's impossible for me to separate my memories of these books from my memories of scouring Wheel of Time themed newsgroups and fan sites, often over dial-up, looking for plausible answers to the various plot mysteries that had maddeningly accumulated over the years. I even had a fan page at one point, now lost to the mists of time.

I lasted until book nine, after which I gave up. The infamous slog had begun, and I was knee deep in it. Sometime after book six, it became clear to me that Robert Jordan didn't know what to do with all the loose narrative threads he had created, and I despaired of them ever being resolved in a satisfactory manner. He eventually died without finishing his life's work. I know Brandon Sanderson picked up the baton after Jordan died, but I never finished reading the series.

I say all this to give you some sense of my relationship to these books - my credentials, if you will. I'm a fan, but I'm not an uber fan. I haven't even read the whole series once, let alone multiple times. I liked the books a lot, and they definitely left an impression on my teenage mind, but I can't say that I loved them - especially the later ones. I am (or at least was) an enthusiastic fan but not an obsessive one. Keep that in mind for what follows.

The Difficulty of Adapting The Wheel Of Time

When I heard that Amazon was adapting The Wheel of Time, my primary emotion was surprise followed by...curiosity? I wanted to see how (or if) they would pull it off.

Adapting such a well-known and well-loved series has to be a difficult and thankless job at the best of times, but it must be particularly hard in the case of The Wheel of Time, with thousands of characters, and hundreds of locations. Amazon didn't do itself any favours by restricting the seasons to eight episodes each.

But it's not just the size of it. The simple truth is that this is no ordinary book series. Its structure doesn't really translate well to a traditional season-based TV narrative format. It's been deemed unfilmable more than once and it's not just because of its length.

So much of the series is invisible. Aes Sedai in the books are famously composed - almost Vulcan-like. Warders are famously stoic. A lot of the plot consists of people thinking to themselves, something that is nearly impossible to portray compellingly in a visual medium. And don't get even me started on the background material. Half of the story takes place in the insanely comprehensive glossary at the back of each book, before you even read the first page.

Add to this: the books are full of characters and artifacts that often appear in one or two chapters in one book, and then don't reappear until several (long) books later - if, indeed, they ever do at all. This might be workable in a printed medium (barely) but it becomes a real problem when you have to hire real actors, and you're at risk of losing them to different projects in between seasons.

It doesn't help matters that Robert Jordan originally intended The Wheel of Time to be a trilogy - and it shows painfully in the story structure. The first three books have a drastically different feel to them than the rest of the series. He basically recycled the same ending three times - it's the same sword fight between the same two characters. In some cases, major characters were almost completely rewritten later on; fan favourite Mat, for example, might as well be a different character in book four.

In fact, it's generally agreed that it's only around book four that the series really starts to come into its own. That might not matter to patient readers, but it makes life infinitely more difficult for people trying to adapt it into a episodic, season based visual format. I mean, what exactly are you supposed to do? I don't know, but I'll tell you what you can't do - you can't really do a straightforward "one book = one season" kind of adaptation. You need to adapt the whole series at once, and that's hard. I don't envy the people who've been given this task.

Separating the Wheat From the Chaff

Okay, so with all that in mind...was The Wheel of Time show any good?

Before I express any concrete opinions, there are a few things I need to get out of the way. The first is that, as a general rule, I don't consider "faithfulness to source material" to be the yardstick by which I measure the quality of an adaptation. We're talking about fiction, not historical documents and writers are allowed to take some liberties. Changes, in and of themselves, don't bother me unless they make the story demonstrably worse - and this goes double for something like The Wheel of Time. There is a kind of fan who won't be happy with anything other than a scene for scene adaptation but this is something that is simply not possible with this franchise, and hence I'm not going to devote too much time to this pipe dream. I wish these people good luck.

Other fans veer into legitimately racist territory, focusing on the skin colour of the cast. For obvious reasons, I won't devote any time to these people either except to say that while the show has a lot of flaws, the cast is not one of them.

This leaves us with the fans who, for whatever reason, criticize the actual show and it's here that we can have an actual discussion. We're obviously headed into major spoiler territory, so be warned. I'll also point that that if you're not already familiar with either the books or the show, then literally nothing I say here will make any sense whatsoever - but if that's the case, then why are you even reading? :-)

Alright. Here we go.

On the whole, I liked the show, but I didn't love it. I wanted to, and there were moments when I thought I could, but I never quite got there.

There were definitely a lot of changes, and they were definitely a mixed bag. Some of them made the story flow better, some of them were utterly baffling and some of them just...were. To say that the quality of the show was uneven is to put it mildly.

The show was at its best when it made changes that expanded on underdeveloped aspects of the books. Season one, episode four ("The Dragon Reborn") is a good example, A Logain-centric episode depicting events that happened "off screen" in the books, it was, in my opinion, the best episode of the season and one of the best of the show. I say "one of" because the title of "best episode" has to go to season two, episode six ("Eyes Without Pity"), an emotionally intense Egwene-centric episode that explicitly portrays certain events that were, at best, only hinted at in The Great Hunt.

Moiraine and Siuan's romantic pairing on the show is another example. The books hint that these two characters may have been more than friends at some point in their past, but it's never made explicit and it's open to interpretation. The show makes it explicit, and it adds to the drama. I liked the change.

In some cases, the show added depth to characters who sorely needed it. Liandrin comes to mind in this regard; introduced in The Great Hunt, she exists as little more than an evil foil for Nynaeve and Egwene, but the show turns her into a complete three dimensional powerhouse without fundamentally altering her role. I love it.

Sometimes, the writers made significant alterations to the lore in order to simplify the narrative mechanics. One of the best examples is in how they streamlined a Forsaken's relationship to death. The Forsaken, if you recall, are the Dark One's main lieutenants - The Wheel of Time's Nazgûl, if you will - and, in the books, their deaths were always complicated affairs. A Forsaken could be killed, like anyone, but they could also be resurrected at the Dark One's whim in a different body later on. Robert Jordan did this quite a bit - the only Forsaken, killed by conventional means, who doesn't get resurrected at some point is, to my knowledge, Asmodean.

This kind of works in print, but it's confusing in a visual medium. You'd have to hire a different actor to play the same character, several seasons later. So, on the show, they simply make the Forsaken straight up unkillable - at one point, Moiraine slits Lanfear's throat and Lanfear just magically heals up and continues along as if nothing happened. I like the change; the result is more or less the same as the novels, but less messy. If you look closely, Lanfear's eyes have small specks floating in them as she comes back to life, indicating that the Dark One is connected to this regeneration ability via the True Power, a little nod to the lore that I very much appreciated.

In the books, the only way to permanently kill a Forsaken is to use balefire and though it obviously remains to be seen, I suspect that show will do the same.

Sometimes, the writers made changes...just because. My opinion on these tends to be neutral. Many people, for example, disliked the way Mat gained his extra memories on the show, by sounding the Horn of Valere and suddenly remembering his past lives. In the books, it's a bargain struck with some weird, otherworldly creature in the Aiel waste. I don't really care either way - the end result is a character with new memories that will become, presumably, more useful later on. When I say I'm not overly concerned about faithfulness to source material, this is partly what I mean.

Of course, not all the changes were positive or neutral, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention the ones that rubbed me the wrong way. I hated everything related to the Rand-Egwene-Perrin love triangle - it came out of nowhere and added nothing. I also didn't care for how they gave Perrin a wife just to kill her off and give him an edge - fridging at its most blatant.

I especially didn't like how the ending of season one robbed Rand of his big power moment against the Trolloc army in order to give it to Nynaeve who had, by that point in the show, already had several big power moments of her own. The show does this in season two as well; despite Egwene having a major character arc, culminating in a final confrontation with one of the more despicable characters in the show, the showrunners still, apparently, found it necessary to insert her into Rand's final confrontation with Ishamael. It's almost as if the writers hate Rand, which is awkward given that he's supposed to be the protagonist. At this point I'm not sure why we're supposed to be invested in him at all.

Some of the problems with the show are more systemic. The writers don't go out of their way to explain how the magic system works and indeed, go to some length to de-emphasize certain crucial aspects that I suppose were deemed "problematic". The fact that there's a male and female half of the One Power, for example, isn't specifically stated on the show, which is puzzling because this aspect of the magic system is so deeply entrenched in the books that you can't really get away from it and still have the same story. It permeates every aspect of the plot and trying to pretend otherwise makes for some very confusing TV.

Why is it that only women can use the One Power safely? Why do men eventually go mad when they try? The answer is an essential part of the written lore - the Dark One tainted the male half of the One Power, and left the female half untouched - but the show downplays the gender split so much that I suspect a lot of non-readers don't understand that there's a difference in the way men and woman channel at all. It certainly doesn't help that the show implies that people can switch genders when they're reborn (Nynaeve as the Dragon Reborn?), or that it's possible for women to give men channelling lessons (something that's simply impossible given how the One Power works in this world). It's frustrating because Robert Jordan's magic system and history are probably some of the most meticulously crafted aspects of series.

The show's treatment of written lore is a general sore spot for me. I liked learning about the history of that world in the books. I liked learning about the Dragon and the Age of Legends and the War of Power and the origins of the Forsaken. I liked learning about Artur Hawkwing and his relationship with Aes Sedai. None of this is in the show, and its absence is deeply felt. How are we supposed to know who the Seachan are without knowing about Artur Hawkwing? The show mentions once, in passing, that the Dragon tried to "cage darkness", but what does that even mean and why would he do that? Who exactly is the Dark One and why would a bunch of channelers go over to his side? Is it even clear that the Forsaken are channelers? So much is missing.

It might be a deliberate ploy. The writers might be planning to trickle the history out bit by bit in later seasons. That might be their plan but...I wouldn't hold my breath. It makes me sad.

Closing Thoughts

I guess you could summarize my feelings on the show as "mixed". The good parts are good enough for me to say I liked it and I will eagerly watch season 3 when it comes out. And the bad parts aren't enough to turn me off completely.

But it's frustrating. The overall quality is uneven. You'll see a great episode, with amazing acting, followed by one that makes little sense at all. You sometimes get the impression that, because this is a fantasy show, the writers believe that they can get away with non-sequiturs and inconsistencies if they paper them over with dramatic lines containing little of substance.

The show appears to be setting up an ensemble cast, but it's done at the expense of making Rand completely uninteresting. I can only hope that season three is better in this regard. I know it's supposed to be adapting The Shadow Rising, which is reason for optimism; that book is one of the best in the series, and Rand features quite prominently in it, so it's chance to make the show version of the character more engaging. The Shadow Rising is also where the series finally starts breaking out of the repetition of the earlier novels and starts becoming more straightforwardly adaptable.

I guess what I'm saying is that, despite everything, I'm looking forward to the third season. I hope they make it to their planned eight.

The Problem With Saying That Free Will Is an Illusion

2024-01-08T02:49:57Z

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I recently finished watching Bodies on Netflix and the concept of free will comes up a fair bit given that the show involves a predestination paradox. One of the characters voices the opinion that "free will is an illusion" (his words) because human choices are ultimately the result of physics and biology. Human choices, in other words, are predetermined, and that means that free will doesn't exist.

The character in question is acting as a mouthpiece for the notion of incompatibilism, the idea that free will and determinism are mutually exclusive concepts. It's the most common way that the free will debate is framed. If you accept the idea of incompatibilism, then you can either believe in determinism (usually considered the rational choice) or you can believe in free will (usually considered the irrational or emotional choice). But you can't believe in both. The character, being a scientist, believes in determinism, hence his assertion that free will is an illusion.

But the problem with saying that free will is an illusion, or that it isn't real, is that for this to make sense, one first has to have a rough idea of what real free will is supposed to look like, and I suspect most incompatibilists would have trouble answering this. It is, nonetheless, something they have to grapple with, because otherwise how do they know that human beings don't have it?

If I assert that unicorns don't exist, you would know, roughly speaking, what it would take to prove me wrong. All you'd have to do is find a real unicorn and show it to me. Case closed. It's easy enough to imagine because we all know, more or less, what a horse with a horn on its head looks like.

"Unicorns don't exist", in other words, is a falsifiable statement, because we have some idea of what a real unicorn is meant to be. "Free will doesn't exist", I would argue, is not a falsifiable statement because no one knows, in this context, what "real" free will is supposed to look like.

Let me put it another way. We've all seen those optical illusions that look like spinning circles, right? Here's one:

It makes sense to call these spinning circles "illusions". Why? Because we all know what an actual spinning object looks like, and we can tell that this picture isn't it. You could tap your face on the picture with no fear at all - something, I suspect, you'd be reluctant to do with, say, a propeller or a ceiling fan.

So if someone asserts that free will is an illusion, the very first question that needs to be answered is: "an illusion of what?" And that is, I think, a very tough question to answer - an impossible question to answer, I would argue, if you're an incompatibilist.

But it's actually pretty easy if you're a comptatibilist - if you believe that free will is not only possible in a mathematical, deterministic universe, but actually requires it, like any natural phenomenon. If you're a comptatibilist, then free will is simply the human capacity for choice - no more and no less. It's almost a self-evident truth, something you witness every day. You might as well try and prove that gravity doesn't exist.

It doesn't matter if a choice is determined, or if it has a natural mechanism, or if it's explainable by physics or biology. Explaining how something works isn't the same as showing it doesn't exist.

Free will is just the ability to act freely in accordance with one's own character. It's the only definition that really makes sense. It is, of course, entirely possibly to take away someone's free will, but that usually involves purposeful action, like tying someone down or drugging them. It's not a metaphysical feature of reality.

Implementing GTD in Emacs With Org Mode

2023-12-06T02:42:19Z

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I have an on-again, off-again relationship with productivity systems. I usually don't bother with them but on those infrequent occasions when my life gets a bit hectic, I will sometimes make use of one. When that happens I always fall back to David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD). I read his book a long time ago and, at the time, found myself impressed.

The fundamental feature of the system is that it downplays the classic, detailed, prioritized to-do list in favour of the so-called next action list. When considering a particular goal, instead of allowing yourself to become overwhelmed with all the myriad things you know you need to do in service of that goal, you instead focus only on the very next thing you can do to move closer to your goal. The end result is an unsorted list of things you can do "in the moment", across all the various goals in your life at the moment.

The result can be also be, as you might imagine, a very long list of next actions. To manage this, Allen recommends the use of contexts - keywords that describe when or where it's possible to do a next action. The idea is that when you find yourself in one of these contexts, you're supposed to be able to pull up all the next actions attached to it and pick one off the list.

In the 90's, before cellphones were widespread, a classic context would have been "phone", to which you'd attach any next action involving a phone call. When you found yourself near a phone, you'd pull up all your phone-related next actions and start cranking through them one by one. Another classic one would have been the "computer" context, back in the days when a "computer" meant a machine sitting on a desk somewhere. You'd often attach that one to a next action involving an email, for example,

These days everyone has a smartphone, so the "phone" and "computer" contexts are less important than they used to be (though I personally still use the computer context for writing blog entries, since I hate doing that kind of thing on my phone). That doesn't mean contexts are useless as a concept, but it does mean that you need to think a bit more about how to use them. The key thing is to remember is that they're meant to be opportunistic. You're meant to be able to pull up a particular context once you find yourself in the corresponding situation and immediately be presented with a series of next actions that you can do "in the moment". My contexts these days are often people or place oriented. If I have a Tupperware or a book that I need to return to my Mom, for example, I'll attach the "mom" context to those next actions and remember to consult it before visiting her (spoiler: I often don't remember to consult it).

In addition to a next action list, GTD also has a notion of a project list. The word "project" can mean a lot of things but when we talk of GTD, it means nothing more than a goal that requires more than one "next action" to accomplish. The metaphor that often gets used in the GTD community is that a project is a "stake in the ground", a reminder that there is a specific, somewhat abstract goal in your life that needs addressing. Effectively, your project list defines the "hard landscape" of your life, around which your next actions revolve.

GTD defines two more lists:

Waiting
Someday/Maybe

The Waiting list is for things that are "outsourced or "delegated" - things that you can't or won't do yourself. Waiting for someone to respond to an email, for example, is a classic Waiting list item.

The Someday/Maybe list is meant to provide a haven for any vague and hazy to-do item that you don't really want to work on "right now". These could be aspirational ("Learn photography") or just stuff that you might want to get to later on in life ("Replace ceiling fan").

Implementing GTD in Emacs with Org Mode

As you might imagine, there are lots of ways to implement GTD, both analog and digital. For a while, in the early 2000's, it was fashionable in certain circles to implement it with a notebook that you carried around with you. Most people, nowadays, use some kind of software.

I'm an Emacs user, or at least I try to be, and so it makes sense for me to try and implement GTD with Emacs. The package one usually hears about in this regard is Org, a note keeping and text outlining tool that has evolved over the years to include task management and scheduling functionality.

Both Emacs and Org are huge and I'm not about to give a full-fledged tutorial on either of them (I'm a perpetual novice myself) so instead I'll focus on what I want out of my GTD system and how I can get Org to do it.

Roughly speaking, I want my GTD system to do the following:

Add new items easily, probably via a templating system
Separately view, at a glance, my next actions, waiting, projects, and someday items.
Attach a next action to a context and be able to view each of my contexts separately, with the next actions attached to it.
Be able to easily move items from one list to another (for example, turn a Someday item to a Project or vice versa)
Be able to archive "done" items easily, so they don't clog up my lists.

Adding new items is easily accomplished with org-capture. Viewing my next actions, waiting, projects and someday lists is easily accomplished with org-agenda. Contexts, and viewing the next actions attached to them, are easily implemented with Org tags and the narrowing function functionality of org-agenda.

Moving and archiving items are similar tasks, and Org has built in functionality to do them.

So, with all that in mind, let's consider different approaches to implementing GTD in Org.

The Literal Approach

TL;DR: I don't actually use this method, because I think the cons outweigh the pros, but I find it useful nonetheless to ferret out what works and what doesn't.

One very obvious way to implement GTD is to maintain a separate file for each list, in roughly the same manner that one would implement with paper. Your Next Actions, for example, could live in an actions.org file that looks like this:

* TODO do this thing
* TODO do this other thing

And a projects.org file that looks pretty much the same:

* TODO project 1
* TODO project 2

The waiting and someday lists would look almost exactly the same, in their own respective files.

GTD contexts can be represented with Org tags, tacked onto the end of the item, like so:

* TODO do this thing :mom:
* TODO do this other thing :plumber:

Org has built-in ways of filtering the agenda view based on the tags you add to each item.

This approach has one huge, underrated advantage: it's dead simple to implement, explain and understand. The fact that all items have the same TODO state and are all at the same outlining "level" means that adding new items, moving items one list to another, and archiving items are all dead simple as well.

What about viewing your individual lists? It turns out this is pretty simple as well. Org TODO items have a property called a category. If you don't do anything special, the category is just the file from which the item originates. So any item in the actions.org file has an action category and the same goes for items in your other files. Defining an agenda view based on a category is trivial in Org, so it's very straightforward to create separate views for your next actions, projects, and someday items.

Linking Projects and Next Actions

Are there any disadvantages to this simple approach? There is only one that I can think of: there's no explicit relationship between Next Actions and Projects. In other words, you can't tell at a glance what the next actions are for a project, or which project a next action belongs to. And here is where things start to get murky, because a GTD purist will probably tell you that it doesn't matter.

One thing that I find interesting about GTD is that the connection between your next actions and your projects is a lot looser than it might seem at first glance. Yes, a next action can be, and often is, associated with a project - but it doesn't have to be, and it's perfectly okay to have "freestanding" next actions that aren't attached to anything at all. In the same vein, a project will often have at least one next action linked to it - but it might not, if you haven't figured out what that next action is. Allen even has a name for projects that have no next actions - they're called "stuck projects" and it's rather revealing that it seemingly happens often enough that he labelled the concept.

The GTD community sometimes takes this disconnect even further - they often suggest no explicit connection between next actions and projects at all. Projects, in this formulation, simply act as a reminder that a next action might have to be created, but once that next action is in your system you don't (so the theory goes) actually need to know which project spawned it.

It helps to remember, at this point, that GTD was conceived in the 90's as a paper based task management system. Next actions were often slips of paper, or literal items penned in a list. In a system like that, you have to choose where to park your next action - and it can only go in one place. The common wisdom at the time dictated that you should park your next action on the context list where it would be the most useful and that meant that it was not parked under the project with which it was associated.

A paper based GTD system almost has to work this way and so I think, over time, that the GTD purists ended up making a virtue of necessity and convincing themselves that it really wasn't very useful to know the project associated with a next action, or to know all the next actions attached to a project.

I'm not convinced. I think, all things being equal, it's obviously useful to know which project a next action belongs to. And the thing is, software today often makes it trivial to park a next action on different lists - in both a project and a context for example. You don't have to choose one over the other.

So how can we do this with the very, very simple system I outlined above? It's surprisingly difficult, though one can, of course, come up with scheme. For example, Org has a feature called drawers that let you add arbitrary properties to TODO items. Add a Project ID to each project item, and a Project ID to each Next Action that belongs to a project and you have a theoretical way of connecting the two lists. Roughly speaking, it would look like this:

* TODO Project 1
:PROPERTIES:
:PROJECT_ID: proj1
:END:

Unfortunately, theoretical is not the same as practical. Ideally we'd like to see a Next Action's project in the agenda view but this isn't possible here without some special configuration - which is of course entirely possible but annoying. More problematic is the reverse - seeing all Next Actions associated with a project. There's no view (that I know of) built into Org that'll let you do that out of the box. You'd have to design a new view and write the code to produce it - not the easiest of tasks.

And if you ever want to archive an entire project, or move it to the Someday list, it would make sense to move all the associated Next Actions along with it. In the scheme designed above, Org certainly wouldn't do this out of the box, and honestly I'm having trouble imagining what that feature would even look like.

Let's see what else we can come up with.

Projects as Hierarchy

Another, arguably more natural, approach, involves putting all of a project's Next Actions under the project's heading, like this:

* TODO Project 1
** TODO item 1
** TODO item 2
* TODO Project 2
** TODO item 3
** TODO item 4

This seems entirely natural. Org is an outlining tool, after all. Hierarchy is its bread and butter.

We can also maintain a separate list for those next actions that are not connected to any particular project, and it would furthermore make sense to combine everything into one file, so all your next actions and projects are located in just one place:

* TODO item 5
* TODO item 6
* TODO Project 1
** TODO item 1
** TODO item 2
* TODO Project 2
** TODO item 3
** TODO item 4

What do we do with the waiting items? These could remain in their own waiting.org file, but it's entirely possible for a particular waiting item to be associated with a project (or not - they're like next actions that way). We could nestle the waiting items among the next actions in our file but that leads to a problem: how do we distinguish next actions from waiting items?

The answer here is to add a new TODO state, called WAIT, something Org allows you to do:

* TODO item 5
* TODO item 6
* TODO Project 1
** TODO item 1
** TODO item 2
** WAIT another item
* TODO Project 2
** TODO item 3
** WAIT email response
** TODO item 4

To make things even more explicit, you could use a special TODO state for your projects as well:

* TODO item 5
* TODO item 6
* PROJ Project 1
** TODO item 1
** TODO item 2
** WAIT another item
* PROJ Project 2
** TODO item 3
** WAIT email response
** TODO item 4

One nifty feature of Org is that it allows you to override an heading's category using the drawer feature, meaning you can give projects their own category, like this:

* TODO item 5
* TODO item 6
* PROJ Project 1
 :PROPERTIES:
 :CATEGORY: proj1
 :END:
** TODO item 1
** TODO item 2
** WAIT another item
* PROJ Project 2
 :PROPERTIES:
 :CATEGORY: proj2
 :END:
** TODO item 3
** WAIT email response
** TODO item 4

Another nifty feature of Org is that categories are inherited, so that TODO items under a project will inherit that projects category. All this to say, if you make your project's category name roughly match your project's name, then the category can act as a suitable stand-in when viewing Next Actions on the agenda (since categories are shown by default on the agenda view). This means you can easily see, at a glance, which project your Next Action belongs to, or if it stands on its own.

Seeing all the next actions associated with a project doesn't involve using org-agenda - you just have to look at the project section itself, and examine the next actions under the project heading.

You could integrate your someday list into this file, but I actually like having it in a separate file, since it can get long and rambling, and I usually interact with it on a different cadence than my main list. Keeping it in its own file makes sense.

Moving top level items between the main file and the someday file is trivial with org-refile. Archiving is also trivial, as long as one sticks to the top level items, i.e. as long as one doesn't try to archive unfinished projects.

The Implementation

Here is my complete org configuration:

(setq org-todo-keywords
      '((sequence "TODO(t)" "WAIT(w)" "PROJ(p)" "|" "DONE(d)" "CANC(c)")
        ))

(setq org-agenda-span 90)

(setq org-agenda-files (file-expand-wildcards "~/pim/gtd/main.org"))

(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
      '(
        ("i" "Inbox" tags-todo "+TODO=\"TODO\""
         ((org-agenda-files (file-expand-wildcards "~/pim/gtd/inbox.org"))))
        ("n" "Next actions" tags-todo "+TODO=\"TODO\"")
        ("p" "Projects" tags-todo "+TODO=\"PROJ\"")
        ("w" "Waiting" tags-todo "+TODO=\"WAIT\"")
        ("s" "Someday" tags-todo "+TODO=\"TODO\"|TODO=\"PROJ\""
         ((org-agenda-files (file-expand-wildcards "~/pim/gtd/someday.org"))))
        ("o" "Actions and Projects" tags-todo "+TODO=\"TODO\"|TODO=\"PROJ\"")
        ))

(setq org-agenda-prefix-format '((agenda . "  %-25:c%?-12t% s")
				 (timeline . "  % s")
				 (todo . "  %-12:c")
				 (tags . "  %-25:c")
				 (search . "  %-12:c")))

(setq org-agenda-tags-column -120)
(setq org-tags-column -80)

(setq org-agenda-sorting-strategy
      '((agenda habit-down time-up priority-down category-keep)
        (todo priority-down todo-state-up category-keep)
        (tags priority-down todo-state-up category-keep)
        (search category-keep)))

;; M-x org-agenda # to show the stuck projects
(setq org-stuck-projects
      '("+TODO=\"PROJ\"" ("TODO") nil "") )

(setq org-refile-use-outline-path 'file)
(setq org-outline-path-complete-in-steps 'nil)
(setq refile-targets (file-expand-wildcards "~/pim/gtd/*.org"))
(setq org-refile-targets '(( refile-targets :todo . "PROJ" )))

(setq org-capture-templates
      '(
        ("i" "Inbox" entry
         (file "~/pim/gtd/inbox.org")
         "* TODO %^{Brief Description}\nAdded: %U\n%?" :empty-lines 1 :prepend t)
          
        ("n" "Next action" entry
         (file "~/pim/gtd/main.org")
         "** TODO %^{Brief Description}\nAdded: %U\n%?" :empty-lines 1 :prepend t)

        ("w" "Waiting" entry
         (file "~/pim/gtd/main.org")
         "** WAIT %^{Brief Description}\nAdded: %U\n%?" :empty-lines 1 :prepend t)

        ("p" "Project" entry
         (file "~/pim/gtd/main.org")
         "* PROJ %^{Brief Description}\n:PROPERTIES:\n:CATEGORY: %^{Id}\n:END:\nAdded: %U\n%?" :empty-lines 1 :prepend t)
        
         ("s" "Someday" entry
         (file "~/pim/gtd/someday.org")
         "* TODO %^{Brief Description}\nAdded: %U\n%?" :empty-lines 1 :prepend t)
        ))

(define-key global-map "\C-cc" 'org-capture)

On the Durability of Plain Text

2023-09-15T00:11:18Z

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My blog is 16 years old. I've rotated through several blogging engines in that time (Bloxsom, YAWT 1.0/2.0, Pelican and finally Eleventy) but they all have one thing in common: they all process blog entries stored as plain text files.

The fact that all my blog entries are stored as plain text files on my computer is, I believe, one of the main reasons my blog has lasted this long. Text files are trivial to back up. Text files don't really crash and rarely get corrupted. Text files are readable and writable on any computer manufactured since the 1980's - hell, the 1960's if I let punch cards into this conversation. When you contrast this simple durability with, for example, a MySQL data store (used by several blogging engines, including one of the most popular ones, WordPress), with all of its attendant version compatibility and data corruption issues, the superiority of plain text becomes undeniable if you're trying to write something that lasts.

I've written before about the longevity of paper over e-books. Real books obviously don't use software. They don't have bugs (well...maybe literal ones). They don't require updates and they don't have a file format. You'll be able to read a paper book 100 years from now, something I'm pretty sure you'd be hard pressed to do with a Kindle.

Plain text isn't paper, but it's as close as you're going to get to it in a digital format. The standard is over 60 years old and odds are good it will still be around 100 years from now. You obviously need software to read it, but it's standard, simple, ubiquitous software, available on every computer platform imaginable. The tools to read it and, perhaps more importantly, manipulate it, are universal.

I'm mentioning the manipulation aspect of text files because that also plays a role in their longevity. Yes, text files are easier to back up and harder to lose then abstract rows in a database, but they are also very easy to convert between one kind of text format and another. My blog entries are all written in Markdown but there's nothing stopping me from converting them to AsciDoc or Restructured Text or even org-mode if I wanted to double down on my Emacs use.

Longevity is also the reason I avoid solutions like Obsidian or Roam Research for my notes or my GTD lists. I don't know how these pieces of software store your notes behind the scenes, but I do know that if they suddenly up and disappeared, I'd be in a bind. At the risk of beating a dead horse, it's safer, in my mind, to have actual text files that I can back up and move around. For what it's worth, if anyone's curious, I've so far settled on an org-mode based solution in this regard.

It's really a matter of how long I want my writing to last. Do I use plain text for literally everything? Of course not, but the likelihood of me using something else is directly proportional to how disposable I consider my writing to be. I'll use Google Keep or Todoist for things like grocery lists, for example, but I won't use them for my blog entries, or my GTD lists or anything meant to last longer than a week.

At the end of the day, I struggle too much with writing to lose it to ravages of changing fashions.

A Library of the World

2023-08-29T02:33:32Z

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I recently saw Umberto Eco: A Library of the World, a documentary about Umberto Eco's extensive book collection. At first blush this doesn't sound like the sort of topic that would make for an interesting documentary but with something like 50000 books spread over two libraries, a significant number of them dating from the medieval era, there's actually a surprising amount of stuff to unpack here. If you like books, you'll like the film. I thought it was great.

In my case, I found myself thinking less about the books themselves and more about the subtext surrounding them. Eco was unsurprisingly disdainful of e-books and valued the physical durability of paper. It's an opinion with which it's easy to sympathize given how e-books are often saddled today with restrictive DRM and competing formats. Ink on paper doesn't have a "format" problem and often lasts centuries. Do you think you'll be able to read your Kindle 100 years from now?

And physical books are just nicer, right? The cover art, the paper, the smell, the ability to see how much you have left to read at a glance - it all adds up to an experience. And I still say that a real, paper book remains the easiest way to read something.

That being said, paper books also take up a significant amount of space and that's where it all breaks down, of course. Eco had two houses and his book collection took up a significant amount of space in both of them. Meanwhile, many young people today, especially in large cities, have trouble buying even a modest house and they are often lucky to have room for just one bookcase.

So while I get the appeal of paper, and I have a bunch of paper books myself, I find myself less dismissive of e-books than some people my age (I'm in my 40's). Their promise - thousands of books in one small device - is hard to ignore. The disdain of some people comes off as self-righteous and clueless. The amount of privilege required to have a library worth exploring is considerable and I know I'm lucky to have one, paltry as it is.

So, nowadays, my format of choice for a book tends to be electronic until it's proven to have an impact on my life. Often I don't know it's made an impact until some time after I've read it. If I find myself describing the book to random people at parties, that's usually a hint. At that point, I'll carve out a place on my bookshelf and buy the real thing. It feels like a decent compromise.

And I'm pretty good about getting rid of books, too. Gone are the days when I hoard them for show. My library is slowly turning into just the books that are meaningful to me, which is as it should be.

Still, though, Umberto Eco's library is thing of beauty :-)

I Enjoy Writing Software

2023-05-31T00:30:13Z

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I enjoy writing software more than I enjoy using software. I'm not berating myself over this, nor am I proud of it. It's just how I am.

What this means in practice is that I will often write a whole bunch of code before I even start trying to debug it. Writing code tickles what I imagine is the creative part of my brain, and it feels good. Running and debugging code tickles the "chore" part of my brain and it doesn't feel as good.

(Yes, programming is creative. It's an act of creation. I'm emphasizing this point because there is a tendency in non-technical circles to view programming as something sterile or clinical, like accounting. I would imagine, however, that there are very few accountants who do accounting in their spare time, whereas you can easily find tons of programmers who do coding in their spare time, myself included).

Writing huge swaths of code that don't run is obviously not ideal. Since part of my job is, in fact, to produce working code, I obviously know how to debug, and I do. It's just that I could probably be more productive if I took a breath, stepped back and started trying things out earlier in the process than I usually do.

This is especially true in my hobby projects. Those are meant to be purely for fun, and so I tend to put an emphasis on the parts I enjoy, which is creating the software. I obviously do get some enjoyment from seeing it work, so I do of course eventually get it running (err...sometimes...) but much later than I should.

I think this is part of the reason I will often spend days setting up elaborate todo systems with org mode and Emacs, and then never follow through with using them. I'm surely beating a dead horse by now, but writing software is fun; using software, particularly my own, is another matter entirely.

What do I do about this? I have no idea. I'm not even sure there's anything to do. I mean, I'm mostly productive. I do, for the most part, produce stuff that, on some level, works. Eventually.

I'm not even sure what I want to get out of this blog entry. I think I just wanted to get it off my chest.

Still, self-improvement is a good thing and as I get older I find myself wanting to be a little more practical so maybe I should look into improving this.

Maybe more unit testing? That seems plausible - combine programming with testing. It could work.

Then again, I'm not a young man and retirement is...well, it's not close but it's no longer unfathomably far away. So maybe life is short and I don't bother.

I'd be curious to see which side of me wins out.

The Popular Vote as a Psychological Coping Mechanism

2023-02-19T22:11:29Z

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In 1931, a book was published in German under the title "100 Authors Against Einstein", attempting to refute the Theory of Relativity. By some accounts, when Einstein was confronted with this book, he is reported to have said something along the lines of:

Why a hundred? If I were wrong, one would have been enough."

I have no idea if this is for real. Still, though, it's pretty good, right?

To be clear, Einstein was talking about physics, not politics or philosophy, but even in the social sciences I find myself sympathetic to the spirit of this quote, fake or not, especially when faced with people who harp on an idea like the popular vote.

You know the type. These are the people who like to emphasize that Donald Trump, despite winning the US presidency in 2016, did not win more than 50% of the votes (due to idiosyncrasies in the American electoral system). This is, of course, completely true but also, I suspect, not quite the crushing argument they think it is, given that they would have been, I imagine, strangely silent on the subject if the opposite had been true - if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency with less than 50% of the votes.

No, if that had happened, I suspect they'd be thinking the exact same thing that I'm thinking, which is that the popular vote, while interesting, doesn't matter very much at all.

The same kind of arguments occasionally surface in Canadian politics as well. Stephen Harper, a somewhat reviled Conservative Prime Minister in some circles, never won more than 40% of the popular vote in Canada, despite winning the election 3 times, once with a majority government. Some people like to point this out, while at the same time failing to point out that his rival Justin Trudeau, of the Liberal party, also never won the popular vote.

Because of the way the electoral system works in Canada, it's actually quite common that a party's popular vote doesn't translate into a corresponding number of seats (and hence a corresponding amount of political power). If I were playing devil's advocate, I could point out that Stephen Harper, at the very least, always won his elections with a plurality if not a majority of the popular vote (i.e. the Conservative party under Stephen Harper always won with the most votes, just not more than 50% of them) - something I cannot say about Justin Trudeau (the Liberals won the election in 2021 with 33.1% of the popular vote, to the Conservatives' 34.4%).

To be clear, I am not defending the Conservative Party. I've never voted for them in my life. I am merely pointing out that the popular vote, as a measure of anything, is stupid. A leadership mandate doesn't suddenly become more or less acceptable because you managed to convince just one more person. To be fair, I'm not totally sure what would count as a convincing moral justification for one policy over another - ethics is hard! - but I'm pretty sure that "number of people who agree with it" isn't one of them.

In the case of Donald Trump, I think the reason why people focus on the popular vote so much is because they can't stand the idea of living in a country where most people are Trump supporters - an attitude to which I'm entirely sympathetic. In that situation, focusing on the popular vote, and the fact that Donald Trump didn't win it, functions as a kind of psychological coping mechanism. It means that the country is still worth saving. I do get it, believe it or not.

But let's not delude ourselves. When push comes to shove, if the cause is judged to be important enough, no one, progressive or conservative, really believes that the notion of the "popular vote" means much of anything at all - and this is, frankly, as it should be.

Amaro Showdown at Casa Di Desmond

2022-07-23T12:34:14Z

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A while back I started going through a phase where I would buy any reasonably well-reviewed bottle of Italian amaro I could find at my local liquor store, in a halfhearted and somewhat misguided attempt to reconnect with my Italian roots (my mother is from Sicily). I can't honestly say that it worked (what would that even look like? I already talk with my hands, I don't need to do it more) but it did result, as you might expect, in a small collection of Italian amari being added to my home bar.

(The plural of "amaro", as I learned, is "amari", not "amaros" so, hey, maybe it did kind of work after all)

The word "amaro" means "bitter" in Italian and, accordingly, amari are a class of Italian herbal liqueurs characterized by a syrupy, bittersweet flavour, often described as "medicinal". They are usually consumed after a heavy meal as a digestif and they vary in strength from "strong wine" (15%) to "out-and-out hard liquor" (40%).

I can testify that they do work, in the sense of settling your stomach after a large meal. I'm not sure how, but one theory is that our brains associate bitter tastes with poison and so, when confronted with such, will stimulate the production of digestive juices.

You can think of them as Italy's answer to a product like Jaggermeister, a German digestif, though I realize as I write this that the comparison would probably be considered unfavourable, as Jaggermeister has a bad reputation (stemming, I suspect, more from teenage antics than because of any inherently bad qualities). They can also be compared to something like Chartreuse, a similar French herbal digestif about which I have written before, and I suspect the comparison there is a bit more flattering.

The flavour profile of a typical amaro is a balance between sweet and bitter, herbal and citrus, spicy and floral. Depending on the brand, some of these qualities are more prominent than others. So, in that spirit (ha!), I have decided to taste test all the amari I have in my bar, side by side, to see how they compare. Here they are, lined up for your viewing pleasure:

I'll give away some of the ending right now: they do differ quite significantly in flavour, and some are definitely more of an acquired taste than others (I'm looking at you, Fernet Branca).

I don't really have any consistent strategy for describing the flavours here and to be honest a lot of this is for my benefit as much as anyone's but, still, if you've never tried this kind of tipple, you may find this useful to some extent. Here we go!

The Tastings

Amaro Averna

Colour: Dark, maybe even black, like Cola.

Alcohol: 29%

Taste: sweet, medical, syrupy, caramel.

This one dates back to 1868 and hails from Caltanissetta, Sicily. It's apparently quite famous in that region. The bottle is annoyingly tall, which sounds petty, I know, but it's hard to fit on my bar cart and that's irritating!

Like almost all amari, the recipe here is a closely guarded secret but is supposed to include things like orange peel. I have to admit, I didn't really detect any citrus.

All in all, I found that this one tasted vaguely of cough medicine. It was sickly sweet, medical, syrupy, with some caramel notes. There was some bitterness, as always in an amaro, but it's not the most prominent flavour.

I got to say, not my favourite. A little too on the syrupy side.

Zucca Rabarbaro

Colour: Dark, like the Averna.

Alcohol: 30%

Taste: Bitter, vegetal.

Although Zucca is Italian for "squash" or "pumpkin", the name actually comes from Caffè Zucca in Milan, where it's a featured drink. The main gimmick here would be the inclusion of Chinese rhubarb as an ingredient, though I'm not sure I detected it specifically as anything more than a vague vegetal aftertaste.

In any case, this one was quite intensely bitter, more so than the other amari I tried, with a lingering, almost harsh aftertaste. It was borderline unpleasant. I would not call this drink approachable.

Cynar

Colour: Dark, like Cola.

Alcohol: 16.5%

Taste: Bitter, syrupy, vegetal.

On the bitter side, though not as bitter as the Zucca; it was smoother and a bit sweeter and more syrupy.

The gimmick here is the inclusion of artichoke as an ingredient (Cynara scolymus), hence the name. That being said, I don't really detect any artichoke in the flavour, beyond perhaps a vague kind of vegetal aftertaste.

Better than the Zucca, and if I wanted a bitter tasting digestif, I'd probably go for this one. but I still would not call this vary approachable.

Amaro Montenegro

Colour: Amber, perhaps the colour of a sweet vermouth or an aged whisky.

Alcohol: 23%

Taste: Sweet, perfumed, floral, spicy.

This one hails from Bologna. Very sweet, perfumed and floral. Some bitterness, obviously, but it's in the background and isn't the main focus of the drink. Much more obviously spiced than the other amari.

All in all, quite delicious and approachable. Maybe my favourite of the bunch.

Amaro Nonino

Colour: Amber, like the Montenegro.

Alcohol: 35%

Taste: Sweet, citrus.

This one is a stronger amaro, based on grappa, hailing from Friuli, Italy. The bitterness here is more pronounced than the Montenegro, but less so than, for example, the Zucca or Cynar. I find the citrus is more obvious here, almost like a Triple Sec.

I liked it, but maybe not as much as the Montenegro. Still quite approachable.

Vecchio Amaro Del Capo

Colour: Dark amber

Alcohol: 35%

Taste: Sweet, herbal.

This one comes from Calabria. It's rather sweet, and not as intensely bitter as the Zucca or Cynar.

The flavour is hard to pin down. There's anise, some citrus, and some mint. Like all amari, there's bitterness there, but it doesn't hit you over the head.

I would say that the anise is a bit more noticeable than the other amari on this list, which would make this one comparable to something like Jaggermeister or Chartreuse, though a bit more complex.

I like this one a lot, to be honest.

Amaro Lucano

Colour: Dark

Alcohol: 28%

Taste: Sweet, citrus with notes of anise

This one dates back to 1894 and was apparently created by a pastry chef.

There's anise and citrus here. Bitterness, as always, and it's more pronounced that the Montenegro. Less harsh than the Zucca, but still comparable: black, syrupy, bitter, medicinal.

I actually quite liked this one, maybe more than the Cynar, but perhaps not as much as the Vecchio.

Fernet-Branca

Colour: Dark

Alcohol: 39%

Taste: Bitter, minty, lacking in sweetness

My goodness, how to describe Fernet-Branca? It's completely unlike anything else in this collection, to the point where I was debating whether I should write about it at all. Wikipedia calls it an amaro, though, so I decided, somewhat grudgingly, to include it.

There is very little sweetness here, and a big hit of mint, with a lingering bitter finish. More than anything else on this list, the taste can best be described as "medicinal". I mean that literally; Fernet-Branca really does taste like medicine, and not necessarily in a good way.

There are, apparently, some people who actually like the taste, but I haven't met any of them. Calling it an "acquired taste" might be considered diplomatic.

Drink it to calm your stomach, and hope for the best.

Where to Go From Here?

Amari are part of a wider class of herbal liqueurs that are often drunk as apertifs or digestifs. I've already mentioned Jaggermeister and Chartreuse, but Campari, Aperol, Suze and others also fall into this category. I'm not including them in this post more for technical reasons than anything else; several are not Italian and hence not "amari" and a few, though Italian, are not considered amari for reasons that remain mysterious to me (have you tasted Campari? It's nothing if not bitter).

At some point I'll likely do a taste test of these bottles, and maybe even try out some cocktails, but for the moment this post will have to do. Enjoy, everyone!

Fifteen Years of Blogging

2022-06-01T12:44:30Z

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Fifteen years ago today, I published my first blog post and I wanted to mark the occasion with - you guessed it! - a blog post. I didn't really have a strong sense of what I wanted to say but, anniversaries being a chance to reminisce, I found myself revisiting what I've written over the years.

It's definitely a mixed bag. The tone and content vary quite a bit. For this reason, when people ask me what this blog is "about", I don't usually have a ready answer, and this sometimes catches them off guard because common wisdom states that blogs typically have themes. People will manage a cooking blog, for example, or a programming blog, or a reading blog. Among other things, it's a way to collect followers - people seem to place greater trust in a blog when it focuses on one subject.

I'm not so precious as to claim that I don't care about readership at all - I do enjoy it when people read my posts, believe it or not - but I will say, being completely honest, that it's not a huge concern, and gaining a following has very little do with why this blog exists. I've tried, over the years, to keep track of visitors (first with piwik and then with google analytics) but I inevitably end up abandoning the effort as not worth my time.

In any case, I've always resisted the temptation to limit this project with labels. My blog, like me, is a bit all over the place. It doesn't have a theme other than "stuff Desmond finds interesting". It's a purely selfish creative outlet, a dim extension of myself, and sticking to one subject would run counter to that purpose.

All that being said, I did notice, poring over the years, that certain patterns stand out. And, even though my blog isn't about anything in particular, individual posts generally are, so I suppose it makes some amount of sense to turn this anniversary post into a trip down memory lane. Not the most elegant of segues but hey, let's see what shakes loose!

The Diary - Part 1

The first year of my blog tended to be somewhat diary oriented. There's a post in there about attending my friend Neil's bachelor party. There's another post about nothing more than the fact that it's snowing outside. There's a brief one on hockey riots and another about my trip on a glider.

This kind of content pretty much stopped after the first year, except for the occasional vacation post (see, for example, my post about my trip to Greece, the one about my trip to Poland, and the one where I visited Chicago and New York). These are actually a lot of fun to write and I should probably should have written more of them.

Thinking about it now, I joined Facebook the same year that I started my blog, and I would imagine it's not a coincidence that these kinds of diary entries began to dry up as I became more active on social media. Facebook effectively became my diary, I suppose. It makes me a bit sad to think about it.

One obvious reason for the change is that Facebook is easier to write for than a blog, particularly my blog. I use a static site generator without a dedicated interface but it's not just about the UI - sites like Facebook and Twitter make it easy to post small, titleless snippets of content that are by nature easier to craft than a blog entry.

Joining the IndieWeb in 2018, though, helped me take back that kind of content.

The Gap and Nothing Personal

There's a three year gap from 2008-2011, ostensibly because my blog got overrun with spam. A number of life events happened in that gap - my dad died, for one, and I also bought a 100 year old apartment. It's a shame that I don't have any posts about that.

But this, in fact, appears to be a pattern with me. I don't really have a lot of personal articles on my blog. As I mentioned, "diary" content more or less stopped after the first year. I do share a lot of opinions, which are obviously personal, but I don't really share what's going on in my life - at least, not on my blog.

Some exceptions do exist. I published a relatively personal post about religion back in 2016. I published a fairly introspective post about the Canada Malting silos way back in 2013. But day-to-day stuff? Not so much.

Again, this changes somewhat when I started participating in the IndieWeb, which made it easier, from a conceptual standpoint, to post one-off status updates of what's happening in my life.

On Being Meta

One thing that hasn't changed is that I tend to blog a lot about blogging, particularly about the technology or workflow I'm using at the time. In fact, "blogging" is the single biggest entry on my tag page. I'm not sure what to make of that, except that I suppose I tend to fall into the common nerd trap of getting caught up in the tools I use.

What can I say? Blogging software (and web publishing software in general) is a topic that fascinates me. I'm old enough to still be amazed at the idea that a random person can put a random web page on a random web server and have it be instantly accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

I started this blog with an obscure little Perl program called Blosxom, moved on fairly quickly to my own homegrown engine called YAWT (first written in Perl, then in Python) and I eventually started using Pelican when I got tired of fixing bugs in my own code. I've recently switched to using Eleventy.

If you're at all familiar with blogging software, you may have noticed that certain popular programs like Wordpress are not on the list. That's because I like writing all my blog entries in a plain text editor (usually Emacs) and saving them as vanilla text files on disk, a personal idiosyncrasy which informs my choice of publishing software. The longevity of my blog can be at least partially attributed to the fact that my content is stored this way, and can be processed by relatively low-tech digital tools (i.e. any text editor, on any platform). This is a topic that probably deserves its own post.

On Being a Geek

I also appear write a lot about programming, which is not entirely unexpected given what I do for a living (spoiler: I'm a software developer). It is kind of interesting to see how these articles change over time. I wrote a couple of Perl articles in 2007, when I was still using Blosxom. I started writing about Python in 2012, a couple of years after I attended OOPSLA, and I decided that I wanted to learn a dynamic language that wasn't Perl. I eventually moved on to Typescript.

Mixed with all of that are a handful of articles on Emacs, which in terms of subject matter tend to blur the line between blogging and programming. Emacs has traditionally been my text editor of choice over the years, which implicitly involves writing a fair amount of Lisp (specifically Emacs Lisp), a fascinating language that can occasionally beguile a person with mathematical inclinations (like me).

The Diary - Part 2

I joined the IndieWeb sometime in 2018 and immediately became consumed by it, as attested by the fact that "indieweb" is the second most frequently used tag on my blog after "blogging".

The IndieWeb is a loose community of people trying to re-popularize the personal website and, by extension, the personal blog. So I guess you could say that my interest in this subject is just an extension of my interest in blogging.

Joining the IndieWeb has had a profound effect on the format and structure of my blog. The most prominent changes, from a reader's perspective, would probably be the introduction of notes and webmentions.

The ability to publish short, quick notes on my blog basically means that I can more easily use this platform for purposes that hitherto had been mostly the purview of Facebook and Twitter - namely day-to-day, diary-oriented musings. The introduction of webmentions have added a sense of community.

Effectively, participating in the IndieWeb has resulted in a kind of renaissance of the diary aspects of my blog, and a lessening of the reliance on Facebook and Twitter, which is nice.

Apparently I Like To Drink

A number of posts involve cooking and cocktails. More cocktails than cooking if I'm honest.

I enjoy mixing drinks. I'm not entirely sure why. It's not to get drunk; I almost always stop at one or two. I think it has something to do with my childhood fascination with chemistry. Mixing a drink feels like a chemistry experiment.

For a while I was really into crafting my own mixers. I have a couple of articles on making my own tonic water, and one that mentions how I make my own grenadine. I have a series of posts on how I use what are traditionally labelled as "mixing liqueurs", like vermouth or Chartreuse.

And Finally...Just a Lot of Soapboxing

This blog doesn't really have title but, if it did, "Desmond's Soapbox" wouldn't be entirely off the mark. I often use this blog to bleat opinions into the void.

So, one occasionally runs into posts about life in Quebec, or posts about philosophy, or posts about religion. There's no rhyme or reason to most of it. It's just stuff about which I felt was important to write at the time.

Given that I'm not really writing for anyone other than myself, my blog is peppered with this kind of thing.

Thoughts On The Future

I sometimes wonder why I do any of this. I even have a blog entry about it. The essential conclusion reached in that article - that blogging is just fun - is as true as it ever was.

Still, though, in the midst of giant platforms like Facebook and Twitter, there are times when it feels like the whole exercise is pointless.

And then I read about how Elon Musk is buying Twitter, with the attendant fuss over what that might mean, and I'm suddenly more grateful than ever for having my own space on the Web. Because even if Twitter or Facebook suddenly disappear, or become unbearable, I'll still have this space.

This space is important, if for no other reason than that.

And I guess I feel grateful that I have a certain amount of technical experience, and that I'm capable of maintaining a project like this, however imperfectly. Not everyone is, which is exactly the reason things like Facebook and Twitter exist.

So what does the future look like for this vanity project I call my home on the web? Probably much like it does now, I suspect, aside from the occasional (amateurish) face lift. I imagine I'll be posting random stuff online for as long as there's a web to post to.

Call it pride, but this space will likely always be around in some form or another. At this point, it's become a part of my identity - part of how I see myself. I suppose there are worse things.

I wonder what the thirtieth anniversary post will look like?

Prohibition Was a Constitutional Amendment

2022-05-05T01:23:30Z

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It always amazes me to think that Prohibition in the U.S. was implemented via a Constitutional amendment, as was its repeal.

In my head I think of a Constitution as a country's legal axioms - the foundation of its law system. From this perspective it makes sense that the prohibition of alcohol, having no Constitutional basis, had to be passed by adding another axiom. And when people realized that this was just a bad idea, it makes sense that getting rid of it required adding yet another axiom. It's funny, when you think about it, like a big legal "oops!" that you can't erase.

But it's also intensely disquieting, because it means that you can pass what amounts to an unconstitutional law just changing the definition of "constitutional". Is banning alcohol unconstitutional? No problem! Amend your constitution to allow it. Oh wait, was that a bad idea? Also no problem! Amend your constitution and erase your mistake!

My greatest fear when Trump became President was that he would find a way around the two-term limit. The two-term limit is, after all, a constitutional amendment. If you can repeal Prohibition, you can repeal that.

And this is part of the reason I'm afraid that the days of legal abortion in the U.S. may be numbered. Maybe the Supreme Court will strike down Roe vs. Wade, and maybe that will render the legality of abortion a question to be decided by individual states. But that won't be good enough for a lot of pro-lifers. For them, presumable, nothing short of a nationwide ban will be enough.

And if you can ban alcohol nationwide, you can ban abortions nationwide.

Receiving and Displaying Webmentions in Eleventy

2022-04-25T12:37:06Z

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Webmentions are the way people have conversations on the Indieweb, but integrating them - or, indeed, any kind of dynamic content - into a static site can be a little tricky. Luckily, many people have run into this issue before and so there wasn't much for me to do but steal.

To be clear, I'm talking about receiving and displaying webmentions here, not sending them. How I ended up sending them will be a separate topic, as it is tied into how I manage POSSE and backfeeding on my site.

The previous, pelican-based incarnation of my blog used a homegrown system involving a webmention listener that handed off data to a redis server and ultimately resulted in a new webmention being committed to my site's repo, causing the whole thing to be rebuilt. It certainly worked, but it required a fair bit of maintenance. It also failed to take into account certain edge cases that I hadn't previously considered (like a commentator's avatar image going missing).

This prompted me to follow Max Bock's lead and use webmention.io to host all my webmentions. This has a couple of advantages:

The service is easy to use. You just need to sign up with IndieAuth, point your webmention endpoint at the site and you're good to go.
By default it will cache images from the webmention so that they won't break, a feature that I didn't fully understand I needed when I stated integrating webmentions into my site.

My webmention integration scheme is effectively almost a complete copy of Max Bock's, so it doesn't make sense to go into too much detail here - just read his article on the subject. I'm basically doing the same thing:

I load a webmention cache using Eleventy's global data feature.
I read all new webmentions from webmention.io and merge them into the now in memory cache.
I save the cache to disk, but keep a copy in memory.
I use this cache to display webmentions for the posts of my blog.
I persist the cache between Netlify builds

There are a couple of things that I still have to do, if I ever get around to it:

Relationships between webmentions are not clear. For example, if one webmention is a reply to another one in the context of one of my blog posts, they both get displayed as independent mentions, with no indication that there's a connection between the two.
If I mention one of my own blog posts, I'll end up displaying a webmention for it. Probably not a great idea.

Displaying Webmentions

How one displays webmentions on one's site is probably a whole topic unto itself.

Some people don't bother differentiating and lump all types of webmentions into one big bucket. Others divide it up into different types.

I mostly fall into the latter category, though from a UI perspective I haven't fully settled on how to convey the information. In any case, for now, I've chosen to group my webmentions into:

Likes
Reposts
Bookmarks
Leftover mentions, which includes replies but also arbitrary mentions that aren't so easily classified.

More To Come

I mentioned before that receiving webmentions and sending webmentions were effectively two different problems, and there are some subtleties to the latter that really deserve their own article. I suspect that's going to be the next article in this series. Stay tuned.

The Philosophy of TypeScript Enums

2022-04-12T00:13:11Z

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I'm a pretty big fan of TypeScript, probably best described as a statically typed language that transpiles to standard JavaScript. I've written about it before.

People who have worked with me in the past may be surprised at my admiration, given the rancour I occasionally direct at something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler, which to the casual eye seems to be in a similar vein.

The similarities, however, are superficial; TypeScript and GWT are quite different beasts. Something like GWT is used in web development in order to avoid writing JavaScript. TypeScript, on the other hand, is best viewed as JavaScript extended with an optional static typing system. The optional part is key; in theory, any JavaScript program is also a valid TypeScript program. In other words, TypeScript doesn't try to hide the fact that it's merely an enhanced version of JavaScript.

To put it another way, GWT adopts the attitude that JavaScript is fundamentally broken and should be avoided in shame, while TypeScript adopts the attitude that JavaScript is elegant and should be used with pride.

Granted, the latter attitude is much easier to adopt with the advent of EcmaScript 6 (ES6), the official name of the latest version of JavaScript. ES6 fixes most of the shortcomings of previous versions of JavaScript, many of which are the reasons that GWT became a thing in the first place.

Because Java and JavaScript are so different, using GWT comes at the expense of an "impedance mismatch". Although JavaScript comes with arrays, dictionaries and something resembling classes, these features are nothing like the analogous features in Java. Implementing a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler like GWT means implementing basic constructs like Java-style classes and specific implementations of things like ArrayLists and HashMaps - all in JavaScript.

You don't have to pull these kinds of shenanigans with a TypeScript transpiler because TypeScript isn't pretending to be anything other than a somewhat safer version of JavaScript. TypeScript doesn't provide a specialized list implementation, for example, because JavaScript (especially ES6) already gives you perfectly good arrays. TypeScript's class construct maps directly to ES6's class construct which is, itself, little more than syntactic sugar over the somewhat more cumbersome ES5 class construct.

What I'm trying to say is that TypeScript really is just "JavaScript with types" which is why my hackles go up every time I hear someone describe it as an attempt to make JavaScript more "Java-like". This is criminally misleading, and misses the point entirely.

It also cuts right to the core of why I dislike TypeScript enums.

Enums in TypeScript

TypeScript enums are similar in concept to enums from other languages, but if all you've ever used is JavaScript, the idea might be foreign. They provide a convenient, type-safe way to describe a variable who's value can only be taken from a constrained list - think of a variable to represent the day of the week, or the month of the year.

You define an enum in TypeScript like this:

enum DayOfWeek {
    Sunday,
    Monday,
    Tuesday,
    Wednesday,
    Thursday,
    Friday,
    Saturday
}

This is what's called a numeric enum; despite the lack of any visible numbers, the values of Sunday through Saturday are literally represented by the numbers 0 through 6.

The DayOfWeek enum label is usually used as a type, like this:

function doSomethingWithDay(day: DayOfWeek) {
   ...
}

This allows to call the function like this:

doSomethingWithDay(DayOfWeek.Monday)

Writing code like this makes two things clear. For one thing, while DayOfWeek is an enum type, it's really little more than an alias for number. For example, you can call the function like this:

doSomethingWithDay(10)

And the compiler won't complain. Secondly, the values of an enum have a real, tangible existence in the transiled JavaScript code, and you can access them like this:

const m = DayOfWeek.Monday;

In other words, an enum is more than just a type; it's an actual runtime object that can be manipulated in actual code. In the above example, the type of m would be number (and value of m would be 1).

Enums also come in string variants like this:

enum D {
   Stuff = 'Blah',
   Foo = 'Hello'
}

This is used in basically the same as the numeric variant, except that in a statement like this:

const m = D.Stuff;

The type of m would be string (and the value of m would be 'Blah').

Philosophical Discomfort

Okay, so what's the problem, exactly? Why are TypeScript enums weird? I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine that JavaScript developers are unfamiliar with the idea of a variable that can only hold one of a finite list of values, so why does this blog entry even exist?

The objection is more philosophical than anything else, I suppose. The fundamental design strategy behind TypeScript is to re-use existing JavaScript concepts wherever possible. TypeScript Constructs like imports, classes, Arrays, Maps, Sets will all be perfectly familiar to any ES6 developer - because they are exactly the same as their JavaScript counterparts.

Enums, on the other hand, do not explicitly exist in any version of JavaScript; they are pure TypeScript constructs. In that sense they're a bit like interfaces, which also exist purely in the TypeScript realm, the difference being that, unlike interfaces, which get completely compiled away from the final, resulting JavaScript, enums very much stay behind. And that makes them, in my opinion, somewhat anathema to the entire idea of TypeScript. One of the main perks of TypeScript development is that it is not entirely dissimilar to JavaScript development, and the use of TypeScript enums undermines that advantage.

Practical Considerations

Another problem is that enums are awkward for certain use cases that would seem to be a natural fit. Consider the case of a dictionary with a limited set of strings for keys. For example, imagine you had a JavaScript object to represent a number of widgets for each day of the week:

const widgetsPerDay = {
    'Sunday': 4,
    'Monday': 10,
    'Tuesday': 3,
    'Wednesday': 6,
    'Thursday': 9,
    'Friday': 1,
    'Saturday': 5
}

You'd like to define a type to represent the keys of this object, and you might think that a vanilla (numeric) enum would do the trick:

enum DayOfWeek {
    Sunday,
    Monday,
    Tuesday,
    Wednesday,
    Thursday,
    Friday,
    Saturday
}

And you'd be right, but not without some fairly significant syntactic acrobatics. For one thing, the enum values are numbers, not strings, so this doesn't work the way you might think:

const totalForMonday = widgetsPerDay[DayOfWeek.Monday]
console.log(totalForMonday)

This will print undefined, because we're actually looking up the total with a key value of 1, i.e. the value of DayOfWeek.Monday, and there is obviously no value attached to that key in the widgetsPerDay object. Making this work requires looking up the name from the enum object itself, like this:

const mondayKey = DayOfWeek[DayOfWeek.Monday] // mondayKey = 'Monday';
const totalForMonday = widgetsPerDay[mondayKey];
console.log(totalForMonday);

This prints the expected 10, but I don't believe I'm the only one to find the need to lookup up the value of the key in the enum object somewhat distasteful.

You can make all this work somewhat more naturally with a string enum:

enum DayOfWeek {
    Sunday = 'Sunday',
    Monday = 'Monday',
    Tuesday = 'Tuesday',
    Wednesday = 'Wednesday',
    Thursday = 'Thursday',
    Friday = 'Friday',
    Saturday = 'Saturday'
}

in which case this statement

const totalForMonday = widgetsPerDay[DayOfWeek.Monday]
console.log(totalForMonday)

will print out the expected 10. This is, in fact, pretty close to how you'd write this in a language like, say, Java. You'd probably define static string constants in a class somewhere like this:

public class DayOfWeek {
    public static String Sunday = "Sunday";
    public static String Monday = "Monday";
    // ...and the rest
}

This is also probably pretty close to how you would do this in pure JavaScript. In ES6, we'd probably just define a file with the key labels defined as such:

export const Sunday = 'Sunday';
export const Monday = 'Monday';
// ...and the rest

But...it's all a bit verbose and redundant, isn't it? You're repeating the name of the day in the variable and its value. One might ask why we're bothering with this at all. It's almost enough to make me want to skip the enum construct entirely and just do this:

const totalForMonday = widgetsPerDay['Monday'];
console.log(totalForMonday);

Easier, yeah? And maybe even good enough for this particular case, where the keys are very constrained and very well-known. That being said, if the values of the keys were to suddenly change, you'd be in trouble. If the widgetsPerDay object were to suddenly look like this, for example:

const widgetsPerDay = {
    'Sun': 4,
    'Mon': 10,
    'Tue': 3,
    'Wed': 6,
    'Thu': 9,
    'Fri': 1,
    'Sat': 5
}

then this code will fail:

const totalForMonday = widgetsPerDay['Monday'];
console.log(totalForMonday);

You would have to go and change every instance of 'Monday' (that was being used as a key to widgetsPerDay) to 'Mon' (and then do the same for all the other days of the week). This may or may not be a big deal depending on how often you're using the key. The desire to avoid this and to protect yourself from such a possibility is what leads us to the apparent verbosity of the other solutions. If you were to use a string enum, all you would have to do is redefine the values like this:

enum DayOfWeek {
    Sunday = 'Sun',
    Monday = 'Mon',
    Tuesday = 'Tue',
    Wednesday = 'Wed',
    Thursday = 'Thu',
    Friday = 'Fri',
    Saturday = 'Sat'
}

And nothing else needs to change, as long as the keys are always referenced via the enum. The apparent redundancy, as it turns out, buys us a certain amount of future-proofing.

Alternatives to Enums

A lot of people associate the concept of "static typing" with Java or C++ and that is a shame because the static typing in those languages is pretty toothless compared to TypeScript (or, really, any modern, statically typed language). So it may surprise you to discover that you can actually reap a lot of the benefits of enums in a language like TypeScript without ever typing the word "enum" - albeit, sometimes with the help of a halfway decent IDE.

For example, let's revisit the widgetsPerDay object:

const widgetsPerDay = {
    'Sunday': 4,
    'Monday': 10,
    'Tuesday': 3,
    'Wednesday': 6,
    'Thursday': 9,
    'Friday': 1,
    'Saturday': 5
}

On a very general level, widgetsPerDay is a dictionary where the keys are strings and the values are integers. This is readily represented as a type in TypeScript:

type WidgetsPerDay = { [day: string]: number; }

We can do better, though. The type, as defined, allows any string as a key, which isn't technically correct; we know that only certain strings are allowed. So we can restrict the keys to certain strings by making a type to represent the keys:

type DaysOfWeek = 
    'Sunday' | 
    'Monday' | 
    'Tuesday' | 
    'Wednesday' | 
    'Thursday' | 
    'Friday' | 
    'Saturday'

DaysOfWeek isn't an enum. It's still a string type, but of a special kind; a string that can only take on very specific values. We can use it to define our WidgetsPerDay type:

type WidgetsPerDay = { [day: DaysOfWeek]: number; }

You can then write code like this:

const widgetsOnTuesday = widgetsPerDay['Tuesday'];

and if you have a relatively modern IDE like IntelliJ or VS Code, you'll get code completion when you start typing 'Tuesday' as the key. Generally, these editors are smart enough to know when they're dealing with a TypeScript type and act accordingly.

In addition, if you try and do something silly like this:

const widgetsPerDay: WidgetsPerDay = {
    'Sunday': 4,
    'Monday': 10,
    'Tuesday': 3,
    'Wednesday': 6,
    'Thursday': 9,
    'Friday': 1,
    'Saturday': 5
}
const widgetsOnBlatherDay = widgetPerDay['Blather'];

the compiler will bark at you as well.

To me, at least, this feels a lot more organic than an artificial, TypeScript-only enum construct. The type statements will get compiled out of the resulting JavaScript, and all that's left is code that probably looks similar to code you would have written in JavaScript anyway.

TypeScript even lets us do clever things like defining a type from the values in an array:

const daysOfWeek = [
    'Sunday',
    'Monday',
    'Tuesday',
    'Wednesday', 
    'Thursday',
    'Friday',
    'Saturday'] as const;
type DaysOfWeek = typeof daysOfWeek[number];

Of course, you still technically have a problem if you want to change the values of the keys. If you want the days of the week to look like this instead, for example

type DaysOfWeek = 
    'Sun' | 
    'Mon' | 
    'Tue' | 
    'Wed' | 
    'Thu' | 
    'Fri' | 
    'Sat'

then you're still stuck with changing every instance of "Tuesday" to "Tue" - unless, of course, you are using one of the aforementioned modern, TypeScript-aware IDEs, which can do it for you.

Conclusion

Part of the reason I like TypeScript is that, for the most part, it doesn't add an extra layer on top of JavaScript, except for the typing. So when I see something like enums being added to the language as a completely new runtime concept, I get suspicious.

Instead, you can create something that acts very much like an enum using nothing but static typing tricks, and if you use a halfway decent IDE, you'll get all of the benefits without any of the weird residual, runtime artifacts.

I guess the moral of the story is that you should use an IDE? Especially if you're using a statically typed language. I have written about that subject before, but enums, for me, just drives home the point. I know a lot of software developers are too young to remember the static versus dynamic typing debates, but static typing really does seem to have the edge here.

For me, at least. Your mileage may vary. I'm not one to tell you can't put pineapple on your pizza :-)

Desmond Rivet - Blog