29 Dec 2021
To the persistent souls that still visit this resurrection plant of a blog,
hi again!
I often tell myself I'll return to regular posts soon,
and that will be true one day.
In the meantime,
as long as I'm around and remember where I left the keys,
I will at least keep coming to share my list of yearly finds,
hoping you will like some of them too. Here we go:
Fiction
Let's start with Rivka Galchen, whom I was grateful to discover this year.
I loved Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch,
in which we get a first-person account of the real life trial,
for witchcraft, of Johannes Kepler's mother (!).
Darkly comical, but humane, never cold;
Galchen's writing gives me Ibargüengoitia vibes,
partly in its commonsensical pragmatism in the face of historical aberrations.
Like Ibargüengoitia, Galchen is also an autobiographical essayist,
and her Little Labors collection, on motherhood and raising a baby,
was fantastic.
(For a sample of her writing, check out this article on nuclear fusion:
she makes the subject's mysteries both accessible and beautiful.)
It was through Galchen that I got to Rachel Ingalls' Mrs Caliban,
perhaps my favourite book of the year.
I'm afraid to say too much about it,
because I don't want to spoil it for you.
But I'll say I found it very funny, very clever, very moving,
and deliciously absurd.
Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships
is a retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of the large cast of women involved—human and divine.
A brilliant idea, well executed—the range of voices and experiences is eye-opening.
I laughed with the new translation, by Julia Lovell,
of Journey to the West—especially on the first few chapters.
I was unaware of the long Chinese tradition of the Monkey King character;
his ridiculous hijinks are whimsical and dream-like.
Also dream-like was Sussana Clarke's Piranesi;
like Mrs Caliban, this is perhaps a book best approached
without too much research—just plunge in.
Three fun books: Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club
(septuagenarians playing detective in a retirement home),
Laurent Binet's Civilizations
(Incas and Aztecs dodge their guns-germs-and-steel trap and conquer Europe),
and Jon J Muth's graphic novel adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Voyage
(an astronaut attempts to fix a spaceship clunker with the help of a time loop).
There were a couple of books I would not typically pick up,
but I am glad I did.
The first was Maggie Shipstead's Astonish Me:
an intergenerational drama starring ballet dancers.
Extremely good; sharp and full of energy.
The second—it was actually a book I did pick up,
then almost dropped when I realized it was about a pandemic;
I've got enough of pandemics for a good while thank you—was
Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven.
Despite striking a few false notes
(a cartoon villain, some postapocalyptic tropes),
on the whole it was great.
It's at its best
when making the case for the simple pleasures and opportunities in everyday experience.
Non-fiction
A suggestion: if you will get and read only one of the books in this post,
I think you should make it Joe Sacco's Paying the Land.
It's a graphic journalism piece on the Dene,
in the Northwest Territories.
I thought it was illuminating, complex, honest, probing, humble,
full of beautiful illustrations,
of love for the land and of empathy for the people Sacco interviewed within.
Chelsea Vowel's Indigenous Writes was sardonically enlightening on some of the same issues—of
indigenous identity, culture, interactions with the Canadian government,
treaties, stereotypes, law,
and the day-to-day perspective and outlook of First Nations, Métis,
and Inuit people.
George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain was a real treat.
It's a book about writing and reading—about
exploring what in a story makes it work,
and why,
and how can we use the same principles if at all.
There is genuine love for literature here;
Saunders' advice is warm, practical, and full of compassion.
Speaking of practical advice, Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset has it too,
though of a different kind.
Early on, perhaps, you'll read her description of the "scout mindset" and proudly think "oh yes that's me,"
but in the rest of the book Galef will show you how difficult it actually is
to remain open to changing our positions.
More importantly,
and in contrast to the plethora of more fatalistic accounts
of our cognitive flaws out there,
she will provide good tools to help us get closer to that scout ideal.
One more non-fiction recommendation: Nina MacLaughlin's Hammer Head.
MacLaughlin was a journalist with a career crisis;
she became a carpenter apprentice by chance.
This memoir of her apprenticeship is deep—it's a story of a change of professional identity,
of craftsmanship and teamwork,
of gender,
of the wonder of turning trees into spaces for living,
of the pride in being able to effect these transformations,
of humbling mistakes,
and of the endless road to mastery.
As a very occasional and very amateur carpenter,
I found a lot to like.
Miscellaneous
Succession finished its third season
and continues to be immensely enjoyable.
Dune on theatres was a hypnotizing experience.
Get Back is a bit of a miracle:
I grew up listening to these Beatles songs and now it turns out there is fascinating footage
of the moments they sprung up, almost casually, on the spot.
We're in the midst of watching Money Heist; awesome so far.
I loved playing Disco Elysium—what a weird and idiosyncratic detective point-and-click game this is.
My gaming group and I have only played a few sessions of Masks,
but I'm also liking it so far.
And on the Switch, my boy and I are currently going through our third playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and we are still not tired of it.
I now use Obsidian for note-taking,
(following, kind of, the Zettelkasten method)
and Dash for API documentation;
I've been using both for months,
pretty much daily,
and I absolutely love them.
Simple, well-made, useful.
Also for work,
the StaffEng podcast has lots of exactly the kind of advice and perspective I feel I needed at this point.
All of these resources, by the way,
I found via mentions by Lorin Hochstein,
and if you work in software you would do well to check his Twitter feed
and his excellent Resilience Engineering papers compilation.
And that's it for the year!
Thank you for coming around.
If you do decide to try out any of these recommendations,
please drop me a line—you
can find out how fairly easily if you don't know already.
I would love to learn your thoughts.
I hope you have an off-the-charts spectacular 2022—or a calm and steady 2022,
really, if that's what you are after;
after the past couple of years who could blame you.
Lots of love and contentment, in any case.
(Previously:
2020,
2019,
2018,
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011,
2010,
2009)
31 Dec 2020
Well, what a year.
But if you are reading this, you made it to the end.
I hope that you and yours made it unscathed,
and that whatever is brewing for 2021 is gentler for the world
than what we've gone through.
As usual,
I have a few recommendations to share as the year ends.
Maybe you'll find something new to like here.
Fiction
Is there a bad Strugatsky brothers novel?
I have been going through them piecemeal over the years,
and it seems to me they could do no wrong.
This year it was Hard to be a God, in which a scientist from a technologically advanced, communist Earth is sent to another planet to observe the dealings of an alien society stuck in the cruelty, superstition, and oppression of the Middle Ages—and is ordered to not intervene. He can see all that's wrong; he thinks he could stop the suffering; yet intervention may be counterproductive.
In a somewhat similar track,
in Tyll,
by Daniel Kehlmann,
we get the story of a vagabond performer in times of war and plague.
It is both sharp and humane, with just a touch of the fantastical.
It's also instructive—a camouflaged historical novel about the horrendous Thirty Years War.
Kehlmann wrote another more clearly historical novel that I enjoyed this year as well,
Measuring the World,
on the lives and academic pursuits of the mathematician Gauss and the explorer von Humboldt;
diametrically opposed yet harmonizing.
There is a fairy tale, Lucky Hans,
about a fellow who gets a huge treasure for his work and sets out on a journey.
He gradually trades it all away,
happy with each seemingly detrimental exchange, until he has nothing.
Henrik Pontoppidan took that structure for Lucky Per,
another novel I enjoyed this year,
despite its length and the self-centredness of Per, the protagonist,
which perhaps made me cringe because I saw some of myself in him.
The wizard in Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea
starts from a similar point,
but goes in an entirely different direction:
the hero's journey here consists of restoring the balance
after some early mistakes.
I think Le Guin's books are so brilliant not because she packs a lot of plot per page—though she does; this slim book could be a multi-volume set in lesser hands—but
because she packs a lot of wisdom.
She translated the Tao Te Ching,
and I think there is some of that here too.
We are lucky to have her writings,
and I look forward to reading the rest of this series.
Non-fiction
I had my first run with social psychology in grad school,
in the early 2000s,
and I think now that it did some damage.
"Researched showed" that we humans are not to be trusted:
we will electrocute and might kill a stranger if asked to,
we will brutalize our peers if given a police uniform and told to act as guards,
we will not stop or call for help when we find someone in need.
I would read these studies, surprised,
and think "if the time comes, I need to do better than that,"
fearing that perhaps I actually would not.
But I should have relied on that instinct of surprise more:
in one of my favourite books this year,
Rutger Bregman's Humankind,
I learned that most of this initial research was deeply flawed,
and in some cases outright deceptive.
Bregman shows, with plenty of examples
and findings across disciplines,
that this cynical view of human nature is wrong.
The large majority of us,
across cultures and time scales,
actually tend to be kind and protective of each other;
this is our strength.
We can be ruthless, of course,
especially if we think ruthlessness is the way to live,
which is why it's particularly important to spread the word that it is not.
This book restored my faith in us,
and I recommend it deeply.
Where Bregman clarified my mind,
Peter Godfrey-Smith's Metazoa expanded it.
It is a philosophical, yet empirically informed,
exploration of animal consciousness;
a lot of it based on underwater observations,
because our farthest-removed relatives live under water.
I saw it described somewhere as "philosophy in a wetsuit,"
and it's a fitting description.
While I don't think it solves the mystery of the subjective experience,
it helps illuminate it.
On a very different topic, but no less consequentially,
Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth
demolished and reconstructed my understanding of economic policy.
Kelton's plain prose and clear arguments
make it easier to understand what I think is the economics equivalent of a Copernican revolution.
I knew Modern Monetary Theory existed—I just didn't know I would find it so straightforwardly true.
But be warned: if Kelton lifts the veil for you like she did for me,
you'll be endlessly annoyed by the inane mainstream political commentary
wondering "how are we going to pay for all these government programs"
or lamenting "the national debt that we're passing on to our children and grandchildren."
Annie Duke's How to Decide is a handbook—a set of guided exercises, with commentary—that I found quite useful.
It was initially meant to be a companion of her (also very good) Thinking in Bets,
and it drove home some of the points of that book that I had only glossed over before.
Finally, Sarah Cooper's (yes, that Sarah Cooper's) 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings was a lot of embarrassing fun.
I confess I had independently, and I think unconsciously,
discovered some of these "tricks,"
and having them described as cynical ploys on the page,
along with those I've seen from others,
helped inoculate me from that low-level, counterproductive organizational sparring.
Miscellaneous
I think I only went to the movies a couple of times this year,
before the pandemic closed it all down!
But I was glad that one of those times was for Parasite;
if you haven't seen it yet, I suggest you do.
The less I say about it the better.
We did watch some TV, but oddly for a time of lockdowns,
far less than previous years.
I liked both seasons of The Umbrella Academy,
and, so far,
the first season of The Man in the High Castle.
The piano has been my Covid hobby.
We bought a digital piano—a Roland HP702, which I love—in late July,
and I have been playing it every day since.
Among the resources that I've found most useful,
I would recommend the Theory Lessons website and app,
a great primer on music theory for a beginner like me,
and Carl Humphries' The Piano Handbook,
which I'm slowly going through.
My boardgaming group met very little in person this year,
and it transformed into a Discord-based role-playing group.
We have been playing a campaign using the Dungeon World system,
which is accessible, flexible, and fun.
(I have also been listening to the hilariously ridiculous Spout Lore podcast,
an "actual play podcast" from some great Victoria-based improv comedians.)
With the family, I've been playing some escape room games that I think are very well done.
We liked The Dungeon from Adventure Games,
and pretty much every scenario from the Unlock! series that we've tried.
Speaking of escape rooms,
I also decided to try out the Escape Mail puzzles from Mobile Escape,
and I have been having a lot of fun solving them so far.
This was an odd, hard year,
but I have many reasons for gratitude.
I'm grateful that most of my family remains healthy,
that we're happily employed,
and still discovering beauty around us.
I'm grateful for medical science—I believe the vaccines rolling out these days are
the biggest scientific success of my lifetime.
I'm grateful to live in British Columbia,
where we have the guidance of a great Public Health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry,
who preaches kindness and calm.
I'm grateful at the prospects of a little more sanity in the political discourse down South.
And I'm grateful for the still slim but slowly growing chances that I will get to see, hug, and kiss my family far away, perhaps within a year or so.
May you have a healthy and happy 2021.
(Previously:
2019,
2018,
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011,
2010,
2009)
31 Dec 2019
The year wraps up,
the decade (depending on how you count) wraps up,
and so here I am,
dusting up this blog once more
to share some of the things I enjoyed in the past twelve months:
Fiction
The most intriguing and beautifully written fiction book
I read this year has to be Davies'
West,
in which, baffling everyone around him,
an American settler and mule breeder
leaves her ten-year-old daughter behind
to go on a solo expedition to find the fantastical creatures
that would match the—prehistoric—bones recently discovered in Kentucky.
The world treats him and his daughter with predictable harshness,
but the author is tender to them,
and explores alienation, grief, vocation, extinction, displacement,
and the wilderness in a very slim, careful text.
Armitage's revised translation of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins,
was an enjoyable read.
Perhaps the alliteration that Armitage emphasized so keenly
in his translation gets in the way somewhat,
but on the whole the story, the rendering, and the illustrations
are all quite compelling.
The tale of Sir Gawain is about preordained death,
and so is Vila-Matas' short story
El Día Señalado (in Spanish; no translation as far as I am aware),
in which a fortune teller predicts the day of the year and
the conditions in which a girl will die.
We follow her cycles of anxiety each year as the date approaches
and she attempts to avoid the predicted conditions.
I liked the story's arc as well as
its incisive and unexpected observations about Mexico.
Recent years have given us a number of Roberto Bolaño's
unfinished works that I sadly found I could not recommend.
It would seem that, after his death,
the vultures feasted on his archives,
publishing anything and everything they found.
Despite my better instincts, I would buy and read it all,
with the result that I had inadvertently
soured somewhat on his works as a whole.
This is why it was such a pleasure to read his
Monsieur Pain,
one of the first books he published and which
I had not been able to find before.
While it's not his best work,
it features a lot of what I like about him—his mixture
of precise and ambiguous imagery,
the turns of a scene from the banal to the nightmarish,
that fantastical but plausible combination of Borges and Lynch.
Non-fiction
I loved Goff's Galileo's Error
and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in
the philosophy of consciousness.
I remember a conversation with a friend,
ten or fifteen years ago,
in which I claimed (in lucky ignorance)
that deep down everyone is stumped by the question of consciousness.
He said that this was not the case—Dennett had explained it—and
I went, checked out Dennett, and was thoroughly disappointed:
it didn't seem to me he was even in the right ballpark,
yet without the proper training I could not explain why with any rigor,
nor find satisfactory alternate explanations.
This issue lay dormant for me until fairly recently,
when I learned of Chalmers
and then of Goff,
who in his blog
and his recent book explains,
to a wide audience, with kindness and patience but without dumbing down,
the state of the philosophical debate on consciousness.
It's far more fascinating than I expected;
as fascinating as the subjective experience of consciousness itself
should have led me to expect.
Another great find for me was Tetlock and Gardner's
Superforecasting.
Tetlock has done the kind of research that I would have loved
to conceive of and carry out:
he analyzed the forecasting accuracy of experts, over many years,
and though he found it seriously lacking
(on the whole, hardly better than chance),
he discovered that some people are actually great forecasters,
and went on to investigate why,
and how to transfer that skill to the rest of us.
The book is enjoyable, smart, and in its own way, inspiring.
On the topic of mathematical thinking,
I thought that Page's
The Model Thinker
was informative and useful.
Page walks through a large number of models to conceive of a situation,
and while the book is uneven,
at the very least it provides the seed of insights
one can pursue by oneself. Finally, I thought Broussard's
Artificial Unintelligence
gives the current AI hype a good cold shower.
I would particularly recommend it to those for whom
computing and AI appear alien and threatening.
Movies and TV
This was a great year for movies and TV, in my opinion.
I had tons of fun with Knives Out;
so much I had to watch it twice:
first just to enjoy it,
then to understand how it was done.
It's one of those films you'll enjoy best if you don't know anything about it,
so I won't comment on it further.
Just resist the urge to even watch the trailer
and go find it in the theatres, if you can.
While I don't usually go for a horror movie, I thought
Us was excellent.
Great atmosphere and performances;
ideas, scenes, and social commentary
that stay with you far longer than the thrill itself.
Jojo Rabbit
was great too:
a combination of comedy and gut-punching tragedy
that must have been very hard to pull off.
And Julianne Moore was incredible in
Gloria Bell,
a movie that is down to earth, guardedly hopeful, and wise.
My favourite TV show this year
(though it was a close call)
was Russian Doll.
Any story with a Groundhog Day premise gets my attention;
this one plays with the plot with intelligence,
a couple of great twists,
and an increasing sensation of needing to right a world gone askew.
The other contender was
Succession,
which is deliciously nasty and sharp
(I've yet to watch the second season; please do not spoil it for me).
I also enjoyed
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel,
though if I'm honest, only the first season.
The pilot is stunningly good on its own.
Others
I found a great podcast series from Canadaland:
Commons.
Currently exploring Canadian dynasties,
the previous season focused on the oil sector,
and was quite eye-opening.
Canadaland also produced
Thunder Bay,
an excellent walk through the racism, corruption, and homelessness
that plague a city most of us rarely think about.
Cautionary Tales
was another informative podcast this year:
good popularization of social science research,
relevant for everyday life.
And finally, a boardgame recommendation for a game I only tried once,
recently, but stayed with me:
the very asymmetric Root.
Four players with very different goals and game mechanics
play on the same board
and can cooperate or hinder each other
(one plays for industrialization,
another for military dominance,
a third for class struggle,
and the fourth for solo adventuring)
in the context of a forest filled with cute critters.
Such disparate mechanics and goals should make for an
unbalanced game,
and yet it all worked well together.
I expect I'll be playing this one much more.
I'm happy to say 2019 was another good year for me and my family.
I made a point of disconnecting more from the news firehose last year—from
Facebook (pretty much everywhere), from Twitter (on my phone),
from obsessively checking the dumpster fire in the most powerful
country in the world—and the benefits were clear to me.
I plan to continue along this path.
As part of this disconnection,
I almost did not touch this blog at all.
I did not announce, for instance,
that I switched jobs midyear,
leaving Limbic Media after six years and joining Workday;
I did not drop by to say that I'm having a tremendously great time in my new position.
I did not write about my disappointment,
when going on a bit of a pilgrimage to see Remedios Varo's works
at the Museo de Arte Moderno,
that the museum's Varo collection was entirely in storage
after being featured in a major exhibition that I missed by a couple of weeks.
I did not mention that Mushi the Cat
went missing from the family that adopted him
(I don't believe I had mentioned that we had to give him up for adoption either),
nor that he was thankfully found again.
I didn't mention I gave a couple of talks,
after years away from the microphone.
I didn't come to presume to tell you who to vote for
in the Canadian Federal election this time around.
I'm not sure how to feel about that. Bittersweet?
I would have liked to share some of those things,
but I don't believe you needed them.
Nevertheless I think I'll come to the blog more often in 2020,
though I'm not sure what for, how frequently, or when.
Subscribe if you want to, but I promise nothing :-).
I wish you a happy 2020!
(Previously:
2018,
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011,
2010,
2009)
31 Dec 2018
It's the end of the year again,
which as far as this blog is concerned,
means it's time to dive into my memories of 2018
to bring you some gems you might like.
Here we go!
Fiction
This was another good year for fiction.
I particularly liked Miller's Circe,
a modern take on Greek mythology from the point of view
of the world's first divine witch.
The premise may sound a bit conceited,
but the gods feel real, powerful, and vain;
while humans, short-lived, sometimes genial,
wash through Circe's shores.
The book is a page-turner,
but a wiser and kinder one than I anticipated.
Patrick DeWitt had a new book out this year,
French Exit,
and it was excellent:
eccentric characters, crisp dialogue, fun settings.
When I was done I wanted more of it,
but—as the book warns from the very start—all good things must end.
Malas Hierbas, by Pedro Cabiya,
is a very entertaining story of a Caribbean zombie passing off as a
pharmaceutical executive,
trying to find a way to become alive again.
I understand that the English translation
(Wicked Weeds)
is quite good, but I haven't read it.
Meanwhile, in Barba's República Luminosa
(not translated yet, as far as I can tell),
a city's bands of roving homeless children begin to take control,
to organize, to terrorize,
and to coopt the more privileged youth to their side.
It's a surreal and subtly horrifying ride.
Speaking of horrifying,
Lewis's The 2020 Commission Report
is based on the premise that Kim's North Korea
attacks Trump's United States in the year 2020,
and that the book—the report—is the best effort of the US Congress
to understand how it all spiraled out of control.
Lewis is an arms control expert,
and what makes this book nightmarish
is that pretty much everything that goes awfully wrong in it
has actually gone wrong;
we've just been lucky that it hasn't had the same outcome yet.
Despite the horror,
this tale of annihilation was far more fun than it had a right to be.
I also enjoyed Alderman's The Power,
a tale in which women discover an inner source
of extraordinary physical power,
immediately and radically shifting the gender power imbalance,
and smashing the patriarchy—and a lot more with it.
It's a bit on the nose,
but I think it needed to be:
I learned a lot from it about our real gender dynamics,
and I suspect you might, too.
Finally, North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
was lots of fun.
It's a kind of Groundhog Day story,
in which the protagonist relives his life after each death,
retaining the memories of what's happened in his earlier lives.
It's probably one or two hundred pages too thick,
but still quite engaging.
Non-fiction
Harper's The Fate of Rome
deals with the shocks that nature dealt the Roman Empire,
in the form of climate change and pandemics,
weakening it, and ultimately helping bring about its downfall.
History has evolved a lot,
being now much more informed by the creative use of forensic archaeology,
climate science, DNA sampling, and epidemiology,
and the results are eye-opening.
Clear's Atomic Habits,
a self-help book, actually helped me.
It provides good, practical advice on how to
foster the kind of habits we want
and break those we don't.
I had to squint past the folksy anecdotes
at the start of each chapter,
but it was worth it:
the discussions on how habits shape identity,
and on how to tweak that system in our favour,
were enlightening.
Two other books with good practical advice:
first, Nosrat's Salt, Falt, Acid, Heat
made me a far better cook,
not by giving me easy recipes to follow,
but by helping me understand the underlying principles
and tools available in the kitchen.
Read it all and you'll find it has somehow built up your intuition
in ways you'll find useful and gratifying three times a day.
It is also beautifully illustrated.
And second, Metz and Owen's 99 Bottles of OOP
provides a clear example on how to approach programming problems
with a test-driven development perspective,
how to tackle naming challenges,
and when and why to create abstractions.
Down to earth mentoring, easy to follow, immediately applicable.
I've been programming for many years,
but I still found Metz and Owen's book improved my skills almost overnight.
Children's Literature
My daughter and I have enjoyed reading through the stories in
Nagaraja's Buddha at Bedtime
many times.
They are approachable, relevant, and wise.
Not really religious, as the title might lead you to believe;
just calm and mindful.
Nagaraja has two other books for kids on the same vein,
and they are just as good.
We also discovered
Woodcock's Coding Games in Scratch,
an easy to follow guide,
and we've been having lots of fun programming games together:
the platform makes it easy to have a full game coded
in an hour or two,
and it's pretty amazing to see it unfold.
Podcasts
I've recommended Duncan's Revolutions podcast before,
but I feel like I need to do it again:
he's now going over the Mexican Revolution,
which I believed I understood well already,
and I find that I get a lot more context and insight from Duncan's narrative.
I thought the first season of
Wooden Overcoats,
about competing funerary homes in a small English village,
was hugely entertaining:
great voice acting, fun situations, good writing.
And the Beef and Dairy Network Podcast,
a satirical improvisational show
supposedly about the cattle industry,
gets pretty weird and features great comedy actors.
Finally, while not a podcast,
I've been meditating daily using Headspace
this whole year,
and loving the results.
I should be able to meditate unassisted,
but I could never do it regularly before,
and I'm grateful for the range of assistance that Headspace gives me,
and the ways it helped me establish the meditation habit.
Boardgames
Three boardgame recommendations:
first and foremost,
Secret Hitler,
a Mafia-like social deduction fable in which liberals try to keep fascists out of power,
while fascist plot to keep Hitler's identity secret,
and to get him into the Chancellery.
It's very easy for liberals to shoot themselves in the foot,
weakening the republic and its norms as they try to root the fascists out.
The game art is quite pleasing,
its mechanics are better than most similar party games,
and its theme is on point for our times.
Food Chain Magnate,
the most recent game from Splotter,
is, like most of their previous games,
sharp, balanced, and rewarding.
It can be played online here for free,
and maybe it should—the accounting is all automated online,
so you can better focus on your food chain franchise.
Flamme Rouge was a joy to play.
You take the role of a team of two cyclists,
and you win if one of them is the first in the game to cross the finish line.
Every other team will have as much energy available as yours,
so it all comes down to efficiency and placing your cyclists
tactically in the group.
The rules are simple and can be explained in ten minutes,
but they fit the theme of the game beautifully:
drafting, elevation, exhaustion—all of these concepts become
accessible and intuitive.
Movies and TV
The best movie I watched this year came late:
Cuarón's Roma,
available on Netflix,
was just undescribably good.
It's gorgeously shot and directed,
but, far more importantly,
I could not stop thinking as I was watching it
the great extent to which it was True:
true to me, as a child born in Mexico in the seventies,
true as in honest and heartfelt,
true architecturally and contextually,
true as art should be.
Roma does not show my life's events,
but it shows my life like no other movie I can think of.
It's a masterpiece;
I know I'll go back to it many times.
The Coen Brother's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,
an antology of six short Western stories,
also available on Netflix,
was funny, dark, cruel, and touching;
one hard candy after another.
I think it's one of the best Coen movies yet.
Another good dark movie was
Iannucci's The Death of Stalin.
Stalin dies, and those around him jostle for power,
while everyone else just tries to do whatever it takes
to stay alive in this demented regime.
The humour here is lucid and macabre,
but I know it's not to everyone's liking,
Finally, I was told I should see
Sorry to Bother You
without reading anything about it, so as not to spoil it.
It was good advice, and I pass it on to you:
just go see it, if you can find it.
So. It was another good year for us, and as is often the case,
it feels strange to type this in the knowledge
of the disparity between our small lives
and the bizarre wellspring of despair of the daily news cycle.
And this brings to mind one more recommendation to wrap up this post:
to disconnect more.
After struggling with the unfolding calamities in newsfeeds everywhere,
I decided to get them all out of my phone:
no Twitter, no Facebook, no news apps—and nothing at all at night.
I still check in on my computer, now and then,
reading the news once or twice a day like the gods intended.
I still care.
But now most of the frantic daily stuff looks small, pointless, and overheated,
a recipe for frustration and rage.
I'm glad to be out of the loop.
Instead of reaching for my phone, I keep a book nearby,
and a list of long reads on my computer.
I feel a lot saner and more focused as a result.
Maybe you'd like to try it?
I hope 2019 goes wonderfully for you. Happy New Year!
(Previously:
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011,
2010,
2009)
13 Oct 2018
Victoria is having its municipal election just a week from now,
on October 20th,
and the streets,
including our own sidewalk,
are lined with lawn signs.
This post lists some resources I found useful in deciding who to vote for,
and then my rationale and endorsements.
Resources
- The City of Victoria elections page
is one impartial place to start looking for information on the candidates
- Victoria Votes has useful summaries on all candidates.
Generally speaking,
I found the site's commentary a bit lax, though not misleading—reading the candidates websites,
conveniently linked from the Victoria Votes site,
you can find more relevant details
- Victorians for Transportation Choice has candidate responses
to transportation questions, which have turned out to be one of the main
dividing issues among candidates. I feel the questions are smart,
and the answers give good hints both about the stance of the candidates
and about their understanding of civic matters
- The School Board Trustee candidate platforms are,
as a rule, ambiguous, mushy, and released too late,
and it's difficult to really assess where they stand.
I guess, since there are only nine candidates for twelve positions,
not standing out too much is a good strategy.
But this makes it difficult to make an informed decision.
On a pinch,
the BC Teachers' Federation's endorsements page
helps by providing a list of progressive, labour-minded candidates
- Sexual education is a wedge issue elsewhere in Canada,
but thankfully our school district is mostly enlightened in this regard.
Sex Ed Is Our Right collected trustee candidates'
stances on the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity program,
and if you scroll down to district 61 you will see that most candidates support it
Where We Stand
Four years ago, I somewhat reluctantly endorsed Dean Fortin
over Lisa Helps.
Helps won a narrow victory
and went on to prove that my concerns with her were unfounded.
She has been an effective mayor in a period of significant growth in Victoria.
She listens to city residents,
she is receptive to First Nations issues,
she promotes neighbourhood community building,
and she has steered the city to an (even more) enviable position within Canada.
The two main issues in town today,
I would say,
are transportation (or, really, the expansion of the bike lane network)
and housing.
The first should be a non-issue.
In Victoria's streets,
as in most of the world,
the car is king.
We know this situation is expensive and unsustainable.
We know that walking and cycling whenever possible
make us healthier and keep our air clean and our wallets full.
So we need to slow down car traffic
and to build a cycling network,
in order to make car alternatives safer and more compelling.
So the city begins building a modest network of separated bike lanes downtown,
and to consider lower speed limits,
and—as entitled factions tend to do—the Car Clown Task Force
comes out in full force,
complaining about a war on cars,
about gridlock,
about lack of parking,
about the choice of street for a bike lane,
about construction costs,
and so on,
until they've convinced themselves that they're being oppressed so hard
they won't be able to come out of their driveway.
But I've been through downtown since the new bike lanes opened,
both driving and cycling.
Driving is still just as fine.
Cycling is unbelievably better.
We should keep building this network.
The second issue is serious,
and while one may argue that Helps and Council should have seen this coming and reacted more quickly,
I think they just got caught up in the wave with inappropriate short-term options.
The problem is that housing here is expensive—in Canada, I think Vancouver and Toronto
are the only cities with a worse housing problem.
We basically have a lot of people moving into town
(it's a great place to live!),
and while construction cranes are now a seemingly permanent fixture in town,
there are not enough spots for everybody yet,
and in particular for families with kids.
All of this raises rents, mortgages, and property taxes,
and therefore makes living here unaffordable.
It increases homelessness.
It makes the prospect of having to move extremely stressful for many.
So we need a denser city,
but it takes time to build up,
it takes effort to fight NIMBYism,
and it takes prudence to grow responsibly and maintain a green, laid-back city with a beautiful character.
Last election, we had two strong left-of-centre candidates (Helps and Fortin).
This year, the stronger opponents to Helps are further to the right.
Stephen Hammond and his New Council slate
have predictably toady proposals,
such as tax cuts, increasing police budgets,
and stopping the bike lane network.
Similarly, Michael Geoghegan wants to fight the current bike lane placements,
and to loosen energy efficiency standards in new construction.
To the extent that his platform has themes,
they are to make city governance more like Langford's
(a Victoria suburb)
and to get money from the provincial and federal governments to solve our problems
(which, sure, I want that too, but good luck).
Endorsements
Mayor
This year, the choice for mayor was easy.
The incumbent, Lisa Helps has been an effective and capable leader,
with a promising vision for Victoria.
She definitely has my vote.
Council
The vote for councillors is as important as the one for mayor!
They help shape the agenda and provide us with better representation at City Hall.
You can vote for up to eight councillors,
but note that it is good strategy to only vote for your favourites,
as filling up a ballot increases the chances that candidates you are less keen on
squeak past your preferred choices.
- Jeremy Loveday is my top choice for City Council.
I have personally seen how active and purposeful he's been as a councillor
fighting for the civic good.
When we began organizing to improve our neighbourhood,
he was there with us,
giving us advice and information.
I will gladly vote for him.
- Grace Lore, I think, will bring a useful perspective to Council:
as a working mother, and as a renter,
she brings to her platform underappreciated issues of family housing and childcare
that, if implemented, will benefit us all
- The Together Victoria slate (formed by Laurel Collins, Sarah Potts, and Sharmarke Dubow)
also has my support. Its three candidates will help address the affordability problems in Victoria
- Ben Isitt is, finally, also a reliable, progressive choice for Council, and I encourage you to support him, too
School Board
Given the difficulty in assessing differences between trustee candidates,
I encourage you to vote for the candidates endorsed by the BCTF.
In alphabetical order:
- Vincent Gornall
- Diane McNally
- Ryan Painter
- Rob Paynter
- Jordan Watters
Amalgamation
In our ballots, we will also have a referendum question on whether to
establish a Citizen's Assembly to explore the amalgamation of Victoria with Saanich.
I am, in general, averse to amalgamation
(I prefer small organizations over large;
I saw the damage that amalgamation brought,
and continues to bring,
to Toronto),
but this question is merely about establishing an Assembly to explore the issue,
and about Victoria and Saanich,
two municipalities that are joined at the hip.
I will reluctantly vote Yes in the referendum question.