I've been discussing this with friends the past week. There's a bunch of "if only she would've..." takes but I don't buy any of them. The 'every incumbant has lost this year' is going around a lot, and I think it is part of it, but it also feels like a nice economic scapegoat for libs - a safe haven of logic to avoid facing what I think is the harsher reality, which is that people do want this, whatever their imagined version of the next four years of this is. Over here, after the dust of the election had settled, the consensus of the PVV's victory comes down to people voting for the extreme-right because they want stronger immigration. It's as simple as that. In previous elections the PVV were ostracized because of the whole far-right thing, but this election the neolibs said they wouldn't ostracize the party any longer. Suddenly, a PVV vote wasn't wasted anymore, so anyone who wanted to put their anti-immigration vote to good use flocked to the PVV. I think there's a faint parallel to Trump's victory here - the simple answer could be that people hated the past four years (case in point: Biden approval ratings), and with the GOP now magawashed/normalized you're not gonna have a fight anymore with your family for voting President Chump. --- Personally I am also pondering if I should re-adjust my belief that people vote for what's best for their country, instead of what feels best for themselves. Sigh.(3) They've seen it before, and they still want this.
And when people are scared, and people are tired, and people are worried, they choose simplicity.
From one extreme-right-elected country to another: good luck, you're gonna need it. I'm still left to wonder why the Harris turnout was so bad - according to CNN she did worse than Biden did in every district in the country.
Got married! Travelled across Spain! So many good vibes that I still have a hard time comprehending it all. As a surprise gift, we got an envelope with a date from each of the guests. Inside the envelope, to be opened on that date sometime in this first year, is a fun task to undertake for us. It is such a thoughtful gift and such a great way to celebrate our marriage, like when we “had to” dine with sushi and wine this week because it’s a go-to combo from a good friend. Good luck all yall with the dumpster fire (/ballot box fire??!) that is next weeks election. Feels like the whole world is watching.
We kind-of-accidentally made the wedding a 5 day thing, which turns out to be a phenomenal thing. Pretty early on we made the decision to have our civil marriage not on The Day but a few days early, giving us much-needed breathing space on The Day itself. We invited only our core families and the witnesses for it. Since our municipality allows you to have your civil marriage in your own garden we took that opportunity and ran with it. So we're now officially marriaged, although we have yet to be religiously married and have saved all the extravagancies for The Day. What I did not expect was the civil marriage to already feel so much like marriage - but speaking our vows in front of the people most dear to us and them gracing us with kindness too was just remarkable. We're now in a lovely inbetween place where we can look back on a part of the marriage already wildly exceeding our expectations, look forward to The Day, and gently float on cloud nine for a few days while we sort out the final to-do's. Next Pubski I'll be in Andalusia with a ring on my hand. Prolly won't be around much for a while, as I am using the trip to detox from my phone more.
Two weeks on the dot until the wedding and it's all we're thinking about. Is there a life after? Who knows? My mood cycles from excited to nervous to already-grateful to nervous at least half a dozen times per day. I know it'll all be wonderful but there's some yak shaving to do to get there.
I'm about halfway through The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Have read the Dhammapadana. Yesterday I started reading The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway after enjoying Titanium Noir a while ago. So far I like the latter more than the former, but it's a slow burn supposedly.
I feel like we've touched this subject a few times before. This article in particular I found an interesting reflection on the clock.
Picked out my wedding tux today. I'm so happy I finally found a skilled tailor that has a fantastic eye for style and that I like working with, so it's essspensivo but so worth it IMO.
I am dipping my toe into buddhism and sailing. We had a day out with our department where we went sailing on a lake for the afternoon. It was a thorougly enjoyable experience because it reminded me of when I was learning gliding eight years ago. You're on a vessel, subject to the whims of the wind going (vertically/horizontally), and have a few axes of control (flaps/sails). How well you fare is something you can only partially control; it's really a challenge of sensing what the wind does and being adaptable enough to lean into that. Some colleagues were frustrated by the fitful winds but I never was; the winds just are. The interest in buddhism comes from watching an unreasonable amount of Dr. K videos and livestreams over the past year. I find his blend of clinical, (neuro)scientific and yogic/buddhist perspectives on mental health fascinating, and some of his videos have genuinely changed our lives. In one of his streams he shared his understanding of dharma and it made me curious to learn more, so now I'm reading the Dhammapada.
I no longer have a girlfriend… …because I now have a fiancée! We’re currently on holiday in the Italian Alps. When I mentioned our plans for our summer vacation to kleinbl00 he went “you know, being proposed to on a lake in Como is pretty storybook” and I was like “you’re not wrong that’s for sure”. Proposing had until that point been an idea for a future day, but we’re still going strong after five oftentimes turbulent years. So after finally finding a ring two days before we left, carrying it in my camera bag where she wouldn’t have any reason to look around in, finding to a gorgeous green lakeside pergola in a beautiful village on Lake Como, and her mentioning how romantic this place is, I tell her I’d love to make a video of us with my new camera to capture this wonderful place and go down on one knee. She was completely surprised and elated. (And she loves the ring! Phew.) I’m still surprised it worked out as well as it did. I even got the video exactly the way I hoped. Not that that matters too much, but it’s the cherry on the cake that I got both the composition right as well as the technical settings that I wanted (6.2K, 30fps, shutter at 1/60 with my variable ND filter and the Eterna Fuji film setting). It helps that my new Fuji camera has been a joy to (learn to) shoot with.
We're slowly starting to work on a plan to get our garden from 90% brickwork to 'as little pavement as we need'. We had a garden designer help us think through and make a first design, which we promptly iterated over until it looked almost nothing like what he drew for us. But it's still useful to have done - gotta start somewhere. Now I just hope there's a few warm/sunny spring weekenddays to get the project going. So far this winter has been oscillating between "cold as fuck" 20% of the time and "mild, but raining" 80% of the time. Last week saw the first sunny mild days which was a nice change of pace, albeit another climate record shattered.
Americans hate transit because it’s usually not a viable alternative to driving. Not always though - 65% is no joke. The first law of transit is that people will always drive unless transit / cycling is fast enough. If the travel time of transit is below 144% of that of driving, more than half of people will choose transit. Your 45 minute bus trip is a 26 minute drive (Maps tells me) so it’s just on that threshold. You’re totally right in assessing that for a lot of people and a lot of trips it’s garbage, because it just takes too fucking long and the bus doesn’t even go where you need it to go. The second law is that transit needs to do everything right to succeed, whereas cars need to suck real bad for people not to use them. That 144% assumes the transit system is working, people know how to use it, and it’s not just perceived as a plebeian can of sardines. I don’t buy that the geography of US cities prevents good transit, I just believe it’s transit on hard mode. Canada’s superb suburban bus networks prove that you can make a successful transit network even in car-dependent suburban hellscapes. That does require buses to be fast, to get priority and to have an agency and city that really get that. A friend and transit professional of mine objected to a pedestrian crossing that the city wanted to place, because that street saw 26 buses an hour each way and if you calculated the extra cost just in terms of paying bus drivers that €2000 of paint would cost the transit agency over €120K a year, let alone the time it asked for everyone riding it. So they didn’t.
Booked a trip to Italy today! We’re going by Nightjet night train, with the remarkable timetable of taking an 8pm train and being in Italy at 9am without a single high speed train involved. I’m quite sore from landscaping our garden today and the past weekend. The work is very fulfilling - urban planning and garden planning are both design challenges in the real world that I like. It also vaguely reminds me of my years in Minecraft as a teenager because I’m paving with brick in a pixel-like pattern of squares and doing landscaping, lol.
Had a fantastic day with my sister and her kids the other day. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever been closer to her, it’s great to be a better brother and uncle than I was years ago. Most of the time we do end up discussing our oftentimes difficult parents and upbringing - glad we turned out okay despite it all. Did a bunch of gardening over Easter. We took out most of the stone bricks and I started repaved parts where we want to extend the brickwork. Quite fun actually to lay down brickwork like that, it’s easy to do but a bit of a physical challenge as I’m using shouldering back muscles that almost never get to work. I’m hoping the weather helps a bit the coming weeks so we can get the garden plant-ready asap.
I just realized I hadn’t updated y’all on the fact that I’ve been effectively free of any long covid symptoms for at least a month now. Yesterday I rode a bike for 5 miles and my heart rate stayed under 120 for the first time in what felt like forever.
What about Siemens? The previous owners graced our kitchen with all-Siemens appliances, including the induction plate. Doesn't light up at all and I have maybe one? gripe with it. You did get me to wonder what my Siemens oven has that I don't know about... it has a pizza mode, and it has a superspeed heat mode, which leads me to wonder if it secretly also has convection in it or sumthin' because it draws a clean 5-6 kW when I put it in said mode.
I got a new job!
Editing my fiancée's choir concert together that I recorded last month. Davinci is a surprisingly easy program to learn, when you're like me and refuse to read anything and prefer to stumble/google your way forward. The video is pretty okay considering the awful lighting conditions. It was...a bit too stressful to record (I had like 2 minutes left of disk space at the end and had to hotswap 2 batteries during recording three times) but my new Fujifilm delivered on its video chops. The audio is splendid - as per KB's recommendation I got a Zoom H1n and put it in the exact spot it needed to be. HOWEVER, I noticed during setup that the piano chair creaks. A lot. Considering I put the Zoom something like a foot from the chair, it would be very noticable. There was an attempt to fix another chair, but it failed, so now I have a perfect recording except for that chair. Even KB with all his might & prowess could not find a good way to get rid of it in post, which is saying something. Thankfully the creaking gets less earpiercing over time, so I'm just gonna run with it and call it a learning exercise for everyone involved. The concert did inspire me to think about learning to play cello. My fiancée not only sings well but also plays the flute phenomenally, and my MIL picked up the alt violin again. It would be amazing to play some music together but right now I have only the most basic of piano skills (it's not my instrument, I've learned) and a bunch of rusty high school guitar skills (which is also not my instrument anymore). So there is room for something else.
Started swimming again this week. I have lost the motivation to go to the gym a while ago but it's painfully obvious that I really need some form of cardio if I want to have the stamina for a busy/fun life. Cancelling my membership there when I can. There was a period of my life where I was a gym rat, and last year it's been great for recovery workouts, but it doesn't work for me anymore. I just don't have any strength goals, am not the insecure twentysomething that needs strength to compensate for confidence, and don't enjoy going to the gym enough to get motivation from there. Swimming is something that I do enjoy a lot. It combines the runners-high that I get (only after weeks) from the repetitive movement, it sends my heart racing but forces me to stay calm and keep down my breath, and I always feel good afterwards.
We’re house-and-dogsitting for two weeks for a friend. I was worried the dog might be anxious or something for a few days, but he’s been nothing but a happy-go-lucky doggo from the get-go. He listens really well to commands, is easily motivated by food and after two days he now lies down beside me while I’m working from this home. It’s clear he has come to like me (more than my SO for some reason) and it is very fun to walk anywhere near him and be met with the thump thump thump of his wagging tail.
It's nice, but my god I can't wait for the eighties nostalgia wave to wane and for the nineties/zeroes to begin any day now.
Hey look, it’s three Christmases in a row ruined by illness/covid! The fiancée has been ill for over a day with the covs, I have not…yet.
First week at my new government job! Genuinely feel like I made the right decision, at least based on first impressions. The biggest downside is that the standard deviation on my 90 minute commute is, like, 45 minutes. But the people are nice and I have some interesting things to work on, much more in the realm of bicycle infrastructure and traffic safety than before. The biggest thing I need to get used to is probably the pace of things. I'm used to hit the ground running and a pretty fast pace. But discussing my work today I went "so you have just one urgent thing for me? how urgent is urgent?" and the answer was "well we need something by the end of January, how about we decide on the roadmap in two weeks". (Not that I'm complaining! This is what I wanted.)
Celebrated my third decade ‘round the sun this week! We are also taking a week off. Yesterday we found a fantastic new spa nearby, today we’re off to Antwerp to visit friends for two days.
Personally I'm convinced the walkie-visionie applications like Joanna Stern's cooking are the eyecatchy red herrings of this device. Like the fuckin' gamified vacuum cleaning video - it looks new and cool and we can go ooh and aah, but it'll get old veeerry quickly. If I'd have to bet my money, I think the best possible future version of this is that it'll be a device for the times when you go 'I want to do something on an iPad, but bigger, but I don't have a big screen'. Really, how often is that? I still think I want to try it out. And who knows - maybe lying on the couch with a 200" fake screen on my ceiling is the best way to watch Interstellar. But I doubt it's thousands-of-dollars better.
Aquarium update: after waiting probably too long for the new tank to settle, I decided to add livestock (some neon tetra's and panda corydoras). It's been going great. I also had totally forgotten that Cities:Skylines 2 launched this week. Supposedly it's optimized more poorly than Cyberpunk was at launch, making 4090's sweat if you have the wrong settings. But I was due for a GPU upgrade anyway - my ancient 1060 couldn't manage a playable framerate in CP2077 even if it were in optimal condition.
Handed in my work stuff on Monday. I start the new gig Sept 4th so now I have a luxorious 5 weeks of freedom slash unemployment. Most of that time will be spent on a long list of DIY in and around the house, but I'm also making an effort to meet a bunch of friends and family who I haven't spoken to in a while. We also got solar yesterday! Five panels pointing east and five pointing west. The weather today was very cloudy and stormy, but they seem to be working great; I got a nice flat energy generation profile out of my panels which (at least today) matched my own energy profile quite well. The blue is all the energy I was able to directly use; green is generation, purple/pink is what I still needed to draw from the grid.
My assertion would be that there is a direct line from to that doesn't seem to happen often enough. You'd do it, because you know full well where the internet is unsafe, but for the vast majority of parents it seems like an insurmountable task so they just don't. I'd argue the point is not to scare parents, the point is that parents should be helped in managing this shit because the techbros sure as fuck won't help. Tech always moves much faster than society can catch up to it, but in this particular case we seem to be lagging behind in a very painful way and the consensus seems to be to maybe do the absolute minimum. Is the Internet a net positive? Well, yeah, but in moderation. So is alcohol as kb points out. I, too, was a socially isolated preteen on the web and have seen my fair share of awfulness due to the complete lack of any parental guidance. But it exposed me to ideas and information and people I'd otherwise never meet. Because it was hard for anything to engage me irl. I fled to niche hobby phpBB forums and mowed down pedestrians in GTA: Vice City when I was nine. I agree, so I think the solution is better parenting. I don't think I ended up worse from my exploratory years on the Internet but that was way before algorithmic feeds, with my own cautiousness a determining factor in what I did and did not do. Kids and teenagers benefit from parents giving them some borders. I didn't get any, but I came of age just before social media really shaped teenagers. Gen Z also didn't get any restraints, but got rekt by social media. Thank fuck it's dying, but that doesn't mean we're out of the woods I think. This strikes me as a very absurd juxtaposition. What percentage of parents do you think are even aware of these dangers? because I'm afraid it's very, very low. My parents knew literally zero about the dangers, this generation of parents know...some things but it frustrates me how far we still have to go.i think that this kind of firehouse-sucking access to the world is more than a lot of people can bear
if they're addicted to the ipad, pull the teat out of their mouth
i don't see how the solution is continued coddling
make sure every once in a while they're not getting groomed by a neonazi or a pedophile. just relax.
Man, this month’s expensive. Now that I have a bunch of free time to fix things in the house and pick up slash revive hobbies, I’m on a spending spree. The big one is that I bought my first car today. The intersection between “EV with a decent range & fastcharging”, “small and relatively affordable car”, and “actually a good car” turns out to be very small, but we found it in the Peugeot e-208 / Opel Corsa-e. They’re both the same Stellantis car under the hood, the difference is purely in the design. We liked both to drive but the French make some weird ass interior choices. After a year of weird ass interior choices from Volkswagen we opted for the car where the buttons are actually where you expect them to be. Last week I ordered a new aquarium! After picking up the hobby as a bit of escapism towards nature during lockdowns, I’ve been maintaining a nano tank for a while now. I always wanted a bigger one, especially since we now live in a bigger house, but didn’t get around to it. Now I’m redoing the home office I have the perfect spot for it. I went with a 48 gallon tank from Oase. I haven’t decided yet on what to fill it with - except one thing. It occurred to me that a tank this big means I have a lot of room for dope, unnecessary follies, so I set myself the challenge to get a 3D printed rollercoaster part for the fishes and plants to weave through as part of the aquascape. My first idea was to make a 3D file and send it off to a print shop, but kleinbl00 convinced me that it’s a better (and much more fun) path to learn some 3D modeling and printing. I always have a hard time denying myself the opportunity to learn a new skill, so the printer came in the mail today. Can’t wait to tinker with that tomorrow!