jducoeur

Kate is visiting her folks this week; so as not to go mad from isolation, I'm doing a lot of social, including a couple of gatherings that I've been saying for years that I want to try out.

Last night was learning a periodish skill that I've never done before, and which I don't hear about much: church bell change ringing.

(Change-ringing patterns per se are probably post-period. But church bells are certainly period, so I suspect at least the basic handling skills go back to then.)

Boston being rather full of old churches, there are a number that still have active bell towers, with anywhere up to a full range of eight bells, and there's a small but active corps of folks who play and teach how to play actively. I've been hearing about it from sorcyress and verdantry for years (and I've learned a bit of "ringing on bodies" -- change ringing with handbells as essentially dance formations -- from Sorcy over the past couple of years), and it's always sounded like fun, so I finally took a Friday evening to get down to the beginners class.

This takes place in the Church of the Advent downtown, and is one of several Bells gatherings that happen in town each week. Last night there were about eight of us, ranging from quite experienced to a couple of us complete newbies, with instruction at various levels.

As a total beginner, last night was the serious basics:

• How to hold the rope. This is very formal, with specific standards on how to hold it, how to adjust your hand-hold, how to safely loop the rope when you have too much of it, and how to (very, very loosely) knot the rope when it isn't in active use.
• Doing a partial "ringing up". Each bells normally sits in the "down" position, with the open part of the bell facing downward, but that's not what you want for active ringing -- it takes way too much effort to actually make a sound. So instead, you pull it, over and over, so that it's swinging further and further each time, until it finally goes all the way around and rests (gently propped) with the opening facing upward, ready to actively go bong.
  Us beginners didn't do this all the way, but we did get to practice it about halfway, to the point where you can "chime" the bell by pausing its swing ever so slightly, so that the clapper hits the inside of the bell.
  (I found chiming surprisingly hard. Ringing the bell up is all about rhythm, and comes pretty naturally to me as a dancer. Slightly violating that rhythm to chime it goes against all my instincts.)
• Basic handling, just the downstroke. Each full swing involves the bell swinging one direction, then the other; these turn out to be significantly different. So us newbies would do the downstroke side, and our teacher (sorcyress), standing right next to us, would pull the upstroke.

So basically, in the course of the evening I got from A to B, while some of the folks in the room were working on N -- I'm still very much a beginner. But it's quite a bit of fun, and I expect to come back periodically and make more progress on it.

Next up on the social front: finally getting down to BIDA and starting to get the hang of contra.

My morning-exercise watching for the past couple of weeks was the Netflix limited series Bodies, loosely based on the Si Spencer graphic novel of the same name. It's solidly good and not well-known, so worth an overview.

Mild spoilers for the first episode or so, but I'll avoid getting into any serious ones.

tl;dr -- four times, four detectives, one case that twines around all of them more intimately than they realize. Worth a watch.

The story features four London police detectives, in four different years, each a bit of an outlier in their own way:

• In 1890, Alfred Hillinghead is a good upstanding family man, who is so deeply in the closet that he can't even see the door from where he is.
• In 1941, Charles Whiteman is treated with some suspicion by the rest of the force, partly because they (correctly) suspect that he's on the take, but mostly because he is Jewish.
• In 2023, we have Shahara Hasan. I will note that the series does not get into the modern-day tensions around being a female probably-Muslim woman of color on the force, but she's a bit busy being the most central character in the story.
• In the crypto-fascist quasi-utopia of 2053, Iris Maplewood is (more or less) a true believer, whose spinal implants let her walk despite her family's genetic issues.

(There is one more central character, but even naming them would be a pretty major spoiler.)

The story starts on the day when each of them finds a body in Longharvest Lane, a back alley in London. The same body -- naked, with a strange tattoo on his wrist, shot through the eye.

I will note: this tale is less a whodunnit -- we eventually get to that, but it's not the heart of the story -- that it is "WTF is going on here?" The setup is fairly unsettling to each of them on their own, even before the historical parallels start to come to light and the over-arching plot reveals itself. These folks dig in deeply and do their research, and do gradually start to realize that something larger is going on.

It's not a major spoiler to say that there is some time-travel involved, because seriously: how could this story not involve time travel? But this isn't a Doctor Who tale with people zipping back and forth -- rather, it's a mystery with existential implications, playing out over the better part of two centuries, with the detectives slowly piecing things together from the shreds of information they have.

It starts out looking like this is going to be four parallel and very similar stories, but that's very much not the case. Each person's situation is very different, and how they relate to the situation is very different: each one turns out to be personally involved with the case. (This does eventually make sense, if you buy the premise of the story.)

The story is pretty tight. It's a complete one-and-done novel, starting out slow and mysterious in the first half and going to roller-coaster speed in the second. (There are a couple of cutesy WTF details at the very end, with hints that nothing is ever completely finished, but I don't think there's any likelihood of continuing: this story is done.)

It reminds me inescapably of Dark (which came out a few years ago), but it's a much more concise tale, and not as nihilistically bleak as Dark. It feels like it's going wind up similarly doomed somewhere around the sixth episode -- fortunately, it's an eight-episode story (about an hour each), and manages to pull out a largely satisfying conclusion.

The writing and acting are quite solid on all parts, and that helps underscore that this isn't simply one story being told four times: our protagonists are all very different, and each has their own story to tell here, whether it be Alfred finding love (and trying to keep that from destroying his life and family), Charles figuring out what he really cares about, or Iris slowly coming to understand the choices that her world was built upon. (Shahara kind of has the curse of the protagonist: she is so busy with plot that she has a bit less time for character-building than anybody else.)

Cinematography is important here, and well-done. The story bounces back and forth between times pretty freely, but each one looks slightly different, with 1890 told in slightly sepia shades and 1941 in blues that almost feel slightly black-and-white. You're pretty much never left scratching your head over when you are, and all four stories proceed forward linearly, so it's nowhere near as confusing as Dark sometimes was. (One of the later episodes ties the whole thing together -- by that point, you already have enough information to have pieced it together yourself, but it's a helpful confirmation of what's going on at the big-picture level.)

The time-travel model does not quite work logically. It's not bad as these things go, I'd say above-average, but there are some aspects that didn't quite work IMO. That's not a harsh criticism -- there are relatively few time-travel stories that are completely internally consistent -- but if such things matter to you, that's worth keeping in mind.

Content warnings for homophobia and anti-semitism, and moderate television violence -- nothing terribly gory, but folks do get shot and stabbed, and there's some blood. Also nudity and sexual situations: not a ton of that, but Alfred's sexuality is pretty central to his story. And some implied mistreatment of a child, not on camera but it's important backstory.

Overall, I liked it quite a bit. It starts as a "WTF?", becomes a mystery, and gradually shades into a thriller as everyone figures out at least their individual angles on what's going on and try to do something about it. It's highly character-driven throughout -- while the plot is a bit twisty, it's primarily about these people and their individual stories and motivations, wrapped in a science-fiction-tinged suspense story. Not at the "You must get Netflix in order to see this" level, but if you have the service, it's worth putting on your list.

For my exercise today, I decided to go for a walk, before the weather gets colder and rainier again. As I was strolling, I noticed that the BlueBikes stand had a few of their new eBikes.

I hadn't actually tried any of the newer e-things yet -- this area has fairly strict rules against the various "just dump them all over the sidewalk" services like Lime, so there's less opportunity to just impulse-download an app and go. But BlueBikes (which apparently got bought by Lyft a while ago) has decided to start moving into eBikes a few months ago, and I've been curious. So I decided to try riding one along the Community Path for a ways.

Summary: uh, yeah -- vroom.

The primary thing that startled me about the experience is just how aggressive this thing is. I was expecting to be bicycling as normal, with a bit of assist on hills.

That's not at all what it's like, though: from the moment I began to push on the pedal, it practically jumped away from me. Indeed, the aggressive assist is most pronounced when starting from a cold stop -- it launches you to a few MPH before you turn the pedal one full rotation.

In general, the sensation is less that it is helping you pedal, and more that it is allowing you to pedal if you really want. On straightaways, it almost feels like going normally in low gear if you want to pedal relatively quickly. But that felt kind of extraneous: I think I could have pedaled half as fast, and the bike would have been moving the same speed.

The result is that, as exercise, it actually isn't great, because it's too easy. Even when I got to real hills on the path, it was almost zero effort. This is basically my only complaint about the thing -- I'd be happier if the app allowed you to dial down the aggressiveness of the motor, to actually put at least a little more work into it.

Overall, it looks to be useful to have around -- once they have enough critical mass of them to be able to somewhat count on one in the morning, it'll make it easier for me to go into the office in Cambridge. (Which isn't a hard ride, but there are a few hills that leave me seriously puffing.)

But I'm going to have to treat these as very different from the normal bikes. Among other things, a helmet is not optional here. I'm sometimes a little casual about it when I'm just grabbing a bike to go into Davis Square: if I'm just going to bike slowly on the Path, it's not terribly dangerous. But this thing really wants to rev quickly up to something like 12 MPH or so, and at that speed a helmet is a requirement. (I felt a tad unsafe not having one on the Path today.)

And it's worth noting (for those considering it with BlueBikes): it doesn't come free with the service. Members get a decent price, but it's still $.10 per minute, which adds up. So I'm still going to favor the normal bikes most of the time.

This is the last night of my work onsite trip. So let's do something I do too rarely: sit down and diarize a bit.

This is going to be long and fairly unedited, but focusing on what I thought were the high points; hopefully it won't be interminable.

The context here is that I work for Slack, as a member of the Platform Team, specifically the "3p Integrations Core" sub-team, still mostly known as Troops. (Which was the small startup I had been working at, that got acquired something like 18 months ago.) At some point, I should talk a bit about what I do. But for purposes of this rambling entry, the important concepts are the Platform Team (something like a hundred people), the Troops Engineers (eight of us), and the Platform Integrations Team (Troops plus two other small teams).

In this age of being heavily remote (all-remote in the case of Troops), the Platform team has made the sensible decision that we should all get together in-person a couple of times a year, for a bit of communication and a lot of team-building.

(tl;dr -- this is actually a good deal of fun. I approve of doing this a few times a year.)

Hence, we were all summoned to Salesforce Tower in SF for the week. (Did you know that Salesforce owns Slack? I did not know that before we were acquired. Yes, Salesforce owns Slack.)

Monday was, y'know, mainly about the flying. But time zones are funny things, so despite taking off from Boston at 11am, I nonetheless landed in SF before 2pm. So there was a lot of time to kill.

I wound up staying at the Galleria Park Hotel, a nice older hotel that has been kept up generally well. My room is a tad small; OTOH, they provide bathrobes and umbrellas (the latter an absolute lifesaver this week -- see below), and every evening, when I walk into the hotel after work, they shove a complementary martini into my hand, so I have no complaints. For the Bostonians: the general vibe reminds me a good deal of the Park Plaza -- older, a bit idiosyncratic, but nice.

(Note that we weren't all staying at the same place: instead of having a hotel dictated to us, we're told to go into Concur (hack, ptui) and choose from the recommended list. I chose the Galleria Park; most of Troops landed on the Omni instead.)

In the early evening, my immediate team had a quick Slack chat: several of us had gotten in by then, all of us were jet-lagged, and looking for an early dinner. My teammate Frank, whose wife comes from Georgia (the country, not the state), had been extolling the virtues of Georgian food, so other-teammate Thor found the restaurant Georgian Cheese Boat, and half-a-dozen of us went there.

Mini-review: that's quite tasty! I haven't tried the cuisine before, but there were lots of high points, from an excellent lamb stew to good kebabs to the eponymous cheese boats. (Basically low bread bowls full of melted cheese, into which you stir an egg and a bit of butter.)

A high point was the Khinkali: vaguely mushroom-shaped dumplings with a thick doughy "stem" that you use to hold it while you eat the stuff-filled "cap". (Fortunately, Frank had clued us into the fact that it's a novice mistake to try to eat the stem, which is just a big wodge of solid dough and not cooked to the point of being good to eat.)

The restaurant was about half a mile from our hotels; I walked with everyone back to the Omni, and then decided I wanted some exercise, so I set myself a mission. I didn't have room for dessert immediately (see: Ozempic), but I wanted a cookie to have in my room to eat later. So I set out down to the Ferry Marketplace on the theory that a tourist area like that would surely have something like Insomia Cookies still open at 8pm.

There ensued what turned into a stubborn five-miles trek up the Embarcadero through Pier 27, then back down to Mission and along that, finding absolutely nothing of the sort. The Embarcadro and Financial Districts are dead after 6pm, to a degree that I find astonishing even by the standards of Boston's comparable district. So while it was great exercise, it was rather frustrating.

(The irony, and lesson in "no shit, just ask freaking directions", was discovering the next day that, two blocks from my hotel in the other direction, is... an Insomnia Cookies. Sigh.)

Tuesday was the first day of the onsite proper, starting with a surprisingly good catered breakfast for all of Platform, some assorted welcoming and speechification, lunch, and presentations on various topics. Since it was work stuff it's mostly proprietary, and wouldn't be interesting to y'all anyway.

For dinner, the entire Platform team went out to ChinaLive. I suspect that if you eat downstairs off the menu, it lives up to its stellar billing. As it was, it was… fine.

The problem is, we weren't doing a sit-down dinner: instead, we had a single big room upstairs, designed as a wander-around-and-mingle cocktail party with passed appetizery things. They were the sorts of items I like (potstickers, char siu pork buns, etc), and good enough, but nothing better than that – I've had far better interpretations of each item. Similarly, the cocktails at the open bar were perfectly competent, but not even remotely innovative or interesting, and the selection was tiny.

Combine that with the fact that it was brutally loud (see "100 people at a cocktail party"), and most of us in the Troops team fled as soon as we could politely do so.

So we walked back to the Omni, I dropped everyone else off, and decided that for tonight's exercise I should do the opposite of last night. Since I'd already explored the Embarcadero thoroughly, I would instead walk up California Street in the other direction. (This is where the SF locals go, "oh, dear".)

The thing is, "up California Street" turns out to be a very literal description. You walk up an extremely steep hill, get to the top – and find yourself confronted with another extremely steep hill in front of you. Repeat half a dozen times.

By the time I got to the Mark Hopkins International and decided that this time really, truly seemed to be the top, I finally went onto my phone, looked it up, discovered that I had just climbed Nob Hill the hard way, and was now about 300 feet higher than I had started.

So yeah – good, but somewhat unintentional, exercise.

—---

Wednesday was smaller-teams day. After another surprising good breakfast (I will credit Salesforce Tower: their catering staff know what they are doing), we broke out into more manageable groups. Troops was grouped with the "3p data" and "Built by Slack" teams (the latter having flown in all the way from India) for some presentations to help us get to know each others' projects better. And then it was time for the inevitable Mandatory Team-Building Fun.

I will confess, I was dreading this bit. Last May's version was fun but dangerous: a cocktail-making class that led to my first hangover since college. This time, we had been told that we were going to be taking an improv class, and a lot of us were not looking forward to that.

As it happens, I needn't have worried. The class was with Leela Improv, and was surprisingly fun. They emphasized upfront that "funny" was not the goal here – they were trying to teach folks to loosen up, turn off the inner critic, be spontaneous and just play for an hour or two.

So for example, there was the game "Whoosh, Bing, Pow". (Similar to this description, with slightly different details.) That's a good enough warmup that I may well steal it for LARP purposes. Or "I am a tree", which consists of people posing as various things and riffing off of the person before you. And a whole bunch of "Yes, and" exercises. Ephraim, from the 3p-data team, wound up working with me in describing a fictional trip to Disneyland, while three other folks got to play the slideshow of the events we were describing. At the end, all twenty of us formed a giant flying dragon, which then fought, ate, and pooped out my teammate Neil.

All in all, kind of weirdly fun – a more effective exercise in getting folks out of their mental ruts than I would have expected.

Dinner was an interesting challenge, in a couple of respects. Will, the Troops lead, had been assigned the task of finding somewhere to go for dinner. But he had a more modest budget than the night before, and the combined group had a lot of vegetarians. (Because India.) So he'd been tearing his hair out, eventually landing on wildseed, a vegan restaurant. Some folks were skeptical (Frank, our confirmed carnivore, especially so), but I was intrigued.

Also challenging was the weather. One of the folks at the front desk of the hotel informed me that we were in the middle of a "pineapple express", where weather coming in from both Hawaii and the northwest hits at once, resulting in wind and rain. Everyone agreed that the weather was horrible.

I, OTOH, looked at it, said "pshaw – compared to a proper Nor'easter this isn't so bad", and resolved to walk. (Yes, I like to walk, and was using this trip as an excuse to do a lot of it.) So I took one of the hotel umbrellas, and set out.

It was, in fact, no-kidding wet, and my shoes were pretty well soaked through by the time I got to the restaurant. (2.1 miles from the hotel.) And it turned out that the route to get there was via Union Street – which isn't quite as steep and tall as California Street, but only a bit less. (The folks who Uber'ed there described the drive as a terrifying experience.)

So everyone thought I was a bit nuts, but it was again great exercise, and I'd left myself enough time that I didn't need to rush, so it was actually kind of fun – I just had to repeat "I am not sugar, I do not melt" to myself every now and then.

The meal itself was arguably the high point of my trip – summary: wildseed is great, and you should go. It's the sort of place that clearly committed to being no-compromises great food, vegan or not, and the set menu that Will had chosen was fabulous. Highlights included wild mushroom zeppoli, light and flavorful, on an herb aioli. Jackfruit "sausage" pizza with calabrian chiles and horseradish to give it serious zing. Mushroom risotto with garlic confit and coconut parmesan. (I don't even know what that last one is, but it was good.) And a gluten-free pan chocolate chip cookie to finish it off.

On top of that, the cocktail menu was everything the previous night's hadn't been, full of creativity. I had something called "The Nutty Professor", the usual sort of nut-forward cocktail that is usually cloyingly sweet, but this was built on top of good nocino, with an amaro and an aperitivo providing balance and just a hint of bitterness, so you got nutty flavor instead of a face full of sugar. (Heck, they even had an amaro on the menu that I don't own – most bars can't claim that good a selection.)

So yeah – if you get a chance, go there. If it was local, wildseed would probably be on my favorite-restaurants list.

(And no, even I wasn't foolish enough to walk back 2.1 miles though that rain: it would have been courting blisters on my feet, and a non-trivial chance of slipping and hurting myself on that hill, given my no-longer-sober state, so I shared an Uber back to within a dozen blocks of my hotel.)

—---

Finally, today (Thursday) was relatively quiet. Closing ceremonies were pretty brief, just the presentation of the "Platinum Platypus Awards" (the Platypus is the mascot of the Platform team), after which I spent a few hours actually, y'know, working.

But since I had the evening to myself (I'm flying home tomorrow), I contacted my sister (who is local), and we decided to try doing dinner at hed verythai, a whopping half-block from my hotel.

It says something about a restaurant when you walk into a restaurant that's invisible down a back alley, at 6:15 on a rainy Thursday evening, and the place is already full. Fortunately, another party was finishing off, so the three of us had to wait less than ten minutes.

If you like Thai food, this gets a high recommendation. The style is sort of bento-box: you choose one of the set meals, each focused on a particular protein, and get served around five small bowls centered around that.

So for example, I went for the Pork Belly (because mmm, pork belly). Besides that central main (relatively thin, well-cooked sliced with an intensely savory dipping sauce), there was a papaya salad with a hard-to-describe but strong back-burn spice, a coconut-based soup (also with some kick), a side of eggplant and three different rices.

The only caveat was that service was slow: they were explicitly short-handed, and slammed with customers. But we weren't in a tearing hurry, and the food was well worth the leisurely pace.

So if you are in this area, and are looking for very good Thai food (with some real kick), check out hed verythai: it also goes on the "I wish this place was near to us" list.

—---

And tomorrow morning I head home. It's been a generally good time – not perfect, but any work trip that turns out three restaurants that I quite like is a good trip. (I'm bemused that the world-class Chinese was the only one that didn't impress me.)

(Continued CW for weight and health and meds and such.)

Picking up from my last entry, which talked about what it was like going on Ozempic, this time let's talk about what it's like when it wears off.

I took my last dose a week ago Sunday, in the late afternoon. I'm trying to shift my schedule slightly, to work around holiday travel (and avoid needing to bring the precious vial through plane rides); it's early evening Monday, and I just took my next.

I woke up early Sunday morning, and found that I was hungry. That was kind of interesting, and drove home that I really hadn't been hungry for the past week. So at 6 1/2 days, the Ozempic was starting to wear off.

In general, yesterday continued to involve some hunger here and there, but it was today that it really set in. I was ferociously hungry today, almost startlingly so -- much hungrier, earlier in the day, than had been typical before starting on the Ozempic. And it's been getting worse over the course of the day.

On the plus side, yesterday I was able to constrain my eating pretty thoroughly: I was a bit hungry, but didn't have a lot of difficulty eating as if I wasn't. Which drives home one of the really interesting things -- the drug seems to make it easier to make good decisions. In a comment on my last entry, andrewducker remarked that there is anecdotal evidence that it seems to help with alcohol abuse, which doesn't make much sense physically, but does seem to line up with that odd way in which it's just easier to eat more sensibly while on it. (The just-informed-enough-to-be-dangerous layman in me suspects that the vagus nerve is going to turn out to have something to do with this.)

Today, I mostly continued that -- one of the real benefits is that it's quickly setting me in better habits than I had before -- but the hunger has been making it markedly harder. While I've eaten less than I was doing three weeks ago, it's definitely more than three days ago, and I'm still decidedly peckish.

Hopefully that will die down soon; I'm watching with some curiosity to see how long it takes to kick in, now that I'm more conscious of the effects.

But the moral of the story is that I now totally understand the reports that, if you go off semaglutide for any serious length of time, you'll gain all of the weight back. This stuff isn't addictive in the conventional sense, but I can already see how you wind up dependent on it.

Make no mistake: the benefits are quite serious. (While I'm still much too heavy, my weight is already lower than it's been any previous time this year.) But this is the perfect drug for the capitalist age -- one that (its benefits aside) if you're on it, you're on it permanently, and it's pretty important to stay on it: the perfect money-maker.

Instead of reviewing something, a quick preview this time. This one is my brother-in-law's passion project that he's been working on for the past couple of years with a friend -- basically, to make a tabletop battle game but offload all of the busywork to an AR-driven app.

Here's the formal blurb:

Welcome to the RiftZone!

RiftZone:Contact is the first chapter of the RiftZone Odyssey, a fast-paced, tactical miniature war game that utilizes Augmented Reality to capture the battle between the United Earth Defense Force, and the Scry’Ox Collective as they battle for the distant world of Proxima Centauri.

As both civilizations, unaware of each other, searched for a new home, first contact between the human starship and a Scry’Ox Queenship ended in catastrophe.

War was on the horizon, and a habitable planet was worth any price. Humanity and the Skry’ox spent a decade preparing to claim the planet for themselves.

The UEDF starships slipped between dimensions. The Scry’ox folded space to make the jump across the galaxy. The reaction caused by the competing technology of the arriving fleets created an inter-dimensional shockwave, ripping the very fabric of space itself. Both fleets destroyed by the reaction, ground forces were cut off from their home worlds. War rages on the fungal planet, and something lurks on the other side of the rift that looms in the sky above.

Pick a side and fight. No rule books. No rulers. No dice. The calculations are done for you. All you have to do is win.

More info here : https://boostedrealitygames.com.

If it sounds potentially interesting, here's the Kickstarter pre-launch page. Check it out!

Continuing from the last, it seems like the right time to talk about Architecture. Our trip was bookended by trips to spectacular churches (for a slightly expansive definition of "church"), so let's talk about both of them, with a couple of topical digressions related to them.

On the one hand, early in our trip to Spain we took the train out to Toledo.

(A recurring refrain here: when in Spain, take the train. The trains are great, and make our American expectations look pretty pathetic by comparison. They're clean, modern, fast, run on time, and even have pretty comfortable seats. Toledo is an easy half hour or so from Madrid, and runs frequently.)

Now, let's set the stage here. Toledo is a lovely town, but you talk about it as a tourist, you're mostly talking about old Toledo, which is a magnificent example of a well-fortified medieval city. Part of what makes it so well-fortified is that it is elevated. So, so elevated.

Many of the tourists took the easy way, calling a cab or taking a bus, but Kate and I are walkers. So we valiantly climbed all the way up -- which is I-don't-know how many feet of elevation, but it's a mile or two of Pretty Freaking Steep. And the old city itself is, to say the least, hilly: if you go, be prepared to spend a good deal of time walking up and down and up and down.

That said, it's a beautiful maze of history, nestled amongst all the tourist trappery. There are a bunch of historical sites, and the one that sucked us in for a couple of hours was the Catedral Primada -- Toledo Cathedral.

It's a Cathedral, so you expect it to be pretty large, and it is very much that. We rented the audioguide tablets, which was a fine investment, and it probably took us two hours to explore the place.

What's most fun about it is the sheer variety of architecture. Period cathedrals typically weren't completed in a decade, or even a lifetime; in practice, this one shows elements from its medieval roots, alongside sections that are High Baroque.

While I am not generally a fan of the Baroque, those late additions are probably the most spectacular part of the whole thing. They punched a hole in the ceiling, adding a new window, surrounding that hole with sculpted whimsical angels loitering around the gap, and the resulting light illuminates a gloriously over-the-top altarpiece known as El Transparente. It's extravagant in that very Baroque way, but really quite beautiful.

Beyond that, the place is full of lovely nooks and crannies: lots of little chapels, as well as a Chapterhouse with a huge Renaissance mural lining the entire place.

The postscript to our adventure in Toledo was that I accidentally told Google to take us to the bus station, instead of the train station that I intended. This led to the horrifying but hilarious discovery, far too late, that there are escalators all the way up the side of the old city on that side. (Imagine Porter Station's big brother.) It's a longer walk from the train station, but escalators!

So overall:

• Toledo is well worth a visit (I haven't even scratched the dozen other things to see there).
• You must do the Cathedral if you're in Toledo; I recommend the audio guided tour, and allow enough time to poke around it.
• If you like walking but don't look forward to All the Stairs, walk around to the far side and take the escalators.

Okay, so on to Barcelona. At the other end of our trip, we are now there for five days.

Barcelona is, to a large degree, the City of Gaudi, the century-ago architect whose distinctive work defines much of the town. We saw two of his best-known constructions, Park Guell and the Sagrada Familia.

Everyone told me that you have to go see Park Guell, and I can kind of see why. It's a monumental and lovely folly: an attempt to build a moderately high-end village, marrying practicality and artistic beauty, about a century ago.

Suffice it to say, it failed commercially; the displays inside it talk a little about why, including the lack of public transit to somewhere quite so out of the way. So the city bought it, turned it into a park, and you can now visit, for a fee. (Reservations strongly recommended; far as I can tell, it usually isn't possible to get in day-of.)

If we hadn't done Toledo, I would be talking about how remarkably hilly Park Guell is -- again, a lot of stairs and ramps are involved, and I don't recommend it to those who don't like a bit of a hike. (One of the attractions, the Hill of Three Crosses, is the highest point, and we were feeling the effort by the time we got there.) But compared to Toledo, it was relatively straightforward.

Some parts of it are really quite gorgeous -- in particular, the officially "monumental" section in the middle. There's an enormous, open, elevated oval space in the middle, big enough for a bullfight, half surrounded by tiled benches (the tiling done in an intentionally whimsical style, pottery shards continually shifting artistic style as you wander along the benches). That's nice -- but underneath it, far more impressive, is a huge expanse of columns holding it up, in what almost feels like a huge shaded ballroom, open on three sides, with sea scenes along the top.

That drove home the two characteristics of Gaudi's work: he loved curves, and he loved nature. He was brilliant at fusing those two impulses in many ways.

All that said, Park Guell suffered from (as noted in my earlier outline) Too Many Tourists. They limit the number of entry tickets (thank heavens), but the result is still awfully crowded. And while there are many cool things in the park, it's sufficiently out of the way, and those things are scattered around such a large area (this was supposed to be a housing development, after all), that I'm on the fence about whether it was worth the outing,

But that brings us to today's trip, to the Sagrada Familia. That also had Too Many Tourists, but this time I don't care, because it is truly one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

The Sagrada was Gaudi's primary life's work: he spent over 40 years on it, knowing that he was merely going to be able to get it started. Nearly a century after his death, it is still under extremely active construction, and is getting within shooting distance of being finished in the next decade or so. (The original target was 2026, the centenary of Gaudi's accidental death, but then Pandemic happened.)

It isn't a cathedral -- indeed, they worked on it for over a century before it was even consecrated -- but it's cathedral scale, both in size and time. Like Toledo, it's a colossal undertaking, spanning generations of hard work, and it shows.

Gaudi was wise enough to realize that he had to build a long-lasting team, and give them freedom to work, so he designed the bold strokes of the cathedral -- its general shape and architectural intent -- but left all the artistic touches to his successors. The result is a building that, despite being over a century old, feels profoundly modern in a host of ways, from the intensely brutal modern artistic style on the Passion entrance (Gaudi himself oversaw the Nativity entrance, full of animals and plants) to the intensely colorful but abstract stained glass surrounding the interior.

Everything was designed with intent -- our tour guide (it's worth getting the English tour) explained details like the fact that the central Jesus tower is "only" going to be 172 meters high, because Barcelona's highest hill is 178 meters, and man should not build anything greater than God. The building is surrounded by twelve towers for the apostles, four for the gospels, plus one each for Mary and the last-to-by-completed Jesus.

The inside is much more open than the Toledo Cathedral, intentionally -- Gaudi rejected standard Gothic arches, instead pioneering enormous, split catenary arches that allowed him to push the ceiling way up. This leaves room for things like an 800-person choir a couple of stories up, and space for 6000 people inside.

We did take one of the tower tours, and that was the only bit that wasn't a win for me, mainly because I'm mildly acrophobic and OMG even the lower towers are Very High Up. Each one has an elevator to get you up to the top, from which you can see the city (through fairly small windows), but then it's 400 very narrow stairs down, the last 150 or so in a super-tight spiral staircase with no railing in the middle, leaving me close to a panic attack. Kate enjoyed it, and suspect many others would as well, but it's not compatible with fear of heights.

But overall, an even more amazing experience than Toledo Cathedral, one of the major highlights of the trip. If you like inspirational (or even just plain cool) architecture, and especially if you like poking at architecture that is full of cool details, it's a must-see.

This week is Kate's and my tenth anniversary, which are are spending in Barcelona -- a famously foodie city for a decidedly foodie couple. (We're taking two weeks in Spain, which is why this entry is initially locked, on the usual theory of "Don't tell the world that you're out of town". We did four nights in Madrid, then three in Valencia, and are finishing off with five in Barcelona, leaving the day after our anniversary.)

Tonight's dinner was Teatro, and while tonight isn't technically our anniversary, I'm content to call it our anniversary dinner, because that was just plain spectacular -- maybe one of the five best restaurants we've been to. I gather that it is the sequel to the similar (and famed) restaurant Tickets, which shut down due to the pandemic, and it's a worthy successor.

The gimmick of the place is that everything is a show. It's not that you watch a kitchen, it's that there are seven kitchens, and every seat faces one of them. We don't go to restaurants for their gimmicks, but it did make it fun.

More importantly, the food quality and service were both absolutely top-notch: excellent and quietly attentive respectively. (The definition of really great service is that you never really need to ask for anything -- someone just shows up next to you before you realize you need it.)

Most important, the menu is ferociously innovative, and pretty much everything works: clever and unusual combinations, with carefully-balanced flavors. For example, perhaps my favorite was the Eel and Fois Gras, both chopped into small cubelets, mixed with an excellent eel sauce, and served in somehow-hardened little vessels of sushi seaweed.

We went with the "surprise" menu, basically Chef's Choice -- a quick interview about allergies and dislikes, and then they just start shoving dishes at you at high speed. All were smallish (the only dish of any real size was the lamb tacos, near the end -- two small tacos each, with North African-spiced lamb, tiny bits of cauliflower, a red onion "pico" and a raita-like topping); most dishes were one bite. So it added up slowly, but we were well north of a dozen dishes (ETA: reviewing the receipt, we did 15 courses) before we declared defeat and told them to stop.

It's pricey, of course, but given the amount of food (and booze -- the cocktail menu is every bit as innovative and well-balanced as the food) it was entirely reasonable for a high-end restaurant, about the same as we were used to paying at Tasting Counter.

So anyway -- if you find yourself in Barcelona, and you like high-end food, do it. This one is best-of-the-best...

My most recent semi-binge (a few times a week, since this one requires more attention) has been the show Carnival Row, on Amazon Prime. (Two seasons, 18 episodes total. ETA: not animated - this one is live-action, with well-done SFX.)

tl;dr: solidly good Victorian-ish-era fantasy AU series, with intriguing characters, deep plots, a lot of suspense, and more to say than average.

Let's get into it. I'm going to largely avoid any major spoilers beyond things that come out in the first couple of episodes, and broad tropes and concepts that get addressed.

The high concept is that this takes place in what amounts to early 20th century Europe in an alternate world. All the names have been changed to give them freedom to tell the story they want, but the parallels are not subtle. (Eg, the primary state religion revolves around The Martyr, who clearly was hanged, but it's basically Christianity.)

The story mostly takes place in an (as far as I can tell) unnamed city that is the capital of The Burgue -- basically, London. They have been fighting a large-scale war (roughly WWI) against the forces of The Pact -- who are vaguely a mix of Imperial Germany and Russia. (There are strong echoes of each, in different ways.)

Their primary fight has been over the colonies, particularly Tirnanoc -- which is, of course, where the fae folk come from. There are a bunch of species of fae who show up, but we mainly see the Pix (fairies -- human-size but with fully functional wings) and the Puck (also humanoid but with horns and hooves). The fae species are collectively called "critch" by the humans; this is pretty clearly a universal racist slur, used ubiquitously by everyone including most of the fae themselves.

Seven years ago, the Pact took Tirnanoc, producing a long-term wave of fae refugees to the Burgue; the "Carnival Row" of the title is basically the fae ghetto, seen by the public mainly as a place of brothels and crime. (Although mostly, of course, actually made up of people just trying to get by.)

The plot is largely a story of three relationships.

The leads are Vignette and Philo.

She is a Pix who stayed behind after the fall of Tirnanoc, helping refugees flee the land. Our tale picks up when the Pact are finally taking the last scrap of land, and she herself is forced to flee for the Burgue.

He is a detective for the Burgish Police. He's a good cop, both in that he's smart enough to close more than his fair share of cases, and in that he tries to keep things from getting too bad for the fae. He has quite a number of his own secrets, which come out gradually over the course of the story. (He's not even aware of all of them at the beginning.)

Vignette and Philo were lovers, back when he was a soldier in Tirnanoc seven years ago. As far as she knew, he was killed back then; when she gets to the city and they are reunited, suffice it to say things do not go smoothly.

Their relationship is very, very complicated. They are very much in love with each other, but not only with each other (in particular, Vignette also has a deep relationship with her girlfriend from the homelands, Tourmaline), and there's a lot of frustration and resentment underneath it all. They are both people of passionate opinions and drive, and when they disagree (which is frequently), they wind up on opposing sides as often as the same ones.

Next are Jonah and Sophie. Jonah Breakspear is the son of the Chancellor -- more or less the elected Emperor of the Burgue, whose mandate is somewhat limited but whose power is considerable. Jonah is grown, but spoiled and bored: at the beginning of the story, he is basically a ne'er-do-well with a predilection for the brothels of Carnival Row, but prophesied for greatness someday.

Sophie Longerbane is the daughter of the leader of the opposition in Parliament, Chancellor Breakspear's chief rival. She is a young woman of considerable intelligence and even more ambition in a society that very much considers women to be wives and mothers, and not much else. She is brilliant, dangerous, and probably the least predictable of all the characters.

Suffice it to say, Jonah and Sophie eventually wind up entangled in an incredibly complex, deeply fraught relationship, which really hits its stride in season two. There is absolutely nothing sweet about it (neither of them are exactly nice people), but it is suspenseful, even thrillingly so sometimes, as they find themselves in a chess game of passion, ambition, and power.

Finally, there is the story of Isobel and Agreus.

Isobel Spurnrose is a young aristocrat in her early 20s. She lives with her brother Ezra, who has just managed to lose much of the family fortune on a bad business investment. She is utterly sheltered and spoiled, casually racist in the most upper-crust kind of way. (Critch can be perfectly fine people, so long as they know their place.)

Her life is upended when Agreus Astrayon moves into the empty mansion next door. He is something unheard-of: a wealthy Puck. She is completely scandalized in a "what will my friends think?" kind of way, but then happens upon a plan -- in exchange for him investing some of his vast self-made wealth in her brother's ventures, she will introduce him to polite society. Suffice it to say, sparks eventually fly.

I was rather surprised to find that, by the middle of season two, Isobel actually wound up my favorite character in the show. Since she starts off as such an entitled brat, she has that much more room to grow, and she gets a lot of arc over the course of the story, gradually gaining in strength and self-awareness even as she loses the biases she grew up with. This doesn't come easily (or voluntarily -- she and Agreus go through some serious tribulations), but it's a fascinating examination of someone growing through adversity.

Their relationship is genuinely sweet. It doesn't go by any means simply -- they are breaking some serious societal taboos, and Ezra is much more seriously racist than she is -- but this just keeps drawing them closer together as each other's rocks in the storm.

As mentioned above, the story has a lot to say.

Sexism is a consistent through-line. About half the cast are women, and Burgish society has a decidedly old-fashioned view there. Isobel and Sophie both start the story very much trapped in their societal roles, and much of their arcs are about breaking out of that. (While it isn't called out, Pix society doesn't appear to have such an issue -- while Vignette has her own problems, agency mostly isn't one of them once she finds her feet in the Burgue.)

Classism is subtler, but deeply woven into the story. The Burgue is capitalist in the finest red-in-tooth-and-claw tradition, and the lower classes of society (especially the fae) are treated like dirt. But while the story doesn't have any fondness there, suffice it to say we eventually get to see another society that is very much early 20th century communist, and it is horribly realistic about just how totalitarian that can get. So by and large, this story is perfectly happy to indict the monstrousness of both extremes, especially as pursued in the early 20th century.

But of course, racism is the heart and soul of this story. The use of the fae as a metaphor allows the show to be unsparing to a degree that many shows aren't willing to go. Burgish society at its best is casually racist; at its worst, cruelly so. Yes, they're been fighting to "save" Tirnanoc, but in the most colonialist sense. The story is rich in parallels with the real world, from the way that the fae races are used as cheap labor to the plundering of their cultural artifacts to show in Burgish museums.

On the content warning front, obviously all of the above: in particular, the racism is metaphorical but unsubtle, and central to the story.

Both seasons involve rather grisly serial murders. The serious on-screen violence is infrequent but sometimes fairly gory when it happens. There is necromantic magic, and pretty horrifying monsters involved with the story; they are mainly Macguffins and plot hooks (the story itself is mostly interpersonal), but when the guignol hits, it's fairly grand. And there is a non-trivial amount of realistic petty violence throughout the story, particularly from the Burgish police.

(There's also a moderate amount of sex and nudity, but not tons: roughly the same level as Bridgerton.)

I will caveat that I'm not quite done with the series yet -- I have two episodes to go, but I'm getting this written while I have a free hour. So I don't know with confidence whether they stick the landing. But the pacing is right for a reasonably good finish. It feels to me like the series was originally planned to run slightly longer -- the back half of the second season moves pretty fast -- but they took the time they had and used it well.

So overall, a solid novel crossing a bunch of genres and tropes. Not high art, but rather better than I had expected -- this one's flown a bit too much under the radar. It's confident in both its fantasy world and its alternate history, while being extremely conscious of real-world history and the parallels being drawn. If the above sounds intriguing to you, I suspect you'll like it.

For a while now, I've been pondering the idea of, "What would / should Usenet look like if we were to rebuild it today?" As Reddit tries to go full Twitter, that topic is getting a little more timely.

So let's take the question seriously, and kick it off with some initial requirements analysis.

(I'm going to post this on both Mastodon and Dreamwidth; comments solicited on both.)

Personal context: Usenet was basically my introduction to the Internet, back in '87: I was one of the founding members of the Rialto, the SCA newsgroup (rec.org.sca), and pretty much lived on Usenet for about five years.

I've been contemplating this "what would a new Usenet be?" for a fairly long time. (I actually own nusenet.org, specifically to provide a home domain if this ever goes anywhere.)

For those going, "WTF is Usenet?", it was the original distributed forum system. Conversations on hundreds of topics, copied from server to server around the world. The tech was primitive by today's standards, but it was fairly cutting-edge then.

So let's think about requirements from a Usenet lens. What did it do well? (+) What were its problems? (-) What were we not even thinking about then?

+ Usenet was topic oriented, not person oriented. That's an important niche, and surprisingly poorly served nowadays.

+ "Topics" could include communities. Some of my favorite newsgroups were for particular niche communities (like the SCA).

+ The topic namespace was hierarchical; you could easily split rec.humor.funny out of rec.humor.

- The Usenet namespace (the list of groups) was controlled by centralized mechanisms that scaled fairly poorly. This worked for hundreds of topics; it wouldn't work for tens of thousands.

(The community quickly devised a workaround, in the form of unofficial "alt" newsgroups for topics that were too new or controversial. These weren't necessarily distributed as widely, but it generally worked.)

IMO, folks should be able to devise whatever groups they want: it shouldn't be centralized.

+ Other than the namespace, the system was highly distributed. Not only wasn't it centrally controlled, it was architecturally almost impossible to control.

(This didn't seem radical at the time, since the other major system was email. Now, it seems kind of radical.)

+ Conversations were explicitly threaded, and threads could branch as needed. No, this isn't obvious, and there are both pros and cons to it.

+ It was defined by the protocol, not by the specific client: more like email, less like Facebook. (Again, this isn't obvious, especially nowadays.)

+ You could block individual posters. For the time, that was a bit radical.

- I suspect the moderation tools weren't nearly good enough for modern requirements, although they were evolving pretty rapidly.

? I'm not entirely sure what moderation means for this sort of medium. Getting this right is important, and not simple. (This is a big topic.)

? While you could avoid reading the messages from a toxic poster, there was no way to prevent a toxic poster from seeing you.

(This was a concept that just plain didn't exist, and still doesn't exist in many systems. But a lot of folks in the Fediverse care about it, so it's worth mentioning and thinking about.)

- Spam was (and is) a problem. Usenet was where we really learned how much of a problem spam could be.

(Yes, this ties into the moderation problem, but is a different problem than bad behavior or toxicity, and probably needs to be looked at separately.)

Okay, that's an initial list, to start the conversation. What have I missed? Do I have some of the plusses and minuses wrong?

For now, let's focus on requirements rather than architecture -- "what do we want?" rather than "how should it be built?" (Or "does this already exist?") Those can come later.

Thoughts?