October 2024

TRAVEL

I had a fantastic time in Taiwan. First I got to see the country solo, though not so much of it as I had planned. I landed on the northern end of the island at the same time a typhoon was busy pummeling the southern. My side trip to see the old city of Tainan was therefore canceled; instead I stuck to the northern third, where the storm turned out to be a nothingburger despite two canceled schooldays.  But a train ride down to Hualien and a car tour of Jiufen and Shifen on the eastern coasts satisfied my standing urge to escape the city.  And Taipei is marvelously comfortable for an American.

After the solo portion, I was wrapped in the over the top hospitality of the parents of the Taipei American School debate program, where I was wined, dined and regaled with about 81,102 toasts, though I confess I didn’t count. I confess that for whatever reason Taiwan has never been on my priority list of places to visit. But now it’s on my list of places to return to.

One of the things I did manage while there is to spend a whole day writing travel blog posts from earlier trips, so my sequence about last year’s Japan adventure will be posting once a week until done. Let’s see if I can get more written between the end of that and now.

No more big journeys for me until Thanksgiving, when I launch on a European Gallavant.

TABROOM

We had a brief downtime on Saturday, which thankfully happened just as I was waking up anyway in Taipei. The downtime has apparently caused a fair fury of speculative debugging around the socials, because the error messages indicated that a disk was out of space. But the lesson of this speculation is that errors can be misleading if you don’t have the full picture.

Some myths, debunked: Tabroom does indeed run in the cloud, not on a server we run ourselves. That fact isn’t so magic as you might expect: all “the cloud” means is someone else’s server. Cloud services are still subject to the resource limits any other server has. In particular, database servers are tricky to parallelize, or run on multiple machines, so we are not vulnerable to a single instance’s downtime. So while our web servers run 2 instances during the week and anywhere from 4-16 instances during the weekend, our primary database server remains singular. That limitation is from the core tech, and is not specific to Tabroom. So, we are stuck with it.

The root cause of this downtime was not insufficient disk space. Tabroom’s database takes up 36gb of space; that’s all your registered entries, ballot comments, and event descriptions rolled up into one mess of data. The database has its own dedicated disk, separate from the operating system and general server it runs on. That disk currently has 128gb of space; not the largest, but we pay for fast instead of big here, and it’s still 4x as large as Tabroom’s data needs. It’ll do fine for a decade, and we can expand it at will when and if we need to.

That was not the full disk you were seeing errors about.

Instead, a badly written query created years ago for a rarely used results page that experienced a sudden surge in popularity this weekend. That query failed to limit its scope: in order to calculate its output, it was pulling every ballot and ballot score in Tabroom. In 2016 when it was written, that made it slow but not particularly noteworthy. In 2024, every time someone went to that page, a 23 gigabyte temporary file was created on the server disk to run this one query.

At that point, it was only a matter of time: no server can indefinitely handle several hundred 23 GB files being dumped on it. At 4:30 PM CST, the disk hit its limit. Kaboom.

Fortunately, it was a simple matter, once I woke up, to clear the disk, fix the query, and kick the server. That’s life when you’re the sole maintainer of a project sometimes. I simply cannot go back and test and check every one of the thousands of queries that Tabroom regularly runs. When I do confront something like this, I do a review and put up guardrails around this exact thing happening again, but that only solves for the problems I’m aware of. Are there other ticking time bombs in the code?  Probably! Is this true of every other online service on earth?  Definitely!

But I promise you the issue is not that we haven’t found a good enough deal on enterprise disks, or the NSDA is being cheap on the hosting provider. We’ve been pretty lavish this year in terms of server resources, actually. But this particular problem would have blown up no matter how much overkill we’d built into our hosting setup; it was simple the result of the terribly common human errors. That’s what my job is. Consider that your typos at worst can insult someone, or temporarily hurt a student’s grade. Mine can bring down most of speech & debate. No amount of paranoid care can entirely prevent that, even though I do take quite a bit of it.

The worst part of it?  That results page with the query doesn’t actually work properly anyway; its formatting is broken. And since people are for some reason now fascinated by this page, they won’t stop emailing us. I’m going to put up a notice about that, but perhaps will just take it down. There’s little value in spending a week trying to fix this bad spaghetti code when I’m just going to have to rewrite it soon anyway; instead I’ll just move it up the list of things to be rewritten early.

The rewrite goes apace. Right now I’m working on standing up a testing framework which should very much help in finding bad queries before they go bad in production. Having a proper testing framework from the beginning of the rewrite reduces the chances that future changes will go back and hurt existing code without me knowing about it. But it also means I have to slim down that 36GB of data y’all have created over the years, to a set of data that is complete enough that I can test every scenario but doesn’t take 2 hours to load on the testing database. This work is drudgery, but invaluable, which is the worst kind of drudgery. But given the jetlag, it’s probably about what my brain is up for right now.

OTHERWISE

Fall is here!  It’s the best time of the year in New England, except that I’m allergic to it, and still jet lagged from Taiwan. But the days are also growing sadly shorter, which isn’t helping with the lag. I’m hoping to get up into the north country this weekend and spend some time in the outdoors crispness; I’m hoping it won’t be a total tourist mob scene in the White Mountains, but likely we’re past foliage peak up there anyhow.

This blog is and has long been hosted on WordPress. But recently, the WordPress project has decided to set itself on fire, thanks to an apparent hissy fit by the founder. He runs both the nonprofit that owns the open source code and update servers, and a for-profit hosting company, Automattic, built on the same software. He claims that a competing hosting company, WPEngine, isn’t giving enough back to the community and somehow abusing trademarks in a nebulous way. But WPEngine isn’t required to give anything back at all, and the trademark claims seem spurious to me; that was enough to raise my antenna. And then the founder leveraged control over the nonprofit to cut off WPEngine from the open source code and security updates. They took over a plugin created and maintained by WPEngine, and pushed out their own changes to it, as well as renaming it, under the guise of “security.”  This update would have auto-installed on thousands of blogs without the administrators thereof consenting to the change or even being aware of it.

That final bit crossed the Rubicon in my book; I no longer trust WordPress, and will therefore soon transition this site to another platform. Honestly, WordPress was never a perfect fit for me anyway, and because it is so common on the web it also requires a lot of security filtering; even my little blog suffers near constant hacking attempts. The most obvious alternative appears to be Ghost, which has the virtue of integrating in email subscriptions, so if you are one of the three people who regularly like to keep updated on my blather, you’ll have that as an option soon.

I don’t really want or need an additional side project, but so it goes sometimes in the world of open source.

Five Capitals of Japan: II Kyoto

Building Nara worked: no local lord grew powerful enough to challenge the throne. But Nara also failed, because soon the temples started interfering. Emperor Kanmu came along and decided it was time to end this bullshit. He moved out of Nara, leaving it to become the smaller sleepy city of temples it is today. He picked a spot of land on what was then the ass end of nowhere, and snapped up control of it himself, attaching it to the throne directly, so lords and temples were frozen out. And there he built Heian-kyo [Peaceful Capital], again a harmonious grid like Chang’an. Kanmu’s reign was an all-time high point for Imperial prestige and direct power. His city, later called Kyoto [Capital City] would remain the capital of Japan for the next thousand years.

On paper.

The emperor was both a governing ruler and the focus of an intense cycle of ritual and obligations to maintain spiritual purity. The combination made for a heavy schedule. After a while, emperors started splitting the duties; they’d retire and shunt the ritual schedule off on one of their young princes, but keep running the government from ‘retirement.’ This precedent proved dangerous: if a retired emperor could call the shots, why not someone else altogether? Great lords and clan leaders didn’t have to risk divine wrath or popular rebellion by usurping thrones. Instead, just sideline the emperor, let burn incense and hit gongs, and exercise power “in his name.” Marry him to one of your own clan’s daughters, and make sure the grandsons depend on you, and repeat the cycle. This method let first the Soga clan, and then the Fujiwara, rule Japan for centuries. These Fujiwara were the builders of the Kasuga Grand Shrine.

Between Fujiwaras and nobles and shoguns, Kyoto most often played host to an emperor who did not rule. Sometimes the actual ruler lived there, but often they did not. So the city basically spent a thousand years trying desperately to keep up appearances, spending their years conducting ceremonies and handing out grand titles and honors to their court of nobles. Sometimes the real government paid them a stipend to support the show; in other eras, they had to trade in on snob appeal to survive. Court nobles would give lessons in poetry, ceremony and painting to uncouth samurai warriors looking to rent a little polish. In some desperate times, the emperors themselves sold calligraphy to pay the bills.

Today Kyoto retains that creative focus. It’s no longer the official capital, despite its name. It hosts a lot of Japan’s modern creative institutions, such as as the anime industry and Nintendo. There are some lovely districts with sprawling piles of classic old Japanese houses, complete with low wooden gates and secret gardens. The Fushimi Inari stands above the city, a huge sprawling complex of red torii gates that seem to stretch to infinity. You’ve definitely seen photos of it whether or not you recognize the name. At the other edge is the famous Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, a towering collection of green bamboo that you’ve also seen. In between is the city, with its own impressive collection of shrines and temples, some more known for their beauty, some more for their historic fame. There’s also, of course, a large rectangle containing the old Imperial Palace where those often-impoverished emperors performed.

But honestly I didn’t find Kyoto as resonant as I might have. You’ll find little peace at the bamboo forest, even as photos of it are a very symbol of tranquility, mostly because of the thousands of people avidly snapping those photos at all hours. The Fushimi Inari is one of the last places you’ll find religious reverence; but you’ll certainly find wannabe influencers using the rows of torii as backdrops for selfies. Some of the historic neighborhoods have signs with rules about noise and photos that everyone disobeys. Even the palace served an emperor without actual power, or money — so the gardens are perfunctory, and the plain buildings mostly closed to the public. As soon as the emperor regained a nominal spot at the center of government in the 1860s, he immediately decamped, and you can empathize with him. As centers of powers go, Kyoto’s history largely consists of faking it without quite making it.

That undercurrent of pretense without power made me less beguiled by Kyoto than I might be. But there are still moments to be found. The Fushimi Inari never closes, and neither does the remarkable train system, so I went there at 10 PM and saw it in the moonlight. There were a few influencers still there, setting up their phone on tripods and looking ridiculous posing “sexily” in front of the torii. But the complex is so vast you can just keep walking and avoid them, and see the stone foxes and red gates in the dim light. The bamboo forest is likewise open around the clock, though here you do want daylight, so make jetlag work for you and head there just before dawn. I confess I did not take my advice here; instead I plugged in headphones, leaned into my height, and just looked up.

In town, the little alleyway called Pantocho, a narrow strip of restaurants and shops that follows the shallow river, has definite tourist trap vibes, but it’s still a twisting warren of fascinating old buildings letting you forget what century it is. It’s a nice antidote to the aggressive openness of its modern equivalent, the strip mall. Pantocho is for walkers and humans, not cars and parking, and we have few enough of those left. And you can trip on history anywhere. My hotel was two blocks from the Honno-ji temple, where the great warlord Oda Nobunaga was betrayed and killed by one of his retainers in the 1500s, just short of ending a 160 year civil war. Americans know Oda now primarily through a line of video games, but here’s a good a place as any to read more about the real stories.

And you do find things there. I stumbled into a print shop, and found names of artists I’d never heard, whose prints now hang on my wall. I found pen and paper shops enough to gladden the heart of anyone who’s long ago abandoned the humble Bic. There was a random wine tasting of California wines, which I crashed. The labels were all top-shelf and famous; luxury good seekers here look for Names, and have little interest in ‘this cute find in Sonoma I’d argue is better than the top names.’ But I still snagged a free taste of Opus One.

And best of all, Kyoto is at the heart of the sprawling Kansai region, the older sibling to Tokyo’s Kanto plain; some huge chunk of Japan’s population lives in these two areas. Kansai has multiple centers where the Kanto is pretty much all-Tokyo, and here is where Japan itself began. The whole plain is nicely meshed with a complicated train network. But don’t fear the trains. Hit the ATM at the airport, and use the cash to buy an IC card from the machines by the train station. Don’t skip steps: when I was there, the phone app would not work for phones sold outside of Japan, you can’t use a Western credit card to load a card, and there was a chip shortage meaning you could only buy a physical IC card at the airport. But it’s worth it: the thing is magic. You load it up with money, and tap to pay for fares on virtually any transit service in the entire country. Imagine if your Boston Charlie Card could pay for a bus in San Diego. IC cards will also buy you a bottle of water out of most vending machines, or a onigiri at 7-11. Some trains have a system where you must buy a fare ticket separately from a seat reservation — but that’s because nobody buys a fare ticket. Tap the IC card and move on.

Planning it out is also worthless, unless it’s a Shinkansen covering a long distance. If you’re in Kyoto and you want to go to Nara, you don’t read six timetables in other alphabets and writing systems. You just punch in “Nara” in Google maps or something, and it will tell you what to do. “Walk three blocks east, go into this station, stand on platform 3, and board the 773 train at 11:14 am.” It will supply you with exact directions for transfers. And then an hour later you’re in Nara. Or Osaka. Or Kobe. Then use your IC card again to take the local train, if you want.

Five Capitals of Japan: Introduction & Nara

Introduction

I begin the travel log.  We’ll see how long it lasts.  I’m no influencer, though — you’re getting my internal reactions, and I’ll be light on recommendations.  Honestly, if you’re reading this site, you should have seen that coming.

I’m going to start with Japan.  I’ve always wanted to go there, partly from a fascination with the culture, and partly because, as you’ll find out, I’ve read a ton about their history as well.  I finally bit the bullet and planned out a trip where I got an excellent deal on airfare — for May of 2020.

Sadness.  But if Covid taught us everything, it’s that we should go now.  We can’t always rely on the world to stay open and reachable to us.  So the earliest time I could find to rebook it pragmatically, I did.  I ended up there over Thanksgiving and early December in 2023.  It turned out to be an excellent time to go to central Japan — it was neither cold nor warm, and saw clear skies and colorful trees.

I decided to do the trip in terms of a historical theme, that got stuck in my head as the five capitals.  Japan actually had innumerable capitals, many before Tokyo was even a village. They’re literally innumerable: we don’t truly know how many there have been. “Capital” was mostly defined as wherever the emperor of the day was living.

The Japanese imperial clan is as timeless and permanent a human institution as exists anywhere. Their line is unbroken for over a hundred generations, albeit with some twists and turns along the way. The dynasty even lacks a surname, since only the one family has held the title. There’s no need to distinguish Tudors from Windsors from Plantagenets — there’s only one line, and their only name is “emperor”.

Legend says the Imperial line sprang from the sun goddess, but the more skeptical historians think those early emperors were likely firsts among equals, warlords who’d won an extra war. The throne was not just about power, however; like most monarchies, it surrounded itself with rites and spiritualism, to strengthen its claimed divine heritage. The emperor became the agent to secure the favor of the gods for his subjects. His consequent need for purity was why the palace kept moving — an old emperor’s death polluted his home, so a new clean palace was made for his heir.

That limitation became politically handy. A capital city attracts power, and not all of it is held by the ruler himself. Local lords became more important, and influential. They marry into the imperial line, and make sure future heirs were their own relatives, and come to exert control over the court to the exclusion of the ruler. So new emperors who wanted independence would often build their new palace in a different town, someplace the local lords were more friendly to him.  Boom, new capital!  The court hopped around like that for nearly 300 years. We don’t know exactly how many towns, or years, or even emperors, because in our records of those days, the line between legends and reality is soft.

I Nara

By the seventh century, though, Tang Dynasty Chinese culture was all the rage. The Tang government was built along centralized, controlling lines, emanating from an enormous and decidedly permanent capital, named the Chang’an [which means Eternal Peace, which would prove a tragic misnomer] which was built in a precise grid pattern believed to be rational, harmonious and ritually pure. The Japanese court decided to follow the fashion — and the idea of building an entirely new city free altogether of established local lords and powers sounded handy, too.

And so they built Nara, in the southern Yamato plain, at the edge of the mountains. And to build a deeper moat against local noble interference, much of the land around Nara was instead given to temples and monasteries, for another new Chinese import: Buddhism. And so the Seven Great Temples were made. The temples remain today, vast sprawling complexes of bells, wooden arches and towards, nestled in the forests above the main city.

There’s two train companies that serve Nara, but you want the Kintetsu line; the station is much handier. March east immediately: there’s not much city between you and the temple lands. You’ll find yourself among a thick crowd if you do this at a sane hour; just let the tide guide you. A fair few of the crowd will peel off to take selfies with the deer that inhabit a large, flat park between the town and the temples. The deer are a symbol of the temples, because they are native to the area and the forests around it, and therefore protected as holy figures. The upshot is you can buy a few crackers and feed them. I skipped that part; I can’t help but think of deer as road hazards instead of sacred animals, no matter the local opinion otherwise. The deer seemed in good health, at least, though the grass in the park was rather thin and dusty thanks to their hooves, or the tourists’.

Keep going east, and start to climb uphill. Most of the crowd that stays with you now peels off see and selfie the Todaji Daibutsu, which is the largest statue in the word of the Vairocana Buddha. I can’t begin to decipher the many schools of Buddhism and their corresponding Buddhas and related figures. To my faithblind eyes, the Vairocana Buddha is recognizable as “the skinny one.” But the stone statue is as massive as the crowds going to see it. I took a look, but did not linger.

My real target was the Kasuga Grand Shrine, which isn’t Buddhist at all, but Shinto. In English, generally, “shrine” means Shinto buildings, while Buddhist ones are “temples”. In Japanese, you have Shinto jinja and Buddhist ji. But as religions go, they mostly play well with each other, and few would describe themselves as a “shinto follower” to the exclusion of Buddhism, or vice-versa. Buddhist temples usually have a little shrine to the local Shinto kami tucked away somewhere, often the cute little fox spirits of the god Inari. This shrine was built for the powerful Fujiwara family, and it features hundreds of bronze bells and torii gates in the forest hills.

The shrine itself is grand, and its botanical gardens as well, but for me the real appeal was to walk past it into the Kasugayama Primeval Forest, a preserve where logging has been banned since 841. Its ancient trees sneer at Yellowstone as nouveau riche. And after the crowds of selfie-hunters at the Daibutsu and the deer park, you find a silence more suited to temples here. The people you do see will tend to appreciate it too. You share a silent nod before parting around another bend. There were some places where you can poke through the canopy to a great view of the town behind you, too. If you take your walk to the far northeastern edge, there’s a nice little waterfall too, which can drown out all the ambient noise you could ask for.

I descended a different way aiming for the Naramachi district — the old merchant’s town with tiny streets packed with tiny old houses in a simulation of what a bygone era was like. The effect is ruined by the curiously unfinished feel of most Asian cities — instead of the bloodless Historical Preservation rules of an old town in Europe or America, here electric wires, air conditioning units and satellite dishes are as often slapped to the front of a building as tucked behind a screen or on the roof. You can’t forget what century it is here, except maybe at night when the HVAC units blend into the dark. But you can at least appreciate the patterns of the past hiding behind the needs of the present.

I had a delicious okonomiyaki for a late lunch at Omitsu. Okonomiyaki is a street food, closest in concept to a frittata, with tempura flakes, eggs, and various veggies slammed together into a patty with the meat if your choice and cooked on the griddle. Omitsu, like many Japanese eateries, is the size of a larger American closet, with a tiny menu. But all six choices are tempting, and you can only have one. The chef speaks some English, and makes up for any linguistic failings with his boundless friendliness. He seems to be thrilled he gets to serve you his food. I was thrilled in turn that I got to eat it.

September 2024

September steals into the world with a lovely crisp week of New England fall weather, cool and perfect, but with that bright bright sun that we see all summer and miss all winter.  I went up to York, ME for Labor Day, giving me a chance to walk in the cooling breeze during sunset and wave goodbye to summer, a stolen tradition but one I quite like.

And now we have the reality of the approaching school year.  Boo, hiss.

Tabroom

I am crawling to the bitter end of the list of things I have to do with Tabroom before I can feature freeze it.  I had hoped to finish that before leaving for a sojourn with Mock Trial folks last month but it was fantasy, as ever.  My last challenge is to build a front end that can take advantage of Tabroom living in the cloud now, which will let people other than me autoscale the power of our installation upwards if the service is lagging.  Right now we can scale it up, but the process is picky and technical which means only Hardy and I can do it, and as anyone in front line support will tell you, you need at least 3 people for 24/7 coverage.

So once this is done, I can permit others in the NSDA hit the “More power!!!” button when there is a slowdown.  The process of programming it is quite tedious, however.  One major requirement is making sure that folks without a programming background can understand the nature of the problem before hitting buttons that will cost us a lot of money.  There are times when there are Tabroom slowdowns for individuals that aren’t actually server overloads — their local internet is having trouble, or the provider’s is.  A system can report load metrics to tell you if they’re struggling and why — but these are a little arcane and hard to read, and stored in multiple locations.  So part of this task is me having to read badly formatted data from six different sources and present it to a colleague in my department such a that an intelligent non programmer can understand and act on it.

That job is nitpicky and tedious, and prone to look right when in fact it is wrong.  When you’re trying to sift through a dozen bits of data that are all decimal numbers between 0 and 1, and you pick the wrong column, it still appears okay unless you check it very carefully.  It’d be easier if the wrong answers were all 439,981 when the right answers were 0.31.

But the nice news is I’ve been able to write more of this backend in NodeJS and not increase my rewrite woes yet further on the cusp of being able to focus on it exclusively.

I’m also working on a pretty comprehensive set of documents for Tabroom aimed at Mock Trial usage.  It’s coming along well, though it is reminding me that we really do need to show some love to the docs for Speech & Debate usage as well. I’m hoping I can actually use some of this MT stuff to help out S&D.  Two public speaking activities, helping each other.

Tournaments & Travels

My slimmed down schedule includes two this month:  the Kentucky Season Opener on 9/7 weekend, and the Jack Howe Memorial at CSU Long Beach on 9/28 weekend.   And then, in more distant and exotic news, I depart for Taiwan, partly for the Taiwan Speech & Debate Invitational on 10/12 weekend, but also for a week of seeing what the island has to offer first hand.  I admit Taiwan has never been high on my travel radar before, because I didn’t know much about it.  I sat down on a long flight last week to do some reading, and it took me exactly one blog post to go from “How should I fill my time there?” to “How on earth can I narrow this list down so it’s manageable?

Otherwise this is also the stunning time of year when New England gets to lord our superior weather over the rest of the world.  It doesn’t happen often, so we tend to grab it with both hands when it does.  The humidity blows out into the ocean, taking the bugs with it, and then the leaves turn bright, and I start moseying northwards to the forests more often.

Writing

I haven’t done squat with the eight or so ideas I have for a travel blog that people keep pestering me about.  But I’ve written three full chapters of this book I’ve been toying with.  I’ll likely never have the gumption to share it with anyone else, but it’s been edifying practice to write it out, and it gives me an excuse to put the coding linter down sometimes.

I made a clipboard to write with out of purple heartwood that came out decent. No photos yet, and I suspect I made it a touch too thin and it’ll warp, but as a first shot working with a new hardwood, I’m decently pleased.  If it does warp, I’ll try a layered version next and see.

 

July 2024

I have returned from Alaska; and therefore have finished the 50.  Almost nothing I booked in advance went as planned, thanks to a forest fire in Fairbanks, followed by another in Denali, then drenching rain for a week in Kenai, and finally a tweaked knee in Wrangell-St Elias that finally prompted an return a few days early.  But I still had an excellent time, and it so happened that my early return meant I dodged the great Crowdstrike outage.  My original flights would have left me stranded in Seattle for days.

It did mean I didn’t do half the hiking miles I wanted to.  On returning, I have so far controlled my impulses to run off to Tuckerman’s Ravine or Mt Katahdin to make up for it, but it’s only a matter of time.

METABLOG

This WordPress install actually got hacked. Someone was careless with some passwords, or was running an outdated plugin or four or something on my tiny server, so all of a suddenly my humble little 3-hits-daily blog was spewing spam and CAPTCHA attempts out, and generally being a bad citizen.  So I spent a lot of time cleaning that up and deepening my defenses.  But now I feel more invested in it, I suppose.

TABROOM

I have a couple of weeks of things to do before I can then take a deep breath and freeze the introduction of any new features into Perl/Mason legacy code, and start working exclusively in JS frameworks.  It hardly feels real, and it doesn’t help that most of the tasks I do have between then and now are rather tedious and annoying cleanups of very old code.  It’s a hard thing to do in July and August, when New England can just stun us with clear light stabbing everywhere through an ocean breeze.  I am making progress, but it’s requiring a few pulls of the chain to get the old motor running again.

These remaining tasks are mostly Nationals specific nitpicks of no use or concern to anyone outside the NSDA, but I am hoping to get the notification system working better in a Tabroom native way (which means fewer adblocker issues) and running on iPads and iPhones better.

NEXT MONTH IN WHERE THE HELL ARE YOu

I’ll be spending a week in Mendocino because I can.  This time I might actually have company there.  I’ve never been able to show the place off to anyone else, despite a lot of trying.  Then I’ll cap that trip with a meeting with the Mock Trial folks in LA.  Otherwise I’m sticking to the northeast for the rest of the summer.

NON TABROOM TYPING

I’ve been writing a lot but the chances I post whatever it is I’m tinkering with right now are really low, to be honest.  However it’s been interesting enough that I’ve found a couple nights I look up feeling ‘a bit tired’ and realize it’s 2AM and perhaps I should sleep instead.  I started working on my tablet with a keyboard attached to it, instead of the open distraction festival that is my laptop.  It’s worked tremendously.

I have written two of the required six posts about travel that I’ve set as my threshold for doing more travel blogging, though, so there’s at least some hope there.

READING

I’ve finished the 3rd Strong Towns book, and remain a fan of the organization and its goals.  I found them via the podcast, but as they’ve grown that’s become a much smaller part of their media footprint of late.  I re-read Piketty’s Capital because I felt like being a nerd, and Faulkner’s Light in August because I felt like being a different type of nerd.

I also read two books of Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series, but then I looked up how many there were left, and it turns out he’s produced 4 of a planned ten volumes.  I decided to put the series into park. I found the series to be engaging enough but plodding in terms of major plot points.  I think authors in that genre have to put a lot of work into building a World, but then they become enamored of the world, or exhausted by the amount of work it took to create. So instead of telling their story with a full start and ending, they end up just living there.  Their outlined story inflates with filler, and the spaces between actual events grow and grow.  Sooner or later you’re reading an account of the main character shopping for dinner ingredients. Or, you know things that the characters don’t, and grow tired of waiting for them to catch up.

So I’m putting that down and going to reach for the classics pile again, especially now that driving around thousands of miles of Alaska is no longer on the agenda and a 45 hour audio book isn’t so appealing.  I have a copy of some Cather, who I’ve read only once and enjoyed.

KILLING SOCIAL MEDIA

It struck me a little recently how much life is different in 2024 for me than any other year because I no longer have a serious social media outlet.  I was one of the first 1,000 users on Facebook, back when it was only open to those with a @harvard.edu address.  Once I finally axed the Facebook account in 2017 I went through brief phases of being active in various corners of Reddit, and then more on Twitter, especially during early Covid when it was the best route directly to some of the under-reported actual experts on respiratory viruses and current research.  But then Twitter became Xitter (pronounced Shitter) and along the way fired my sister, so I killed my account and do not touch the site anymore.

Folks keep sending me links to Xitter. I never click on any of them, but they keep coming.

I do post stuff to Instagram from time to time, mostly as a heartbeat to people I don’t keep in regular contact with.  And I tinkered around with Bluesky and Mastodon for a while.  But I’ve come to realize that they were like the raw sugar candy of communication: empty calories that concealed the nutrient deficits they were creating for me.  It felt like I’d interacted with people in mass, but truly I had read eighty-seven quick bad hot takes.

They took a silent toll.  I’ve never been notably anxious; my mental curses tend to run more towards slowness and lethargy, not spinning around rapidly.  But online social discourse is drenched in terror right now.  Are there things to fear in the present political moment? Yes. Are they so omnipotent and unavoidable that we should ban optimism altogether? No. But engagement sells, and fear drives engagement, and now that’s all you find.  And even I found it was damaging my calm more than the underlying reality does.

So, I started muting the most conspicuously doomerish on Bluesky and Mastodon.  After a while I found both of them were growing rather silent. And after a time I stopped checking either altogether.  And now, neither lives on my phone.  And almost by magic I find myself more productively writing things that matter, not little zings about the latest political event that will affect nothing at all and persuade no one of anything.

I think a lot of debate people probably end up with a parasocial relationship to politics: the actual agents do not know or care we exist, but we imagine that if we have the 2024 equivalent of Josh Lyman’s four TVs going at all times that our finger is on the pulse. It becomes a part of folks’ personality to know what’s going on instantly.  People felt the need to text me immediately after the shooting attempt at the Pennsylvania rally for the orange creep, or when Biden dropped out of the race, as if it matters that I know these things within the hour, or even the week. As it happens Alaska is a big wild land with a lot of gaps in cell phone coverage, and I learned about neither piece of news quickly.  And it did not affect either my life, or how either story unfolded.

And that speed makes people vulnerable to their own narratives. Without time to deliberate the specifics of an event before the next one comes, you’re at the mercy of your cognitive biases and shortcuts, who are so often false friends.  It’s important to be hostile to your own beliefs. Before allowing a concept into your mind, first subject it to deep scrutiny, to make sure it’s worthy.  And then go back and re-open old ones too, and make sure they’re still current. I’ve turned pretty radically from one conclusion to another over the years on a number of fronts, but I think it’s part of how I remain myself.

And so it was with the shooting; it infected even Instagram, which I keep because it’s supposedly limited to pretty pictures.  Suddenly there were walls of text assuming this event had sealed the doom of all civilization; presumably because the jerk would win the election as a result, or something?  The mechanism of the doom is never clear, just the feeling.  Just who would change their vote because someone took a shot at the guy and missed?  How was this landslide going to start rolling?

And in the event, a week later Biden dropped out of the race, and the world changed again. Nobody remembers the event that doomed the world.  There’s a lot of events that “mean we’re all screwed!” that nobody remembers anymore. Like a lot of politics, it was mostly ephemera.  And while I can name a lot of books that changed me,  I can name zero tweets that have done the same.