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.
28 Mar 2018
Many of the most impactful charities around the world
are not set to receive tax-deductible donations from Canada.
If you want to donate to them in a tax-deductible way,
you need to find a registered charity in Canada that will reliably pass along your donations,
and provide you with a tax receipt.
These days,
the best way to do that is to donate to one or several of the campaigns
set up by Rethink Charity Forward (RC Forward),
within the CHIMP platform.
This is how I manage a good chunk of my monthly donations
(to a Global Health Fund,
to GiveDirectly,
to an Animal Welfare Fund,
and a small sum to contribute to RC Forward's operations).
The reason I post this is that,
due to a CHIMP promotion,
for the next week I can send three of you a CHIMP referral which,
should you accept it,
will give both your new account and my current account
$10 to donate to the charities of our choice.
That's potentially a total of $60 which can go to very worthwhile causes.
Please consider joining!
If you want one of these referrals,
let me know, soon, at jorge.aranda (AT) cuevano.ca,
and I'll send it your way.
31 Dec 2017
Another year over!
And as I learned this year,
whatever the news and the grand-scale history,
our small lives carry on, if they can,
cooking and enjoying breakfast,
making funny faces to our kids,
watching the birds and the trees on the way to work,
and trying to find love, beauty, humour, skill, and good ideas around us.
In that spirit,
and following my little yearly tradition of sharing what I've found,
these are some of the things I enjoyed the most in 2017:
The book that surprised and delighted me the most has to be
Wilson's new translation of "The Odyssey".
I had read the book in Spanish a long time ago,
more in an effort to pay my literary dues than for fun,
and I had found it obtuse and remote; a dusty relic.
I have the sense, perhaps not wholly justified,
that large egos over the centuries have tried their hand at translating Homer in an effort to impress us with their flowery language,
rather than in an effort to translate.
But in Wilson's version the text is raw, fresh, human;
it pulsates with life and blood.
It helps me understand why others before me worshipped the ancient gods the way they did,
the mixture of fear and curiosity they must have felt when seeing a stranger come to shore, or when landing their ship in a foreign island,
and the attraction to the story that made them huddle in silence to listen to a poet deliver the next installment of their epics.
In a previous post I had mentioned how much I like Roald Dahl's children books,
but I've now read "Kiss Kiss",
a collection of some of his adult short stories,
and I like him even more.
That same spice is here, the same eye for twisted souls,
the same storytelling strategy of plots that spiral into the absurd and nevertheless work well.
I also loved the Strugatsky Brothers' "Roadside Picnic",
a great take on an incomprehensible interstellar visit.
In literature in Spanish,
I thought Villalobos' "No Voy a Pedirle a Nadie que me Crea" was marvellously funny.
He has the same deadpan humour that Ibargüengoitia had, a great ear for character voices,
and, in this book, a page-turning plot as well.
Another excellent find was Pauls' "El Pudor del Pornógrafo",
an earnest, impassioned, and claustrophobic epistolar novel, a bit of Kafka and a bit of Lynch.
Finally, Zambra's short story collection, "Mis Documentos",
though a mixed bag, has some real gems.
Three great non-fiction books: Duncan's "The Storm before the Storm",
Brown's "Building Powerful Community Organizations",
and Kleppmann's "Designing Data-Intensive Applications".
I still love Duncan as a podcaster—I continue being an avid listener of his Revolutions series—,
and his jump to the printed page is just as good as his other work,
and topical for the state of the American republic today.
If you are concerned about that state, or the state of your own country, city, or neighbourhood,
Brown's handbook is a great guide to get started organizing a better world.
And Kleppmann's book is simply one of the best technical books for my line of work that I can think of.
If you work with databases, queues, concurrent processes, or anything along these lines,
my guess is you'll find many insights here.
There are so many good podcasts around these days!
Among those that I particularly enjoyed,
the first one has to be the hilarious "My Dad Wrote a Porno".
Because if your dad tells you he's been writing raunchy erotic literature,
and that he goes by the pen name Rocky Flintstone,
I think one of the best things you can do to stay sane
is to gather with your best friends,
read his ouvre, and absolutely tear it apart.
It makes me laugh so hard that my face hurts.
Now, on the more informative podcasting front,
Adamson's "History of Philosophy without any gaps" is fun and accessible,
(though I think maybe one or two gaps would have been alright),
and Bortolotti's "Canadian Couch Potato" podcast, a companion to his blog,
provides professional, consistent, and trustworthy financial advice.
"American Vandal", a Netflix TV show,
was another great discovery.
It's an antidote for the seriousness and the tropes of true-crime podcasts and shows,
which is a good enough reason to recommend it,
but it also has good writing and pitch-perfect performances.
It also made me laugh a lot.
I recently wrote about my love for Twilight Struggle and Go,
so I won't talk more about those games here,
but there were two other boardgames that I liked this year.
The first is Terraforming Mars,
which is perhaps what you would get if you developed the fantastic Race for the Galaxy card game
into a longer, but still tight and balanced, boardgame.
The second is T.I.M.E. Stories,
a cooperative game and a mashup of Quantum Leap with a Groundhog Day mechanic.
I've played a handful of scenarios,
and they have all been different, satisfying, and challenging in different ways.
On the computer, my six-year-old and I spent many fun hours working a farm in Stardew Valley,
a cute and versatile game without any Farmville-esque psychological traps.
When playing alone, I had the most fun with Darkest Dungeon,
a kind of dungeon-crawling X-Com cousin,
and (on my phone) with Dreamquest, a poorly drawn but well designed deck-building game.
Thanks to everyone who gave me tips to some of the above;
I hope you'll find something to like here.
And if you have any recommendations for me, please share them!
I'm easy to find.
Here's to a happy and healthy 2018!
(Previously: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009)
17 Nov 2017
I agree with everything Greg Wilson wrote here,
and I had been thinking along similar lines after recent incidents such as:
In all of these cases,
reactions from humanities academics tend to express an exasperation with how little society minds them.
"Ha, Cathy O'Neil is laughable, there's entire research centres dedicated to this!"
"Pfff, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, may I introduce you to the fields of Epistemology and Science and Technology Studies?
You may like them."
"Geez Twitter, we've been researching status for over a hundred years. Why doesn't anybody study this?"
And, to some extent, I see where these critiques come from.
After all, if you have dedicated your life to the study of a problem,
and the world seems to ignore your work,
or to pretend you're not around,
it's understandable if you feel frustrated.
But I think this natural reaction is misguided.
As I see it, the mission of academia is twofold:
to explore outstanding questions,
and to explain our understanding to the rest of society.
Research without dissemination leads to isolation, to the ivory tower;
dissemination without research, to stagnation.
From this stance,
evidence that the public knows nothing about your decades of volumes and treatises
should be classified as a failure of your field;
a failure to fulfill your mission.
The healthy reaction to cases like the above should be
"hmm, how can we make ourselves clearer?",
not "lol look at these ignoramuses."
I did interdisciplinary research.
Coming from computer science,
I studied, and truly enjoyed, sociology, epistemology, philosophy, and organizational science.
But it was not easy to crack them,
and most people in the mainstream don't have the time, the resources, or the inclination to do a second degree.
The idea that the average person is going to meet you where you are is a fantasy;
the task and the challenge is to meet them where they are.
So, if your field is over a hundred years old—
where are its entry points for lay people?
Where are the texts that present the findings that citizens and policy makers should know,
in an accessible format and without sacrificing substance?
Where are the articles or blog posts where regular folks can learn about new developments?
If these don't exist,
or if they can't yet be produced because research is inconclusive,
or because these are genuinely thorny concepts,
then that's hardly a failure to pin on the confused lay person,
and you should not wear your rarefied isolation as a badge of honour.