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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I thought I'd read this before... turns out my memory wasn't failing, but it has been a looong time:

I've been enjoying slogging through Grueber's The Dawn of Everything. As for a bit of lighter reading, I just started Titanium Noir from Nick Harkaway and have what if? 2 for when I'm in the mood for silly physics. It's not his best work but it's passable and scratches an itch.

Quick vent, I have not been reading much the past two years and it's frustrating me to no end. I've been religiously time-tracking my reading since February of 2017 and it looks like this:

2017: 167 hrs

2018: 249 hrs

2019: 152 hrs

2020: 143 hrs

2021: 123 hrs

2022: 65 hrs

2023: 52 hrs

...yeah, I just looked, I have 5 unspent Audible credits and 3 books I have already loaded up (The Goneaway World by Nick Harkaway, The Song of the Cell by Mukherjee and Hidden Potential by Adam Grant). I have a pretty good (as in, long) commute now but haven't been motivated enough to jump from light podcasts to a book.

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.

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.

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.)

I got a new job!

Is it just me or does it feel like Substack is the only place left where there's any original, consistently good writing? Blogs feel dead, social media (especially Twitter) fails to deliver...

Spent a few rainy days in Antwerp with friends. On Saturday we went "huh why are all the stores closed?" only to realize its Armistice Day, which is Not A Thing in the Netherlands because we remained neutral, so I had no idea.

Next Wednesday is Election Day. A few months ago I was hopeful for a leftist renaissance, but that ship seems to have sailed as we are somehow gonna slide even more to the right after 4 cabinets of right-wing neoliberals. I haaattee itttt.

I feel like everyone has some kind of covid/flu thing, there's something going 'round and I was almost sure I got it yesterday but it seems to already fade away today.

Got an idea for a TV show that I'm exploring with kleinbl00. Could be really awesome, could go nowhere, the only way to find out is to attempt it.

The aquarium's up and running! Planted it a few days ago:

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.

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!

I didn't know about the whole 'Waymo requires manual rules per road' thing, that is wild. Really puts a nail in the coffin that Google's "we simply scan the entire world and the car will have enough information to drive" is a formula that after a decade plus they just can't make work.

At least it's good to see one obviously risk-taking company put in its place with Cruise's pullback. Hopefully it's only a matter of time before Tesla goes the same way with their even-riskier approach to non-highway automation because that stuff is not, will never be safe enough because of their tech.

The shed is coming along. It was more work than expected, and the weather turned for the worse, but the roof is now watertight, it's like 5 times stronger than it was and I think I used up two thirds of the wood for the exterior.

i do feel a bit...saddened now that it's only five days until I start working again. I could get used to this pensioner lifestyle. There's still a lot to do in my mind - mostly DIY projects, and hobbies like learning Solidworks to scaping my new aquarium and I doubt I'll finish it all before Monday rolls around again.

What blows.my.mind. is that this is clearly and obviously a conscious policy choice.

The interesting part to me is a) seeing the massive decrease in inequality realised in the past years, and b) ruminating on the exact causes. I'll give you the Economist is not very good at the latter, but I'd be surprised if the largest determinant in this blue collar revival is policy, and not "covid / russia and its implications". By which I mean: covid caused large disruptions in global manufacturing and massive shifts in (the willingness to do) blue collar work. The Russian invasion caused energy insecurity which pushed inflation even further than the labor troubles could.

I get that the U.S., with the benefit of hindsight, has made the right choices to navigate these unprecedented times, but isn't that secondary to the larger economic forces at play here?

Tearing down the garden shed this week with my dad to rebuild it next week. The goal is to stemgeheim the structure and give it a green roof. We’re just at the point where we now know how big the task really is. (Quite big…) I’m exhausted but it’ feels good to work hard like this.

Got myself another Pfizer. Was the only one under 60 there.

Caught myself wanting to work last weekend. That’s a good sign I suppose. There does seem to exist a Law of Continual Work Suck in our household, as whenever I have it easy or good at work my SO has a hard time and vice versa. Right now she’s considering jumping ship.

I'll do you one worse:

...I think I ended up jumping through the book? Considering I had completely forgotten ever reading it I can't be sure of that though.

One of the things I like about the podcast How I Built This, is that it always ends by asking the person who built a company what degree of success they attribute to luck versus to their skill. It forces haughty CEOs to address the fact that they usually just stumbled into succes, that they got where they are by the help of other people('s money). Either that, or they end the episode by looking like, well, a Ben Horowitz.

There was a time when I ate the entrepreneurial, Tim Ferriss/Peter Thiel/Sam Altman narratives up. You can be anything you want! Go change the world! I'm glad I now know it's just throwing darts. After all, what is ambition but lust on a longer timescale.