jducoeur | Recent Entries

(Posted this on LinkedIn, of all places, since it seems appropriate there. But let's also put it here, where my friends will actually see it.)

I was chatting yesterday with a sometime colleague -- a fellow programmer -- who just got laid off, who asked (paraphrasing) "How do you manage to stay hopeful in this terrible job market? What do you do in the meantime that helps?" Here are some thoughts on that.

Part of my response here is history, because I've kind of lived through it before. 2025 is starting to remind me of 2002 -- what we referred to at the time as the "nuclear winter" of the software industry, in the wake of the Dotcom Bust.

(Although this time around, the tariff mess seems to be popping the bubble earlier, and maybe a little less violently, than 25 years ago.)

Regardless, I expect the job market this year to be brutal for software engineers. We have a lot more programmers than jobs for the time being, after years of heavy hiring around the pandemic, so it's worth thinking about how to get through it.

The first question, hard but important, is: how serious are you about this? In 2002, part of how things resolved is that a lot of folks dropped out of programming and found something else to do. By that point, we had tons of folks for whom it was just a job, rather than a passion, and many of them found greener pastures elsewhere. That's 100% sensible, and I expect a fair amount of it this year.

For those of us who do consider ourselves to be software "lifers" -- the ones who can't imagine not programming on a constant basis -- I have two key pieces of advice:

Never Stop Learning
Never Stop Coding

On the first point, self-driven learning is the heart of software engineering: as a rule of thumb, I believe in spending several hours every week, even when fully employed, learning new stuff -- staying on top of things is a key part of my job in an industry that is constantly evolving.

That becomes more true when you're unemployed: you should take the opportunity to learn new languages, new techniques, new technologies. Take the time to expand your toolbelt and figure out new things you can do and find fun.

On the second, take the downtime as a chance to buff your portfolio. For most of us, our dayjob work is pretty hidden: the code is proprietary to our former employers, so we can't show it off.

So don't take too much time as enforced vacation. Instead, once you have your head straight, get back to "working" a full day every day on something open source. That both shows that you have some initiative, and lets you show off your chops to prospective employers.

Indeed, this is exactly what worked for me in 2002. I taught myself the then-newish C# language and built a dumb little shareware application in it. That proved directly relevant to my job hunt: I wound up getting hired to build the .NET middleware backend for a startup that I had my eye on.

(This time around, I'm taking the time to bring Querki, my own little product, up to modern snuff after years of neglect -- that's teaching me a lot about AWS, and should give me a chance to turn that crufty ancient Scala code into something I'm more willing to show off.)

Mind, it's still hard -- you have to put a lot of mental effort into not letting it get you down. But having a project to focus on will help with your mental game, and can help with the job hunt in unexpected ways. I recommend it.

Just saw The Odyssey at the ART. (Later than usual for us: our usual preview showing got cancelled -- not sure what wasn't ready -- so we wound up with one of the main showings instead.)

Manages to be surprisingly faithful to the story from Homer (mostly modern dress but otherwise very much of the period) while being an absolutely savage look at the aftermath of war, and viewing all of it through a female lens. The only actress playing a single through-line part is Penelope, but the heart of the show is the three women playing the Chorus, the Fates, the voices in Odysseus' head, and three of the main other women in the story.

The author of the play (Kate Hamill) is one of those three -- she plays Circe and completely steals the show in the second act (this one is three hours and three acts with two intermissions -- unusually long for the ART), with a take on the character that is powerful, passionate, terrifying and blasphemous in equal measure. She's basically worth the price of admission on her own.

Odysseus, while still the central character and having the most stage time, manages to be a mix of toxic masculinity and self-pity, desperately seeking forgiveness for his war crimes in Troy. I wind up somewhat empathizing with him, but still agreeing with the women who all basically wind up going variations of, "Dude -- seriously? We're not here to forgive you. Get your shit together."

The writing is sharp and smart, and terribly funny at times despite being a tad bleak overall.

Not easy, but a very good show. Playing through this week -- worth seeing if you have a chance.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am involved with many, many volunteer organizations -- that's what I do with much of my time.

This past week, I wound up in a conversation in one of them that was pointlessly hurtful to me, and the result is that I'm going to be reducing my involvement in that organization. I don't think anyone was intentionally trying to be harmful, but it was kind of my breaking point.

(We're not going to talk here about which organization, or the details of the incident -- they're not especially relevant, and would likely just derail the more interesting conversation. Suffice it to say, I've written to the leadership of that organization to give them my thoughts on the matter.)

The whole thing led to a lot of soul-searching and introspection, and as is my way, some philosophizing about what's going on there. None of this is unique to the group in question -- I've observed similar in many clubs -- so let's talk about some basics.

This is half-philosophizing, half a necessary diary entry to get my head straight, so it'll be a bit of a wander. Bear with me -- it'll get to the point. Hopefully others will find it useful / interesting.

In the heat of the moment, I focused on a few individuals who, being extremely focused on their own problems, made mine much worse. This put me in mind of the concept of Toxic Service.

"Toxic Service" is an idea that I learned from the Order of the Silver Crescent, in the East Kingdom of the SCA. We might well have invented the term, decades ago, but it's hard to be sure.

The Crescent is the Order that recognizes Service to the Kingdom. Its definition doesn't say anything about behavior, and some people take that to imply that behavior is absolutely irrelevant. (As opposed to the higher-level Order of the Pelican, where good behavior is an explicit requirement.)

Over the years, we decided that wasn't quite right. The Crescent doesn't demand that you be a role model of politesse, but is concerned with net service -- not just the gross amount of work you're doing, but the overall effect.

And the thing is, your behavior can affect the service of the people around you. "Role model" may not be a requirement, but if you are driving others away from doing service -- because you're too perfectionist or hectoring, or too self-sacrificing to be near, or simply an asshole -- that becomes Toxic Service, and gets subtracted from the work you're doing. While it's not common, it's not rare for someone to be held back from recognition because of this.

After some reflection, though, I realized that thinking of this as Toxic Service was off-base. This wasn't a problem of one or two badly-behaved people; instead this showed itself as a more pervasive cultural problem.

In retrospect, it shouldn't be surprising: the organization is overloaded and under-resourced (as are many volunteer organizations these days), with the result that lots of people are burnt out and crabby. Everybody knows it, but it's rare for people inside the organization to talk about it.

Which put me in mind of the Missing Stair Problem.

For those who aren't familiar with it, a "missing stair" is a person inside an organization who is dangerous: most often a sexual predator, although other forms happen.

What makes this person a missing stair is that they are charismatic and/or productive, so nobody particularly wants to confront them or talk about their bad behavior publicly. Instead, they become the topic of whisper networks, so that all the experienced members know to steer around them.

Which is kind of okay -- except that new members sometimes don't hear those whispers until it's too late, and wind up badly hurt. Hence "missing stair": easy to avoid habitually if you know about it, but extremely dangerous if you don't. The fact that there is a problem that nobody talks about publicly makes the problem much worse.

On further thought, though, I realized that the missing-stair analogy was poorly suited to the problem at hand as well. Not only is that metaphor also focused on individual bad apples, it's much more serious. A collectively-grumpy culture is harmful to the organization, and might be emotionally somewhat harmful to the members, but nobody's likely to get sexually assaulted.

So instead, let's shift the metaphor a bit, and think of this problem as Missing Banisters.

It's not just one stair that is super-dangerous: it's that the entire staircase is just a bit less safe than it should be. Going down it is slower and scarier than it should be, more emotionally draining, and it doesn't matter how long you've been going down, it still kind of sucks, because it isn't supportive.

And that gets to the heart of the matter. In a Missing Banisters situation, everybody is more isolated than they should be. Everyone is doing their best, but they are tending to feel overwhelmed, and many wind up resenting anything that sounds like it could possibly be a demand on their time. It drains the camaraderie and joy.

That lack of mutual support can be downright deadly to a volunteer organization, because it steadily erodes the volunteer capacity of the organization, in several different ways.

First, it leads to individual burnout. Many folks -- often including the high-achievers and leadership -- keep plugging away out of a dreary sense of guilt, accomplishing a lot until they just plain snap, and have to leave for their own health.
Second, it hurts recruitment. Volunteers can smell this sort of unhealthy environment, when the existing members are already over-tired, and tend to be sensible enough to stay far, far away.
Third -- subtlest but actually most important -- it reduces the capacity of the active members. Folks running volunteer orgs tend to think of each person as having a set amount they can do, but that's over-simplified. If the environment is isolating and combative, the emotional labor needed to get anything done increases, and that person just can't accomplish as much as they would in a more-supportive environment.

It's an easy trap to fall into. It tends not to be due to one event or one person -- rather, it's usually a long process of things going a little wrong. Folks wind up nitpicking, over-interpreting, and getting defensive, and that gradually becomes a pattern of habit that others pick up on. Since nobody calls it out and tries to turn it around, it slowly worsens.

It's a spectrum, of course, not a simple "toxic vs healthy". And it goes the other way as well: if you can create an environment that is positive, people tend to stick around, it's easier to recruit, and members tend to be much more productive because of that mutual support. It's easier to do things with more company, and folks tend to fill in each others' gaps so that they focus on their strengths.

That doesn't mean a Pollyanna-ish denial that there are problems, mind (there are always problems), but it does mean that everyone needs to engage productively and positively, acknowledging those problems and working together to find and enact the best solutions.

Which in turn means that the first step is noticing and acknowledging the missing banisters, and working together to build them.

Of course, that isn't easy. I've been involved with clubs that have turned around toxic cultures, but it's required a ton of hard work, cooperation, and sometimes some very scary gambles on radical change. There's no guarantee of success -- heaven knows, I've been in enough clubs that have simply crumbled. But you don't have any chance if you don't seriously try.

Anyway, that's my current thinking. I'm hoping that the organization that triggered this line of thought can turn things around. (I'm not entirely stepping away, just reducing my own exposure for my own health.)

Hopefully folks find these ideas (and terms) at least somewhat useful.

Thoughts? Please, no speculation about the specifics, but ideas about how to recognize problems in the cultures of volunteer organizations, discuss them productively, and turn things around are quite welcome.

Time for that end-of-year tradition, taking stock of where I am now. This is kind of a diary entry, but I've been posting infrequently enough that much of it is probably news to most folks. This will be a pretty long braindump, but hopefully informative. Comments welcome -- it sometimes feels a little lonely around here nowadays.

Job

Not to bury the lede: remember my ruminations last month about how I wasn't fitting into Big Corporate Life perfectly? When I wrote that, I already knew I was on my way out the door. My manager knew, but she asked me not to announce it until four weeks out, lest I be too much of a lame duck for too long. (And she was right: while I got a colossal amount done those last few weeks, it wasn't easy to maintain motivation.)

Anyway, I'm no longer with Slack/Salesforce. My last day of work was the 18th, and my technical last day of employment is tomorrow -- I'm starting to pack up my laptop to ship it back.

It's kind of a pity: Slack was a pretty great company, and my team are uniformly great folks. But I just wasn't being as effective as either I or the company wanted me to be, mostly because succeeding at a senior level in a really large company calls for different skills than doing so at a small company, and those aren't skills I'm all that practiced in.

(I was great at the programming, of course. But once you're up to a really senior level half the job is about communication, and that's just plain harder at a really big firm.)

It's not entirely tragic -- Slack is slowly getting more deeply absorbed into Salesforce, and necessarily becoming more corporate in the process, which isn't really my ideal world.

And Salesforce is absolutely all-in on AI ("Agentforce" is the hot buzzword these days) -- I'm by no means as anti-AI as many of my friends, but I'm also not especially passionate about it. IMO the current situation is very, very similar to the Dotcom Bubble, circa 1999. I believe there's some real potential, and some companies will hit very big, but most are over-committing, there's an enormous amount of Dumb Money chasing anything with the word "AI" in its pitch, and I believe we're likely to see a massive crash in the next few years, with similarly huge layoffs. Having lived through the last big bubble, I don't necessarily need to focus excessively on this one.

Anyway, I'm going to be in the job market again in a couple of months, looking for a smaller company (ideally an early-stage startup) that is looking for a strong backend tech lead and preferably open to pure-FP Scala as its stack. (Happy to blather about why I firmly believe it's the best current stack for anybody who is actually serious about building something that will scale well.)

But first...

Sabbatical

It's been 12 years since I last took a break, and I could use a little time to get my head together and recover from the burnout. So I'm officially setting Q1 aside as a sabbatical.

That's specifically not a vacation, mind. Kate is still working full-time, and it would (quite reasonably) annoy the snot out of her if I was just sitting on my ass all day.

But I'm going to take the time to focus on the many, many neglected personal projects that have built up. The list is as long as my arm (yes, there's a checklist), ranging from working on our overfilled basement to outlining some missing public documentation for Typelevel to getting our financial plans in order. (We're gradually approaching retirement, and I suspect there's a stock market crash coming in the middle of next year, so it's time for readjustments.)

Above all, the highest-priority project is getting Querki back on a decent footing. For complicated technical reasons, it is still running on an antique version of Scala, and its dependencies are unbelieveably out of date. It's time to pull the tablecloth out from under the running system, change the way it works under the hood, and get it to the point where I can begin seriously moving the project forward again. (In particular, get it to the point where developing it is fun again.)

Social

Part of the sabbatical, but worth calling out: even more than usual, I'm looking for opportunities to get together with my friends. That can be board games, dinners out, club activities, whatever -- the point is to reconnect socially, because I've been feeling a measure of loneliness lately, and that's likely to get worse with the cold weather.

Of course, we're also about to start Crazy Season -- the period when a lot of High Impact Social happens in quick succession. (Arisia, Birka, Intercon, etc) But that's not the same thing: while I love those huge events, I often find myself lost in the crowd, so they don't necessarily alleviate the loneliness. So smaller get-togethers are still super-important.

Socials

And speaking of "social", it's worth reviewing my current social media presence. People here aren't necessarily on all of these, but connecting is welcome if you are.

Dreamwidth -- obviously, I'm still here to some degree, but also obviously I'm not posting as much. With the rise of microblogging, I've tended to focus my DW usage more for long-form posts, where I have more to say and am willing to spend the time thinking about what I'm going to say. Over the years I've become a bit less comfortable posting brief hot takes and links here; those are winding up in the places below.
Mastodon has become my primary home for the time being, at https://social.coop/@jducoeur. I post way more frequently there: retooting multiple times a day on average, and tooting my own thoughts pretty often. I don't know if it's ever going to be the biggest social media outlet, but IMO it's the healthiest. I read a lot of feeds there (enough that I can't keep up with all of them), and I'm happy to connect to folks there. (And if you'd like help getting started there, I'm happy to provide advice.)
I have two accounts on Bluesky. My "real" Bluesky account is https://bsky.app/profile/jducoeur.bsky.social, but that's mostly reposts -- I rarely do main posts there. More important is the Bluesky bridge of my Mastodon account, which copies all of my Mastodon posts -- if you are only on Bluesky and want to follow me, that's the one that is more worth connecting to. Note that I only read Bluesky very erratically: since I mainly read Mastodon, I primarily follow accounts that are bridged to there, checking in on Bluesky itself mainly when I'm out and reading on my phone.
Quite recently, I set myself up on Bookwyrm, which is basically the Fediverse version of Goodreads, at https://bookwyrm.social/user/jducoeur. That's still an experiment, but I'm trying to at least record, and often review or comment on, the interesting graphic novels and audiobooks I'm reading. (I read relatively little text these days, but Libro.fm has enabled me to get back into audiobooks without feeding the voracious maw of Amazon and its abuses.)
Finally, it's worth noting that I'm on LinkedIn at (as usual) jducoeur. I do not follow the feed there (I find the idea of LI as a social network just daft), but I do use it as my Rolodex. With me planning to look for a job in a couple of months that's going to become more important, so I encourage folks who know me reasonably well to link to me there.

Health

Finally, if I'm going to do an honest braindump of my current state, it's worth talking a little about health.

I'm approaching a Big Round Birthday, and while there's a measure of "yay" to that, it's also faintly depressing. I'm feeling my age, and beginning to grapple with why and what to do about that. I think there's going to be another big post (possibly within the next few days) on that topic.

More immediately, I am slowly being driven spare by reflux issues.

I've had problems with reflux my entire adult life, mind, starting shortly after college. Esophageal reflux made me absolutely nuts for the better part of ten years, thinking something was deeply wrong with me, until I got a new doctor with a clue who realized what the problem was and pointed me in the direction of Omeprazole. I've been on and off of that ever since, which isn't great, but at least it was under control.

But ever since my last bout of Covid (just about a year ago now), I've been fighting laryngeal reflux, which is new for me. (Aside from a few months of it last year, after my previous Covid, which is why I have a nasty suspicion of a connection.) The symptoms are totally different: burping, a bit of a cough, some raspiness in my voice, sometimes "cottonmouth" and/or a touch of sore throat in the morning. It's just inconvenient, rather than painful, but it's not a great thing to have ongoing for long periods -- it's undoubtedly doing subtle long-term damage.

Nothing has yet succeeded in controlling that. The Omeprazole keeps the acid from eating away at my innards too much, but clearly haven't fixed the underlying problem. I picked up a Medcline pillow a while back, but it isn't obvious that it's helping all that much, and my sleep with it is only so-so.

So that's a constant, low-level stressor. And just to add to that, there is some confusion, because the problem seems to lessen when I travel, and I can't figure out why: on the road I tend to be dealing with worse pillows and mattresses, and not obviously any better foods. It's a puzzle, and distracting to say the least.

Finally, yes, I'm still on Ozempic, although still at a minimal dose. I'll likely raise that a notch at some point, to knock myself down out of the pre-diabetic range and get my weight back to something a bit more appropriate, but I'd love to fix the reflux first, before making more changes.

Conclusion

So overall, life is decent, but not perfect -- nothing awful, but lots of stuff to grapple with and try to improve.

How are you all doing? Please feel free to opine about any of the above -- conversation is what makes DW most fun, and I've monologued enough here...

Another season, another new show at the ART. Tonight was a preview showing of Ayodele Casel's Diary of a Tap Dancer. It's worth talking about.

The show is intensely autobiographical: a memoir told on stage in the form of (mostly) monologue and dance, with a fine and diverse cast of performers backing her up. They fill in the roles of some of the important people in her life (most notably her mother), but the story is mostly narrative, starting from a young age.

The first act is mostly chronological, outlining and filling in what it was like growing up biracial, first in the Bronx and then exiled for years to Puerto Rico. Then the hunt to find the father she had never met, and finally the discovery of the movies of Ginger Rogers, and beginning to get a hint of her calling.

Act two continues in that vein, but begins to explore the history of tap, and her growing realization of how little she really knew about her own art form. Finally, there comes the dawning realization that, far from being a historical outlier as a black female tapper, she is instead following in a deep tradition -- a tradition that had been almost entirely erased from history, of the black women who had been major stars only fifty years before, and then deliberately forgotten.

Calling the last third of the show "impassioned" would be an understatement: it is a cry of sadness and anger about the women whose legacies were almost buried forever, and a fierce demand to remember them and the generation now rising.

It's as personal a show as I've seen, with a raw intensity at times that is almost hard to watch -- I have no clue how she can bare herself to such a degree night after night and then keep on dancing. But it's impossible to look away.

Obviously, this is a story that is deeply about racism and sexism, told not in facile metaphor or melodrama but simply in the facts of her own life and the history that she gradually learned.

And not to be overlooked: this is also about tap -- not so much the show-biz-smooth styles of Rogers and Astaire, but the from-the-soul expressions that became her obsession and her pride. There's a lot of truly great dance on stage here, telling the story just as much as the words are.

It runs through early January at the ART, and is well worth seeing. If you can make it, please take the opportunity.

(Content warning for a bit of whining, but I really need to get this written down and out of my head.)

Most of my friends know that I've been horribly toasty for at least a year now. But most are sort of playing blind men to my elephant, only seeing a bit of it. So for the sake of diarizing, and to think it through in my own head, let's enumerate all of my current responsibilities, by category.

Dayjob

First and by no means least, there's Work-work. I've been working for Slack/Salesforce for something like 2.5 years now. It's not terrible, mind -- by the standards of giant multinationals, Salesforce isn't a bad employer, and Slack built up a wonderful culture.

But still, it's fairly intense, taking up nearly all of my attention from 8:30am - 6pm most days, in a busy and complicated environment. It's less "hard", more "brain-burning", simply from all of the balls I need to keep in the air there.

And the sad reality is, it's reminded me that I've been a small-company guy all my life, and this isn't that. I like to know everyone at the company, up to and including the CEO, and have my hands completely around the product that I'm working on. That's really not possible here, and that's quietly frustrating. It's really not the sort of place where I tend to excel.

Querki

Remember Querki? Querki is my little company -- I'm still the CEO, President and sole real programmer.

The company is still toddling along -- I build nice stable software, and the thing's been running more or less continuously for a dozen years now. But the software stack is ridiculously out of date in many ways, in desperate need of a hundred upgrades just to get to the point where I can actively develop it again. (Starting with the trick of pulling out the tablecloth of the obsolete containerization system that it currently runs in and replacing that with Docker. That bit's hard: it's the sort of Ops work that I'm not as good at as I am programming per se.)

I really miss working on Querki, but this annoying-but-necessary upgrade project stands in the way of doing so. That needs a pile of serious time.

Professional Organizations

I'm on the Typelevel Steering Committee. Typelevel is one of the major sub-communities of the Scala world (Scala being my programming language of choice), dedicated to high-quality functional programming and being decent people; the Steering Committee are kinda-sorta the board of directors of that, trying to herd the cats (as it were) in vaguely the same direction and keep the community healthy.

I'm actually on the Board of the NE Scala conference, a delightful hybrid of a technical conference and a fan-con; I chaired it last year, and still seem to be the nearest thing to a leader we currently have. I desperately need to find somebody interested in chairing the next one, and we really should reincorporate the bloody thing as a 501(c)3.

In airy theory, I'm in charge of BASE, the Boston Area Scala Enthusiasts Meetup. That was floundering even before the pandemic, and I've had no luck getting it restarted since 2020. Which is sad: I'm fairly sure the people are there, but getting folks to communicate is hard.

SCA

The SCA is still my home base -- where I met most of my friends, and the organization I still spend the most time on, for all that it's not nearly as much as I used to.

I have one official job there, as Chatelaine of Carolingia -- basically the welcome wagon for the Barony. That one, I was slightly voluntold into: I had stepped up as "drop dead deputy" for the previous Chatelaine, since somebody had to do so, and discovered that I'd been appointed to the main job only two weeks after it happened. (In the middle of East Kingdom Court, no less.) I enjoy working with new folks -- I've done so for almost as long as I've been in the club -- but having it as a Job makes it a bit more Work, a bit less Fun, and it comes with some real responsibilities.

Less officially, I'm Ace of the Low Company of Gamesters and Gamblers (basically, I co-run the gaming guild), and help out in various other capacities like Dance.

Arisia

Arisia is one of the local science fiction conventions -- I've attended nearly every year since it was founded (about 35 years ago), and have gotten gradually more involved since then.

Most obviously, I'm in the middle of standing up an official Arisia Discord server. (I wound up in charge mainly because I made the argument that we needed one.) That project is running behind -- I'd hoped to have it open to the public last month, so I need to get my ass in gear there.

I've also been the Press Liaison -- basically the person responsible for working with the fan press and making sure they behave -- for something like ten years now. I'd really like to hand off that job, but have had no luck so far.

And of course, there are the fun bits: running the annual Arisia Renaissance Ball and serving on panels. Those require some real effort, but they're highlights of my year.

Intercon

Intercon is the local LARP convention, which I've been participating in since 1988. My responsibilities there are decently light at this point -- I'm part of the Proposal Committee, which is mainly just a matter of reviewing game proposals and making suggestions to help them succeed. Not usually a big deal, although it got pretty freaking intense for a while, a month or two ago, when we had to process enormous numbers of proposals at high speed.

I'm also writing a new game for the upcoming Intercon. By my standards it's super-light -- it'll total dozens of pages of writing instead of the hundreds that most of my games have entailed. But it still needs to get done, and soon.

Family

Of course, there's also Real Life.

My mother is in her mid-80s, and really no longer independent -- she's now in an adult living facility. Fortunately, my aunt and uncle have been doing much of the heavy lifting (with her medical care and bills, respectively), so I'm not by any means her sole caregiver. But I seem to be her main social connection to the world (she's a serious introvert), so I'm trying to visit every other weekend; in practice, that winds up taking about a quarter of my free days.

Conclusions

So yeah -- it's a lot.

The hell of it is, nearly all of the above are fun individually. With the exception of Carolingian Chatelaine, I volunteered for all of this -- I care about these communities, and enjoy the work. But put it all together, and it's completely insane: overwhelming to the point where I'm dropping balls left and right. And that sense of overwhelm and failure makes it hard to enjoy the tasks.

And of course, that's just counting responsibilities, and doesn't include the Just Plain Fun things I'm doing and that I'd like to be doing more of, which include:

Scottish Country Dance, especially the new Gender Free SCD right near my house.
Contra Dance, especially BIDA (also within walking distance).
Going to more SCA events.
Doing more gaming with friends.
Socializing in general -- it's weird to feel a bit lonely and isolated when I'm in so many communities, but it's not a minor thing.

So the big project for next year is going to be figuring out how to trim things back, so more of it is Fun and less is Work. That's likely to be hard and dispiriting -- some of those activities are effectively moribund, and I may have to just let them die, which is very depressing -- but it's necessary for my sanity.

Just finished A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, a pair of novellas by Becky Chambers (author of the Wayfarers series) that effectively form a novel.

On the one hand, it's even more of a plot-free travelogue than The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. The story can be summarized as "Monk gets restless and heads into the woods. Monk meets Robot. Monk and Robot wind up on a long road trip."

But's also a profoundly beautiful, quiet story, about meaning and purpose and whether it even matters to have such things, or whether it's enough to just be.

Like all of Chambers' work, the story is notionally science-fiction, taking place on what is clearly a human colony world (a moon of a gas giant) in the fairly-distant future. But also like all of her work, the SF aspect is fairly irrelevant. This isn't about spaceships or battles with aliens; it's about exploring different ways of being. To no small degree, it's about positing a quieter, healthier way to arrange human society.

The story starts a couple hundred years after The Factory Age, which came to an end when the robots revealed that they'd become sentient somewhere along the line, and would like to opt out of the labors to which they had been put. Humanity apparently reacted to this with a questionably-plausible but refreshingly-sensible agreeableness, so the humans and robots agreed to split the world between them, and the humans would leave the robots in peace until the robots chose otherwise. In the wake of that, the humans realized that their society was built on sand, and needed a serious rethink.

Our first protagonist (and viewpoint character) is Sibling Dex, a Tea Monk who travels from village to village, serving tea to anyone who wants and listening to their troubles. Having found a streak of dissatisfaction in their own life, they impulsively strike out into the Wilderness, to go in search of a monastery that no one has visited in many years. (And get away from people for a while: Dex is a pretty serious introvert in a pretty people-oriented role.)

They are making their way along, when a robot comes up and greets them, the first contact in centuries, to ask the apparently-simple question, "What do you need?" The quest to wrestle with answers to that is one of the main axes on which the rest of the story turns.

The robot is Mosscap, and it is wonderfully not what you expect. It is both deeply naive about how the human world works, but insightful, fun, warm and friendly. It's impossible to read the story without concluding the Mosscap is a very good person, save that it is very insistent that it is not a person. (Which is why it is firm that Dex is "they" and Mosscap is "it".)

(Entirely tangential, but for those who get the reference: especially in the audiobook version, Mosscap both sounds and behaves exactly like Elsbeth Tascioni from the TV shows The Good Wife, The Good Fight, and Elsbeth. The combination of surface goofiness but underlying cleverness and wisdom, plus unexpected wonder in the little things, was a similarity that kept striking me again and again.)

The first book is mainly just the two of them, finishing out Dex' quest for the monastery and some hoped-for insights to be found there; the second is them wandering from village to village in the human side of the world, with Mosscap asking person after person "What do you need?" in an attempt to understand how humanity has fared over the past couple of centuries. There are no easy answers to be found for any of it, but the journey is an enlightening one for both of them.

The whole thing is refreshingly free of content warnings: while there are some tense moments, they're generally not of the traumatic sort. It's a tale of two people (Mosscap's denial aside) becoming close friends, exploring and learning along the way.

One particular detail that I noticed concerns gender. Not only does this story feature two firmly non-binary protagonists, it's conspicious that that doesn't stop Dex from having a romantic and sexual life -- and throughout, their biological sex doesn't come into it. It's not loudly disavowed (as one sometimes sees) or anything like that -- it just isn't relevant, and the story never mentions it.

(Even more than Murderbot, this makes it a bit problematic to translate this story to a visual medium. One of the delightful things about text is that this aspect can remain firmly ambiguous, and that's pretty clearly deliberate.)

The posited human society is fascinating to think about. I can poke holes in its economics, but it makes a compelling argument for a quieter and simpler life that allows a lot of the toxins to drain out of the world.

Summary: the two novellas together make a short novel -- if you can deal with a story that really isn't about plot, you should read it. If you liked Chamber's Wayfarers series, it's a must-read: it has many of the same good qualities, distilled down.

I've long been happy about the fact that I've had little nausea from Ozempic -- that had always been the most worrying side-effect, but it's never really bothered me.

That ended last night. (Content warning for discussion of bodily functions.)

Yesterday, I posted about the glorious dinner we had just had at Yapa, and mentioned that "really, I ate too much, but it was impossible to pass anything up". At the time, that didn't seem to be an issue. Indeed, it wasn't a problem -- until about 2am.

After that, all hell broke loose. Moderate flooding from the bowels, combined with a solid hour of nausea and about ten minutes of dry heaves. It took a couple of hours to get back to sleep, and based on what a zombie I was all day today, I don't think I slept at all well after that.

Today has been one of those delicate-stomach days: not quite nauseous, but decidedly queasy all day. Don't know if that's because my digestion is backed up, or because of the post-nasal drip (see below) or both, but I've had to eat lightly and delicately. Not a tragedy (we didn't have any looked-forward-to dinner plans), but definitely put a damper on my day.

Also, an interesting correlation was observed. All year, I've noticed a weird and annoying new symptom: when I eat a meat of any serious size, my nose runs. I've been attributing that as a COVID side-effect, since it started shortly after my second bout, at the beginning of the year, but of course that's also not too long after I started Ozempic.

Last night, before the guts turned inside-out, my nose went completely haywire. Stuffed up and running like a gusher. I had to take a shot of Afrin to get any sleep.

So now I'm starting to suspect that the nasal symptom is an Ozempic thing somehow. (Waves hands and mutters, "something-something-vagus-nerve".) It's not a major problem, but it is an ongoing annoyance, and seems to get bad proportionally to how much I have eaten.

Anyway: moral of the story is, don't do that. I'm going to need to watch how much I eat when I get a fabulous meal like that. The Ozempic lets me stop when I should, but it doesn't force me to do so -- it just punishes me horribly afterwards.

We're now in Milan, and for our first two evenings (our wedding-anniversary weekend) did the two restaurants that we had made reservations long in advance. They were night-and-day different, so it's worth a bit of compare-and-contrast.

For the night we arrived, we had gone for Langosteria Cucina. By the numbers, this looked to be kinda similar to Ristorante Benso, which I talked about in my Bologna writeup -- white-tablecloth, seafood-oriented, fairly creative.

tl;dr -- it failed us in nearly every way.

To begin with, the service was more pretentious than effective. To give them credit, there were lots of servers, they were prompt and effective, and our primary waiter in particular did a completely solid job.

But seriously: when we walked in and gave our name, they simply said that no, we didn't have a reservation -- maybe we were at the wrong restaurant? I showed them our confirmation, and they said that no, no, I obviously hadn't clicked on the button to confirm the reservation. I told them three times that yes, I had absolutely done so, and finally spelled out my last name letter-by-letter, only for them to find that oh yes, I'd had a reservation all along.

I mean, seriously -- how in heaven's name was "how do you spell that?" not the first question when it didn't come up immediately? It's not unusual for maitres d' to fail to understand how to spell my last name, and anyone of any quality always asks that next. So that set a poor tone to begin with.

The menu was a little challenging for Kate -- she doesn't love shellfish, and most dishes had some involved, but we knew that that going to be a bit iffy going in. (On the plus side, she had the tuna cheeks as her appetizer, and those were the one truly excellent aspect of the meal: innovative and delicious.)

But we saw the catch of the day menu, which included a sea bass dish that sounded excellent and several others that appealed to her, so she resolved to order one of those while I ordered some fish that, yes, had shellfish in the sauce.

That plan sounded great, until we tried to order it -- and discovered that they will only sell the catch of the day as a whole fish. At 130 Euros per kilo. And the smallest fish they had was 1.5 kilos. We were incredulous: who in god's name only sells fish in what, even after preparation, must be a pound-and-a-half serving? (Yes, steakhouses do the same thing -- but you can take leftover rare porterhouse home, re-sear it, and get excellent leftovers. Fish leftovers aren't a thing.)

So she settled on one of the few plain fish dishes on the main menu that she could eat (the rare tuna steak), which was fine but boring. Similarly, my dish (basically Italian cod) was moderately flavorful but utterly dull.

As a minor note, but in keeping with the rest: they forgot my cocktail to go with my main -- I gather that the order was put in, but nobody thought to deliver it. Which, fine -- at most restaurants I would just shrug and not worry about it. But this place is trying to project truly high-end dining, and you do not ever make that kind of service mistake at a truly high-end restaurant. The whole point of high-end is impeccable service.

And of course, the whole thing was stupidly expensive, which forced the obvious comparison. It cost us nearly twice as much as Ristorante Benso, for a similar concept, was far less creative, with service that was relentlessly pretentious but not actually nearly as good as the charming folks at Benso.

Towards the end of dinner, we wound up chatting with the German couple sitting next to us, who had seemed a bit dour throughout the meal. It turned out that he had been to one of their restaurants once before, and had the same experience of it being ridiculously expensive, pretentious, and not very good. He was grumpy because he was kicking himself for having forgotten his intention never to come back.

(And they had exactly the same experience as us with the catch of the day, but pushed it harder, demanding to see this insanely expensive fish and getting into it with the waiter because even for two people that was far too much food, and how the hell did they think it made any sense to insist you had to eat an entire, enormous, expensive fish? Frankly, the humor of that shared suffering at the end was the high point of the evening.)

So while I don't often bother writing negative restaurant reviews, I'll make an exception here. Langosteria gets a hard "avoid at all costs": the service is snooty rather than good, the food is much less interesting than it sounds, and it costs vastly more than it is worth. It's a "show off your money" restaurant, not a good one.

On the opposite end, tonight's dinner was at Yapa. And I won't hide the hard reality: we wound up paying even more than at Langosteria. But that's kind of the thing: Langosteria was wildly overpriced at 200 Euros or so; Yapa was worth every penny at half again that much.

To be clear, that's the high end of the cost at Yapa -- we decided that the whole menu was intriguing enough that we opted into the eight-course tasting menu, which was a lot of food, and we had a bunch of drinks to go with, so we probably ate something like twice as much there as we had at Langosteria. And man, it was all so good.

Yapa is something I don't think I've ever encountered before (and I'm not sure why not): South American Fusion. You see Asian Fusion all the time nowadays: take the flavors of Asia, mix them with a lot of creativity, and you can get something great if it's handled with skill. This is the same thing, but leaning into the cuisines of South America, with lots of corn and avacado and chile and so much more.

The food was all sorts of things. My personal favorite was the ceviche with tiger's milk and several other elements, served with both plantain and corn chips -- lots of different flavors to combine in a wide variety of ways. But there was also the Elote -- Mexican street corn on the cob with a rich sauce drizzled on and a chile rub of some sort -- the robustly seasoned and perfectly cooked lamb chops, served with a slightly dangerous hot sauce and a more delicate mayo on the side, the dessert of pears with a pear granita and a delicate crumble, and the final bite, a spoonful of lovely sweet cream with a chocolate crumble on top. And so much more -- really, I ate too much, but it was impossible to pass anything up. (Kate just can't cope with octopus, so she simply skipped that course, so I kinda had to have half of hers because it was delish.)

Plus it's worth mentioning the cocktail menu, which is every bit as innovative and fun, from the Paloma Muerte (black as night, with a savory saline edge) to the Mexican-spiced Espresso Martini.

And the service was exactly what was lacking last night: effusively friendly instead of snooty, chatty (we were at the chef's counter) without being intrusive, efficient while never feeling rushed.

We're going to sleep on it, but may well give Yapa our highest possible praise: go back again on the last night of our vacation, to try some of the items on the a la carte menu that weren't on the tasting menu. (I'm kind of dying to try what appeared to be squash-blossom-filled tortillas that they kept making in front of us.)

We can never remember whether our anniversary is the 27th or 28th, but this year it's officially going to be counted on the 28th because that was the meal that was worth calling our anniversary dinner.

So Yapa gets a full-throated five-star review. It's not cheap, but it was the best meal of our vacation (beating out the fully-excellent ones we had at Parlor and Benso in Bologna) -- if you find yourself in Milan, and can afford a great dinner, this is the place to go.

I'm mostly keeping this impressionistic instead of diaristic, but dinner the past couple of nights has been good enough that it's worth a couple of briefs reviews and kudos.

On the one hand, last night we went to Parlor. This one focuses on atmosphere and attitude -- looking at their homepage, it projects sophisticated casual, and that was definitely accurate: moderately high-end but not at all stuffy.

The food was innovative to the point of startling, though. Both of our Primi were great -- Kate's pasta was in a light crema, with salmon and roe, and mine was a fusilloni in a ragu of octopus and 'nduja (flavorful with a great bite from the 'nduja). After that, I was fairly sure the Secondo that we split would be relatively boring, but it was anything but: it was venison with endive and, no shit, an onion granita. (Imagine a powerfully onion-flavored sherbet and you're getting into the ballpark.) It was weird as hell, but paired beautifully with the meat, and might turn out to be the standout dish of the entire vacation.

Slight ding for the fact that our waitress' English wasn't great (I think she was also newer, and slightly scattered), which made things slightly challenging here and there, but that's a small detail.

Tonight was a rather different feel. Ristorante Benso is more traditionally white tablecloth; we sat outside (the weather is lovely), so didn't experience the full luxe experience, but the vibe is classically high-end, with service to match.

The food isn't quite as wild as that at Parlor, but still excellent. We started with Kate getting a couple of shrimp (just to compare the red and purple shrimp that they offered), while I got a plate of beautifully-prepared grilled octopus. For mains, I got the Spoja Lorda, tiny riccota/anchovy ravioli in a turnip green pesto (absolutely delish) and tiny baby squid, while she went for the classic Tagliatella al Ragu. Everything was a delight: a sophisticated city dinner in a quiet little Bologna alley.

I'm slightly concerned that it wasn't very busy, which I think is because of location -- it's in the middle of the old Jewish ghetto, and there is nothing on that block: you have to know to turn down this street to find it. (I discovered it by accident our first afternoon in Bologna, when I was wandering somewhat aimlessly and the menu caught my eye.) It's near the student quarter, but this is very much not a student restaurant, and it's impossible to drive within a few blocks of it. (Part of the motivation for this post is to link to it and help build wordfame: folks need to be looking for it.)

Anyway, both places get a big thumbs-up from me. If you find yourself in Bologna, I highly recommend checking them out!

(CW: alcohol)

As many of my friends know, I am an Amaro Nerd. My booze collection contains more amari than most bars, and indeed more than the typical liquor store.

(I concluded some years back that I am very slightly OCD, which I channel in specific ways. One of them is allowing myself to get horribly completist about a few things, one of which is amari. This is slightly controlled by the rule that Kate has imposed: before buying a new bottle, I'm required to finish something, lest the collection completely take over the basement.)

For those who are going, "Okay, what the hell are you talking about?" -- Amaro is a ridiculously over-broad category of spirits that is particularly ill-defined; it is almost "everything that doesn't have a better name". Italy is the heart of amari, although there are plenty native to the US (Malort is, god help us, pretty clearly a terrifying variant of amaro) and lots that basically fit under that term in many countries of Europe.

They tend to be more bitter than other drinks. (Although not always.) They tend not to be very sweet. (Although some are fairly sweet.) They often involve herbal flavors, and often spices. Some are very strong (up to 100+ proof); others are basically just infused wines. There's a lot of "you know it when you taste it" involved, but really -- if it doesn't fall into another category of booze, there's a decent chance that it qualifies.

Anyway...

During the food tour the other night, I asked about regional amari, and our tour guide recommended that I try Blu. I didn't try it that night, but looking it up, I discovered that the makers were only about a mile from where we are staying in Bologna. So while Kate had a sit-down this afternoon, I wandered over there.

It turns out that Gothi Spiriti Nobili basically operate out of a local bar -- I walked right on past them before re-checking the address and doubling back. They have a whole line of spirits, so I sat down and ordered several. (Hence my burbliness this evening -- I get talkative when tipsy.) Let's review.

Blu is practically unique -- a Scotch-based amaro, which is something I've never come across before. It's a gentle and refined sipper, which lets the Scotch shine through (highland-style, not much smoke or peat), with a hint of anise from absinthe, and a slight salinity from using seawater in the blend. (This is apparently a hallmark of Gothi.)
Settemezzo is an artichoke-based digestif (don't be shocked -- artichoke is a fairly common basis for amari), again pretty refined rather than overpowering in the way many German digestifs run. (Or punch-you-in-the-face licorice like an anisette.) Also a fine sipper, although I wish I'd ordered it straight up instead of on the rocks, which diluted its flavor too much.
Bitter Allko is roughly in the Campari category, with the characteristic bright red warning-sign color, but better straight than Campari or indeed most of that category. Citrusy, peppery -- not as refined, but slightly sweeter and stronger in flavor, possibly my favorite of the bunch.
Towards the end, I got into a conversation with the brewmaster's brother, and he encouraged me to try a taste of the Drai Vermouth, which is just plain hard to described. It's grapefruit-based, leaning more heavily into the characteristic salinity with both seawater and capers -- I'm not sure I'd want to drink a glass of it straight, but it would make for some fascinating cocktails.

Overall, delightful stuff. They do apparently import to the US via Oliver McCrum Wines and Spirits in California; I may have to chat with Ball Square Fine Wines and encourage them to check it out...

One thing I've been noticing on our current trip is the different assumptions about how a bed gets covered.

In the US, you typically have (bottom to top):

Boxspring
Mattress
Fitted bottom sheet
Top sheet
Blanket
Quilt

The three top layers are optional, and you use whatever makes sense for the weather.

In Europe (at least, most of the places I've traveled, both hotels and AirBnBs/VRBOs), the custom seems to typically be to just have a duvet on top, and that keeps throwing me for a loop.

I mean, I kind of understand the appeal: when I was growing up, I invariably just used a quilt, year-round. I didn't learn The Way of the Hospital Corner until after getting married.

But I'm coming to the opinion that I like the American norm better, because it's more modular. In winter, I'll have all three pulled up; in summer, I'll just be using the top sheet. Right now on our trip, I'm finding the duvet typically just a little bit warmer than I want, at least during part of the night.

No idea whether I'm typical or weird this way, but the difference has been catching my attention.

(Tangent: posts of more than 500 characters are going here, but short microblog-length entries about our vacation are going on my Mastodon, using the same #europe2024 tag as here.)

We're currently on to Bologna in our vacation, having arrived last night.

Getting from Bologna Airport to the center of town via taxi sounds like a good idea. But not so much when:

There's been recent serious flooding;
There turns out to be a major ceramics festival in town (we had no idea), so there are tons of tourists arriving; and
There is a major taxi strike this evening.

We spent 10-15 minutes in the immensely long queue waiting for taxis, with none apparently arriving, before noticing the eensy-weensy hand-written sign near the front saying "taxi strike". And of course Uber was completely useless, since everyone was trying to use it to get around the strike.

Thank heavens our AirBnB hosts graciously came and rescued us from the Bologna Central train station -- we had managed to find our way there via the monorail, but we weren't looking forward to dragging our luggage a fair walk to find the bus.

Anyway...

Tonight was a food tour that we had scheduled. Suffice it to say, Delicious Bologna know their stuff, and it was a hoot, getting to try lots of local fare (including real Mortadella, with a talk on how it compares with the stuff we find at home, and the weird but delightful Ciccioli), get introduced to Lambrusco in its genuine non-sucky form, try the weird but wonderful local spinach-based green lasanga and tortollini in brodo, and finish off with gelato (me being me, I went for a combination of the Coffee with Sambucca and Beer flavors).

He was also careful to show us all of the important tourist sites and fill us in on the major history and legends, including the battle between the city and the Vatican over their overly-large cathedral (it is apparently now a point of pride that, many centuries later, the thing is never going to be finished), and the controversy around Neptune's penis. European history is just weirder and more fun than American sometimes.

The whole thing was a blast, and it was lots of fun chatting with folks in the tour group, who were from all over (three of us from the US, plus a couple of guys from Ireland, a woman from Australia, a guy from Paris, a couple from Vancouver, and so on). Highly recommended.

Of course, I took the opportunity to inquire about local Amari, because, y'know, Amaro geek here, and was directed to a lovely bar, Camera a Sud. (Where our tour guide eventually wound up taking a seat at the bar a while after we arrived, which helped solidify the sincerity of the recommendation.)

Tonight's exploration: Amaro Salento Amarissimo. Intense, solidly bitter, with a strong anise edge. (In general, I get the sense that they aren't afraid of anise flavor in these parts.) Good stuff, although the anise is probably a bit more than I would usually go for. We're likely to return to Camera a Sud -- they had several other local Amari I need to try, including the intriguing scotch-based Blu.

On the weirder and more commercial side: I happened to stop in a nearby grocery store this afternoon, and just for giggles picked up a bottle of Amaro China from, no kidding, Martini. (The people who make the ubiquitous adequate-but-not fabulous vermouths that you can find everywhere in the States.) And y'know -- it's actually not bad. It's ridiculously cheap (under 10 Euros per bottle), and I've had far worse. I wouldn't say it's great amaro, but it's entirely acceptable, and far better than some of the crap I find at home; in terms of bang for the buck it's really quite impressive. So I may see whether it can be obtained at home.

Also in terms of beverages: it's wonderful being in a country where not only is Sanbitter quite cheap, but there are lots of similarly-inexpensive competitors. (I wound up picking up a ten-pack of the official Campari and Soda.) But I do still miss Spain's Bitter Kas, which is quite similar, even cheaper, and doesn't involve nearly as much glass waste.

We'll see where we go next: we now have a couple of unscheduled days to eat our way across Bologna and hopefully not get squashed flat by the tourists here for the ceramics festival.

So... we're in Copenhagen.

For this year's big vacation, we decided to return to Italy. We first went for our honeymoon in 2013, and had been clear that we wanted to go back; COVID delayed that by a few years, but we figured this was the year.

When trying to figure out the flights, Kate found that the best option to get to Bologna seemed to be SAS. Which connects via Copenhagen. Which has always been on her bucket list.

So... four days in Copenhagen.

As usual for my vacations, my posts on the subject will be more impressionistic than chronological, talking about subjects that caught my eye. And that being the case, we'll talk about the more distinctively obvious thing about the city...

Bicycles.

All the bicycles.

So many bicycles.

Somerville likes to talk about turning itself into a bike-friendly town, and I never really understood what that might look like until now.

The tourist destinations here sometimes say that the best way to get somewhere is the way the locals do, on a bike. They're not kidding -- everybody bikes here, it seems.

At least in these parts (we've mostly been in the areas within a mile or two of the city center, in various directions), nearly every street has a dedicated bike lane (frequently one in each direction), often quite busy. It feels almost a little weird being pedestrians here. (Kate can't really bike, due to the problems with her arms.)

Most dramatically, there are surprisingly few cars in the city. I was really struck by rush hour, where, yes, there are significantly more cars than the rest of the day -- but far fewer than you see at home at a quiet time of day. And at pretty much any hour, there appear to be 3-10 times as many bikes on the road as there are cars.

An amusing twist: many people, instead of riding a conventional bicycle, pedal a trike: one wheel in the back, two in front, with a big optionally-covered compartment in the front. My best guess is that these were originally intended for kids or groceries, but I've seen a surprisingly large number of couples, one of them pedaling and the other in the seat up front, with their knees pulled up so they will fit. (I actually think I've seen that more than I've seen kids in them: these are considerably larger than the bike add-ons for kids you sometimes see back home.)

Overall, I quite approve, although it does have its drawbacks. In particular, people need to park all those bikes, and there are nowhere near enough bike racks in many locations. So in practice, there are a lot of places where the sidewalk has been turned into a semi-formal bike rack -- leaving nowhere for us pedestrians to walk.

(Not really a crisis, mind -- we wind up stepping into the bike lane to get around the parked bikes. But it's a bit of a nuisance.)

Anyway: if you like to bicycle, this is a city for you. It's relatively flat, enormously bike-centric, and about the right size to get around on bike, with the various attractions typically a couple of miles from each other. By the same light, it's not quite as trivially walkable as some places (Kate and I have been walking 10-15 miles a day), but I suspect it would be pretty straightforward if we just swallowed our pride and used the Metro more.

Got back from Pennsic on Sunday -- there may be some diary entries about it over time. Suffice it to say, despite sub-optimal weather, it was a generally good time.

(And no, Hurricane Debby wasn't relevant. A lot of folks cut and ran before the remnants got to us, but it was basically a non-event for those of us who stuck it out: something like a tenth of an inch of rain, and no wind to speak of. The serious storm was War Week Tuesday, several days before that -- we got slammed by something like an inch of rain, including some torrential downpours. Blochleven was largely fine -- we have good drainage so it was just a bit muddy -- but some of the Serengeti was underwater. But I digress...)

The day worth mentioning, though, was Middle Friday, when I got to the War.

I was pretty stressed-out to begin with: the predictions for the day said it might rain, so I arrived in a mild panic, getting my pavilion set up as quickly as possible, and all that probably didn't help.

Still and all, once I was fully settled in at around 2pm, I was a bit surprised to notice that I was feeling noticeably faint. It's not the first time that's ever happened, but full-on "wow, am I in danger of passing out?" faintness -- that's pretty new.

I figured I was probably a bit dehydrated, so I pushed liquids hard over the next few hours -- something like a quart of water, a pint of tea, a pint of Gatorade, around half a gallon total. Still, by 5pm I was wandering around Downtown Pennsic and still having distinct "whiteout" moments: never quite feeling like I was going to keel over, but definitely less steady than I should be. And my heart rate (according to my watch) was stuck at around 115-120 -- not a scary level, but a fair ways above my baseline 88.

I dithered about it for a fair while: I'm prone to mild hypochondria, and it was just weird -- I'm normally fairly decent with moderate heat during the day. (I require cool to sleep, but I commonly let my work space get to the mid-80s.) But after the fourth or fifth go-round of feeling faint, I let my feet lead me into the EMT building.

The Pennsic EMTs were solidly friendly and professional throughout -- kudos to them. They noted everything I was saying, brought me into one of their improvised wards, and ran a battery of tests. The EKG was fine (always comforting), but the heartrate was indeed elevated. Most significantly, my blood pressure had crashed to 87/52 lying down.

(Yes, I have a lot of friends to whom that's a normal Tuesday. But it's the lowest I've ever seen in myself, a good ten points below what I normally think of as my "yay!" normal, and explained the faintness nicely.)

Their very-reasonable conclusion was that, despite my attempts at oral hydration, I was pretty dehydrated. We chatted about it, agreed to put in an IV, and over the next hour they proceeded to shove a solid two liters of saline into me before my BP and heart rate got back into the normal range.

So my Pennsic was spent pushing liquids hard, maybe more than I've ever done before. That was generally fine, aside from the need to get up and pee once or twice every night. (Which is significantly less convenient when it involves getting up, putting on shoes, untying the pavilion, and walking 30-40 yards in the dark to the porta-potty.) But I think that's my new normal when I'm out in continuous heat.

The EMTs were specifically unsurprised by this: I wasn't the first person they had seen reporting hydration challenges after starting Ozempic.

So the moral of the story is that this seems to just be a semi-common side-effect of the stuff. It isn't so severe as to turn me off of it (I was basically fine for the rest of the War, once I got super-serious about drinking water at every opportunity), but it's worth being aware of if you're on it or considering it.

In the wake of this weekend's Board meeting to approve the East's variance to try out a Rapier Crown (yay!), I heard lots of reports about Board members saying that this change would damage the SCA's "brand".

Such nonsense deserves some attention.

Let's be clear here: the SCA's public image has never been that focused on armored combat. Yes, the cover photo of publicity tends to be some dude in armor, because it's weird and flashy, and the media like weird and flashy. But scratch just the tiniest bit beneath the surface, and all decent publicity about the Society focuses primarily on the people, and the many different activities we do.

That's always been true. My first personal experience with publicizing the SCA was a fairly long TV segment Carolingia did back around 1984. Yes, there was a brief bit of fighting -- but there was more music, and dance, and calligraphy, and mainly a focus on the way that this is something that reasonably normal people do in their spare time. It was pretty great publicity, frankly -- truthful and sympathetic, exactly the sort of thing we want.

This really cuts to the essence of the argument. Brands aren't just a picture: a good brand is a statement of who you are, and what you mean. Heavy list isn't the brand of the SCA -- it's just one facet.

What the SCA's brand should be focused on is diversity.

Seriously, that's what we're about, and it always has been. I don't just mean diversity of demographics in our membership (which heaven knows is still a work in progress, that we need to keep improving) -- I mean diversity of viewpoint, activity, and focus.

Diversity of activity has always been what distinguishes the Society from re-enactors. We don't focus narrowly and precisely on a specific time and place. Just the opposite: we are (as it's popularly put these days) three hundred hobbies in a trench coat, covering just about everything that everyone did before 1600. That's always really been the spirit of the club, even before the Board finally knuckled under and recognized it officially, by broadening our scope in the rules some years back.

That is the brand we should be leaning into -- it represents us more truthfully, and frankly it's more appealing to our target audience. Most of the younger new folks I talk to nowadays are somewhat uncomfortable with the excessive focus on "dude in armor": that brand isn't just inaccurate, it's probably hurting us in recruiting, precisely because it over-focuses on an aspect that only a fraction of our target market are looking for. The chance to dive deep into lots of different things, all of which are valued -- that's what makes us look cool and fun.

So let's please not tolerate this "heavy list Crown is our brand" bullshit. The notion that armored combatants fighting for the Crown is our "brand" is not true now, it's never really been true, and insofar as we claim it, we're mostly doing ourselves damage inside and out.

Our "brand" should be diversity -- that is both honest and positive, and it's a brand that makes us better.

Time to bring The Review of Obscure Books out for once -- this one's definitely less-known. I picked up The Short While some time back (I probably backed the Kickstarter). I got around to finishing it tonight, so let's give it a look.

tl;dr -- quiet, personal-scale speculative fiction, less about the "science" and more about how people and cultures evolve. Not exactly gripping, but quite good.

This is a pretty big graphic novel, well over 400 pages, and doesn't follow simple conventions. It's not all comic-book style -- much of the book is more illustrated text, interspersed with straight-up comics, as fits the story of the moment.

It's very, very personal. It's the story of Paolo and Colin, who enjoy a sweet, loving relationship until the day that tears them apart, following their story both before and after.

It's set in the future, although how far isn't at all clear, nor very relevant. (I'd say at least fifty years, but beyond that it's hard to say.) Thirty years ago, the Administration, a somewhat brutal totalitarian regime, finally fell. Since then, people have been slowly figuring out how to put the pieces back together.

This isn't a "post-apocalyptic" story -- it's not interested in being anywhere near that melodramatic. It's clear that a lot of people have died, the weather isn't great, and the technical underpinnings of our current time have largely decayed, but it's by no means a hellscape. Folks are filling into the buildings that are left, and figuring out where to rebuild; they're repurposing the leftover tech, including taking old sexbots and putting them to better uses. Communities rise and fall, not because of cataclysmic drama but just because People.

That's the world that Paolo and Colin live in, and there's nothing all that weird or bad about it to them -- it's just life. The story is more about their relationship; both of them somewhat complicated men, but whose love works until trauma finally drives a wedge in between them.

The story is told quite elliptically, often taking a detour of a dozen pages to talk about their youths, or their parents' history, or their other lovers, or the backstory of the past decades. It's less like a carefully-constructed novel, more a story being told about some friends, filling in the relevant details as they come up.

It's a very good book. One of the pull quotes calls it a "thriller", and I don't agree -- while that key moment is a bit horrifying (and the trauma of it recurs through the story), this is a much more contemplative story than that word implies.

The world-building is fascinating -- really not very interested in fancy science, more about how people pull together and rebuild after things somewhat break down. The most interesting ideas are mainly about culture, reminding us of how complicated that always is, never falling into neat boxes. (Even the nasty Administration gets rather more nuanced as we learn more about it.)

It's a smart novel, and it expects a lot of the reader: there are a lot of characters and a lot of backstory, not all of it spelled out explicitly, but it makes sense as the story wends its way down the months and years.

Obviously, heavy on the queer content -- our protagonists are gay, and the majority of the other folks they spend time with are as well. That's not even remarkable here: queer phobias seem to have taken a back seat in this future culture.

The main content warning is for physical violence (the trauma at the center of the tale); there's also a bunch of implied horrors in the backstory, albeit mostly at a remove from our main characters. This is a world pulling itself together after some very bad times, but those times still resonate.

Overall, worth reading if you'd like something quiet and thoughtful -- notionally science fiction, but about the people far more than the gadgets.

Remember that "Best Graphic Novels of 2023" that put me on to Shubeik Lubeik? It also introduced me to Bea Wolf. (I'm now really wishing I'd kept the URL, because I probably should look up more books from it.)

tl;dr -- it's... let's say a full-length filk of Beowulf, about kids, candy, and the monster forcing them to grow up. It is glorious.

I mean, let's put it this way: when the pull quotes on the cover of a kids' book are from Lemony Snicket and Neil Gaiman, you know you've done something right. Let's talk about it.

If this was just a parody of Beowulf, it might be cute but nothing more. But this is way, way more ambitious.

This tells the story of Treeheart, mighty treehouse guided by a line of kid-kings, doling delicious treats to their followers in party, during the dark times when this high castle is besieged by Grindle, a grown-up whose touch confers age, turning kids into teenagers or (shudder) accountants. All seems lost until the arrival of the sea-warrior Bea Wolf and her band of fierce followers.

To give a sense of the book, here's a completely random page from Fitt 3, the moment when Mister Grindle slams through the door:

He shot his black shoe, shattering the door!
Sorrow came in tube socks, swan-white, knee-high!

Kids raised battle-gear, red balloons, ripe with water,
readying war shields, swamp-wet spitballs, acorns winter-hard.

It's all that great. Not only is it following the plot of Beowulf, beat by beat, it sounds like Beowulf. It's impossible to read the book without at least declaiming it softly under your breath, and it feels so good to do so. (I may have to bring it to Storytellers' Guild practice for a reading or two -- it's not period, but it feels period in a way that few SCA compositions achieve.)

Moreover, it's not just text. It's a big hardcover, not quite a comic book per se, but with each page richly illustrated by legendary French cartoonist Boulet, and the pictures capture the darkness, drama, and sheer wonderful silliness of the story, all at once.

(It's abridged, just going through the defeat of Grindle -- it alludes to Mother Grindle, but sensibly stops before going there.)

Really, it's not worth belaboring the point beyond saying: get a copy. If you are an SCA parent of small children, you must get a copy -- if I was the sort to have had kids, this is the book that I would want to be reading to and with them. It's fun, dramatic, and ever-so-relatable. (And even includes an afterword by the author, written largely for the kids, explaining what Beowulf is and the ways in which this text is and isn't faithful to the style of the original.)

Highest recommendation: while it's nowhere near as serious and real-world-related as the stuff I tend to favor, it's absolutely one of the best books I've read in the past few years, and I think it's going to shove a slightly-lesser work or two off of The Shelf.

(CW for diet, weight loss, health and that sort of thing.)

It occurs to me that it's been six months or so, and I should give an update about what it's been like.

The headline is that it's working more or less as expected. It's not a miracle weight-loss drug that sends me right down to my perfect weight forever, but it's been a net positive for my health so far.

As previously mentioned, I found withdrawal from Ozempic to be startlingly hard for even a couple of days, so I've been following my schedule pretty religiously: every Monday morning, without fail. I'm still pondering how I want to play Pennsic. (Where refrigeration is a bit complicated, so I can't just casually grab the injector pen and go the way I do with most vacations.)

Over time, the effects have evened out. The initial "meh, I don't really need food" has died off as I've gotten used to it. But it still has the key effect: it's just rather easier to not overdo it. It's not that I'm not eating, or even that I don't occasionally over-indulge. Rather, it's just a bit easier to portion-control, it's a bit easier to eat a little healthier, it's easier to cut off the over-indulgences earlier.

Put it together and it's not like I'm only eating half what I was before. But I probably am eating 80% as much, slightly better balanced, and that's not a minor detail.

The weight hasn't melted off, but I seem to have stabilized around 10-15 pounds down from where I was to begin with. That's less weight loss than I was hoping, but again -- not nothing. I'm probably around the same weight I was 15 years ago: kinda fat, but not as fat.

More importantly, my health has improved markedly. I was mildly diabetic to begin with; now I'm at the lower edge of the borderline range, for the first time in something like 15 years. (About 1.0 down in my A1C levels.) That's a very big deal. My cardio health feels better, stairs don't bother me so much, I'm a little more able to dance again -- in general, it's good. Fingers crossed, the lost weight will help prevent the stress fracture I got in my foot at ESCape two years ago.

No obvious negatives: I haven't yet had any serious nausea, and the constipation went away before long. The weekly shot is a mild nuisance, but less so than most of my daily meds once I got the hang of how to use the injector. Knock on wood, my doctor's pharmacy still seems to be sourcing it without difficulty. (Unlike CVS, who I am steadily moving away from entirely due to their ongoing institutional incompetence.)

The only possible side-effect I've noticed is a worrying reflux issue. That's not entirely new (I've had heartburn issues my entire adult life), but this is a new and concerningly persistent laryngeal reflux that has me a bit nervous -- even a heavy Omeprazole regimen isn't entirely stopping it. Now, that may be entirely unrelated to the Ozempic -- I had a previous bout last year, before starting the Ozempic, and the thing that both rounds really have in common is that they were post-Covid, so that might actually be the trigger. But I'm keeping an eye on it, and trying to get more yogurt and stuff into my life, to improve my gut flora.

Most important: I'm still on a minimum Ozempic dose, and it's been quite beneficial. I might eventually raise it, to knock off another 10 pounds and actually get out of the diabetic range entirely, but I'm in no rush -- this is a game of adjusting the long-term, not a crash diet.

So yeah -- the stuff still seems to be the perfect capitalist-age medicine: very useful, works as advertised, but you have to keep paying them tons of money every month. Use with caution -- I do recommend starting slow if you can do so -- and there's clearly a lot of YMMV. But it doesn't seem to be snake oil, and knock on wood, it's done me considerable benefit so far.

(NB: this is about the real Avatar: The Last Airbender, not the recent remake that I haven't yet heard any good reason to watch.)

Just about a year ago, I finished watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which is a fair candidate for my favorite animated series of all time. In the wake of that, I asked around about what to watch next, and one of my friends suggested, "Maybe Legend of Korra?"

I started watching that as my filler show (what I watch a few minutes at a time, to fill in the rest of my exercise time after the main show runs out -- that's currently Clone Wars). Around when I started getting into it, I finally realized that it's specifically a sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender, but in for a penny, in for a pound: wouldn't be the first time I've watched stuff out of order.

So after watching my way through Korra and then Avatar, I finished the latter a few days ago. Time for a retrospective and review.

(Note: both shows are available on Netflix. You want the animated Avatar, not the live-action remake.)

tl;dr -- both excellent, but more different than I might have expected.

For those who, like me, have been living in a cave for the past decade, let's do an overview of the structure of both stories.

First up (both chronologically and in the order they came out) is Avatar.

The story is kinda-sorta high fantasy, but instead of being set in a fantasy version of medieval Europe, it's set in a fantasy version of 19th century Asia. The opening narration for each episode sums the setting up well, so let's just quote that:

"Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the Avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed him most, he vanished. A hundred years passed and my brother and I discovered the new Avatar, an airbender named Aang. And although his airbending skills are great, he has a lot to learn before he's ready to save anyone. But I believe Aang can save the world."

In this world, each nation is built around one of the classical elements; among each nation, there are "benders" who command the powers of that element. (If you think super-powers, you're not far off.)

The nations aren't based directly on real ones, but the influences aren't subtle:

The Earth Kingdom is roughly Imperial China: huge, populous, notionally governed by a powerful Emperor but really run by a powerful and all-pervasive bureaucracy.
The Fire Nation resembles late Imperial Japan: aggressive in its conquests, much more technologically focused than the rest.
The Water Tribe are a bit less precise, but generally resemble northern indiginous peoples, leaning relatively peaceful, broken into smaller groupings that are happy to do their own thing.
And the Air Tribe are pretty clearly Buddhist monks, right down to the shaven heads and pacifist philosophies.

The Avatar can, in theory, command all four elements, as well as commune with the spirits and call on The Avatar State that pushes all of this to 11. But Aang is very young, and knows nothing of the other three elements.

The stucture is pure epic fantasy. Early in the story, it is made clear that there is a great doom coming to the land: at the end of the summer, the powers of the Firelord, who has already conquered much of the world, will be at their zenith, allowing him to rain death and destruction on everyone. It is up to Aang, Katara, Sokka (the latter two are the sister and brother who found Aang) and Toph (the rebellious daughter of rich Earth nobility, blind but preternaturally talented in earth-bending) -- a quartet of youngsters -- to figure out how to save the world before that happens.

Chasing them is Prince Zuko, the driven and more than slightly abused son of the Firelord, who is convinced that the only way to redeem his personal honor is to capture the Avatar for his father. He is by no means the only antagonist in the story, but he's the lead one for much of it.

The entire series (three seasons of about 20 episodes each) takes place over those months. Along the way, they make lots of allies, hatch plans, have some victories and a lot of defeats, learn a lot more about how the world works, and get a lot of character growth. It's no surprise that the story builds to a final showdown, in which they need to square off against the bad guys to save the world.

Legend of Korra is a sequel, but a fairly distant one -- set in the same world, but around 70 years later. Where Avatar's culture and tech level are vaguely 1860ish (with some vaguely steampunk touches), Korra's are vaguely 1920ish (with some vaguely steampunk touches).

The world has moved on, in many ways. It is largely at peace, but that doesn't mean all is happiness and light: there are lots of cultural and political discontents, and the series tends to center on those. The story largely takes place in Republic City, a new city built specifically as a crossroads and democratic neutral ground between the four traditional nations.

Korra is the next Avatar, born upon Aang's death, and is now somewhere around 17. As is the natural cycle, she was born a waterbender, and has some skill at the other disciplines but still needs to master airbending. She winds up at the Air Temple that is run by Aang's (now middle-aged) son, surrounded by the family that are still the last of the airbenders.

She begins to accumulate her own group of friends, all around her own age: the rising stars of sport bending Mako and Bolin, and industrialist heir (and no slouch in a fight) Asami.

Over the course of four seasons, they take on a series of challenges to the peaceful social order; along the way, they grow from teens into young adults, finding that those challenges are sometimes harder than the fights against the bad guys.

It's important to emphasize: for stories that are so closely related, these are very different series. I know a bunch of people who loved Avatar but hated Korra, and that's fair -- especially if you go in expecting a similar vibe, you're going to be disappointed. I liked both a lot, but it's worth talking about the differences.

First of all and most obvious, there's the age difference. Avatar's protagonists are young: I don't know the official ages, but I would place Toph, Aang, Katara and Sokka at roughly 12-15 respectively. They're kids who are starting to grow up and learning the hard basic lessons. It's a story of first love for several of them, and there's no small amount of pubescent awkwardness playing out here. But the story also has a real undercurrent of innocense as well, helped by that young idealism.

By contrast, Korra is a story of young adults finding their way in the world. All four are at the age where they are starting to deal with figuring out what they want to be when they grow up, and the story takes place over a much longer span -- several years, not just a few months. The relationships are complicated and messy: less first-kiss, more navigating one's first serious love triangle. There's a bit less innocense and somewhat more anger and frustration, broken trust and figuring out what they really care about in both friends and partners.

(Plus the one big content warning: there's a fairly serious PTSD story in the later part of the series, which makes for a distinctly darker shade than anything before then.)

Avatar's character arcs are simpler and more straightforward, due to the tightness of the story and the ages. And interestingly, the standout character from the whole double-series when it comes to arc is Prince Zuko: a bit older than the kids and deeply tortured, he's nowhere near as one-dimensional as most of the villains in Korra -- he's trying very hard to figure out who he is (as opposed to what everyone else wants him to be), and he turns out to be a major linchpin of the story.

Structurally, the stories are completely different. Avatar is one epic novel, taking place in a fairly short period of time, whereas each season of Korra is a distinct story, with its own beginning, middle and end.

One of the most interesting structural differences is in the nature of the enemy. Avatar's is pure epic fantasy: the Firelord is the Big Bad, who wants to conquer most of the world and burn the rest -- he's almost pure evil, a basic Sauron cognate.

What few people seem to notice about Korra, by contrast, is that it is a meditation on the nature of political power, greed and fanaticism:

Season one is dealing with what at least appears to be a classic proletarian revolution. (Which fits nicely with the 1920s-ish setting.)
Season two deals with what amounts to an eco-terrorist who wants to save the environment by conquering the world, and never mind how many people need to die.
Season three's antagonists are a quartet of high-powered benders who are fanatical anarchists, determined to bring down all government.
And finally, season four deals with the rise of a powerful and relatively sincere fascist force, led by a woman who believes that the only way the world can truly know peace is if everyone follows her orders.

That structure isn't belabored, but it's very clear once you notice it. It's intellectually pretty interesting, but doesn't ring quite as powerfully as the simpler fantasy of Avatar.

Korra is also somewhat more interested in taking its time exploring this world. Since it doesn't have a Big Bad lurking over her shoulder every minute the way Avatar does, rather more time is spent on both pure exploring of topics like what the Avatar is, the spirit realm that is alluded to in Avatar (and is far more central in Korra), and navigating the relationships between the characters. (Those don't always go in the obvious directions; personally, I really like the way the core relationships play out in the end.)

Speaking of characters, there is significant crossover between the two shows. Needless to say, most of the characters from Avatar who show up in Korra are much older now (and one of them is a little bit dead), and many of their kids are major players in the second series. Those continuity details generally work well, and the older versions of the characters are generally very plausible 80-something versions of the kids from the original.

By the numbers, Avatar is the better series. The structure is compact and well-designed, the writing is sharp and often very funny, especially in the smaller moments (I finally understand why "My cabbages!" is a meme), the contrast of light and dark crisp while still leaving a good deal of room for you not to be sure who is going to be on which side at the end.

By contrast, Korra is a messier story, probably intentionally. The tone tends a bit more somber, sometimes downright dark. It is joyfully asking "What might this world look like, 70 years on?" and does a great job of world-building on the details dropped in Avatar, but there are moments where the fan service is laid on a tad thick. (One of the weirdness of watching the series out of order was gradually realizing just how much of Korra is specifically name-dropping details from Avatar and carrying them forward -- generally logically, but it gets to be a bit much at times.) I like it quite a lot, but in many ways it feels more real than Avatar does, in ways both good and bad.

I do recommend both, but with the big caveat that it's entirely reasonable to like one a lot more than the other. They share a world, but neither a story nor a tone. Above all, if you watch through Avatar and then start on Korra (I don't recommend emulating me and watching them out of order -- it works, but makes more sense if you watch them chronologically), go in with the understanding that it really is rather different, and be prepared to think of it on its own terms.

And with that, I'll toss out the question again. I adored She-Ra, and liked both Avatar and Korra a lot. Recommendations of what to try next?

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