(3) They've seen it before, and they still want this.

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.

And when people are scared, and people are tired, and people are worried, they choose simplicity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I feel like we've touched this subject a few times before. This article in particular I found an interesting reflection on the clock.

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 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.

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.

Armenia and Estonia keep popping up in my head days after the Eurovision finals

If I had to pick a winner, it'd be "France, if it wasn't off-key at times"

with of course Ireland as an honorable mention

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.

Maybe I read over it, or it’s hidden incorrectly in the ‘low self-esteem’ or ‘task aversion’ category, but what I see with myself and my peers is that the biggest reason for procrastination is the perceived ability to do the task. “I need to write an essay, but I don’t know where to start” or any other task where the steps from now to finished thing is fuzzy, unclear, tricky, scary, or all of the above. I see so many people struggling with procrastination actually struggling with generating the activation energy necessary to start and subsequently not losing steam. None of that seems present in this meta-analysis in a way that I find matching my experiences.

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.

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.

Ohhhhh I’ve had that indecipherable infrequent egg burn for so long! I’ll try that from now on. I just compensated with more butter but that just results in very greasy eggs.

Maybe 4) would be to let the pan and oil/butter warm up entirely and thoroughly before adding anything else. I’m always so impatient to start and it often hurts in the long run.

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.

Same! Quickly becoming my most listened new album this year.

I've been playing D&D on 'n off for the past...six years? I'm very glad I found it, but I've also just finished prepping my first one-shot using an alpha version of what I hope grows into the D&D killer. At the very least it is a much more fun game already, finally stripping out the weird war game legacy shit that never really made sense in D&D but would anger the grognards too much if it were removed from D&D. Personally, I just love the combination of narratively tense tactical battles and collaborative storytelling that keep me coming back to TTRPGs. It's just such a different medium to tell stories in than games, tv or film.

Matt Colville (of the aforementioned D&D killer) pointed out that there have been a bunch of cycles of interest, hype, excitement over new versions of D&D, only for it to grow stale again (or get superseded by WoW). The last years were definitely a new upswing for D&D that I rode along with, but I am also quite certain the inflection point is in the past and we're on a downward trajectory again. In no small part because Hasbro wants their properties to go bajillion-or-bust and D&D has never, will never be a cash cow the way Magic is, even if they manage to Netflix it up by making 6th Edition some kind of online tethered game. Kinda remarkable how varied and interesting the TTRPG space seems to be these days while simultaneously having D&D as the undeniable centerpiece.

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.

Good ol' trifecta of incompetency, power grabs and grift. That makes...more sense. Fuckn' stellar journalism, Vice.

Over time I've come to appreciate slash realize that on a fundamental level, the general public simply does not care for public transportation. It's why the US gets so many trams that should have been metros. Even here - the railways cut service in half to a rural-ish city, and people grumbled and some politicians sputtered, but transit is only 13% of all trips so they'll grumble and sputter and the train just won't come more than once an hour and the people will adapt and the people will forget it wasn't always that way and they will wonder why the roads are so busy these days and they will never link the bad choices in the past to the bad outcomes in the present.

Dan desperately wants to be an auteur. He's not.

What I like about the metaphor is that it reminded me a lot of how I feel like managing interns at my job. You're gonna need to instruct (prompt) them in a particular way, they're gonna run in whatever direction that seems good to them regardless of if it actually makes sense/is true, and it's up to you to coordinate various people and make sure the right task befalls the right person (model). It's a metaphor on how to use the increasing array of different tools and models and interfaces and whatnot. I feel there's a difference between how I use a normal tool versus how I use AI tools, precisely because they're both unreliable and a way to boost creativity or to outsource easily-controllable tasks. (Lke interns.)

I fully agree that managing people and, you know, their feelings & morale & motivation is what a manager's actual job is, but I find the argument that Dan makes where "we are all gonna be a bit more managerial due to AI tools cropping up in our job in weird ways" at least somewhat compelling.

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.

…why? What’s the significance of it beyond the minor step towards governmental legitimacy and retail acceptance of crypto?

My assertion would be that there is a direct line from

i think that this kind of firehouse-sucking access to the world is more than a lot of people can bear

to

if they're addicted to the ipad, pull the teat out of their mouth

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 don't see how the solution is continued coddling

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.

make sure every once in a while they're not getting groomed by a neonazi or a pedophile. just relax.

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.

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.