Fascination Place

It’s COVID!

We recently spent a week in Massachusetts visiting our families, taking care of some tasks around our vacation home back there, and helping my dad out with some stuff. It was my third trip back in the past year, and Debbi’s second. The flights were routine, we had some good meals, and got to experience a nice day of rainfall amidst the cool-but-not-cold temperatures. It was a pretty hectic time, so not exactly a relaxing vacation, and not quite as productive as we’d originally hoped, but I think we got enough done.

Our trip’s gift to us when we returned was COVID. Debbi had been feeling pretty blah for several days, and I started feeling it myself. We both tested – twice – and I tested pretty strongly positive, while Debbi tested negative.

Both of us are as fully vaccinated as we can be, given that the FDA hasn’t yet approved another booster for people our age; we had our latest booster – the bivalent variety – last September before our previous trip.

We’d both describe our symptoms as that of a cold. I’d call mine a moderate cold: It peaked Thursday evening with sneezing and congestion and a mild headache, but otherwise has mostly been some tiredness and coughing. I’d have stayed home from work for a couple of days if I’d had these symptoms before COVID. Debbi’s symptoms have been more severe and longer-lasting, but basically the same kinds.

By the time I tested positive, Debbi’s symptoms had been going on too long for her to qualify to take Paxlovid, but I contacted my doctor and got a prescription for myself. I’ve heard different things about its effects, the most common being that it gives you a bad taste in your mouth while you’re taking it. I’ve had this occasional sensation of something in the back of my mouth, like a bad-tasting chalky antacid coming back up, but it’s been pretty ignorable. Otherwise it seems to be doing its job, although it’s hard to be sure since my symptoms were not severe in the first place. If this had been a normal cold, this is basically the arc I’d have expected.

So we hunkered down for the long weekend. We did a pick-up order from Safeway, which went smoothly. I made Indian food for dinner, coffee chocolate chip ice cream for dessert, and scones for breakfast. I also mowed, and this morning went running for the first time since we got back. Debbi took Domino for morning walks. And we got plenty of sleep.

I spent a lot of the weekend playing Firmament, the new game from Cyan Worlds, the makers of MYST. It’s their first release since the excellent Obduction, and is very much in the same vein. I’m enjoying it, and will probably write it up once I finish it. It took me about 20 hours to finish Obduction so if Firmament is similar then I’m about 40% of the way through it.

I spent most of today sitting on our couch on the back porch, with Domino lying next to me, playing the game. It was pretty much perfect weather for it. Not bad for Memorial Day, all things considered.

We tested again this evening. Debbi tested very, very slightly positive, so faint we had to look closely. My line was still pretty clear, but not nearly as strong as last week. So it’s going to be at least a week of working from home. Hopefully by next weekend we’ll be clear.

As I’ve said before, I expect almost everyone on Earth is going to contract COVID multiple times in their life going forward (barring an unforeseen development), unless they are truly isolating from the rest of humanity. We’ve avoided it longer than most, but this starts our counter. Fingers crossed that neither of us have any long-term symptoms. No one I know who’s contracted it since the advent of the vaccines has any long-term effects that I know of. But check back in 5 or 10 years to see how everyone’s doing.

Dr. Marvin Morillo

This is Teacher Appreciation Week, with National Teacher Day being tomorrow, so I figured it’s time to finish this entry about a teacher of mine who’s been on my mind recently.

I wasn’t a very good fit for Tulane University. But no other college I applied to thought I was a good enough fit to accept me. So in the fall of 1987 off I went from Boston to New Orleans, the land of heat, humidity, booze, a high murder rate, conservative politics, and seafood, none of which agreed with me. (Okay, I came around on the booze, to some extent.)

Very much on-brand for me as a teenager, I had little idea how to get started in college. I took computer programming (they wouldn’t let me skip the intro class, even though I already knew everything in it and did well on the AP test), German (a year off from it in high school did nothing for my already shaky grasp of the language, and it was my last hurrah at trying to learn something other than English), studio art, and English.

Dr. Marvin Morillo was the teacher of that freshman English class. My recollection is that he was an older man of average height (which is to say, several inches shorter than I was), with white hair and a goatee. I now know that he turned 61 at the start of the semester.

My memories of college are at the point where they’re fading and merging together, and so are no longer very trustworthy. I recall the classrooms in the English department building were often small – holding maybe 16 people – arranged around a large table, with soft lighting and a lot of wood decor.I don’t really remember any of the other students in the class, and I don’t clearly remember the books we read anymore either, but I know there were four, of which two were Hiroshima by John Hersey, and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. I thought one was called The Infinite Journey, but I can’t find a book with that title which matches my memory of it. I think the fourth had something to do with space. Only 4 books across 12ish weeks of classes, but that meant we could get into them in depth. I had been generally uninspired by my high school English classes, and I didn’t have the learning skills to know how to get value out of them. This started changing in this class.

In particular Hiroshima is an extremely powerful chronicle of the aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bomb on that city, and Dr. Morillo did a fine job of taking us through the events of the book, and reinforcing the book’s point that this must never be allowed to happen again. Honestly he started the class with the best stuff, and the later books felt weak by comparison.

I’d like to say that I have keen memories of lively debates about the books in the class, but I don’t. That’s what I’ve got left, 36 years later. But I felt like I connected strongly with Dr. Morillo, and I started swinging by his office from time to time over the next few years. He had a small office which I remember being lined by books in bookcases, with a desk at one end by the window, and a lounge chair for visitors. I don’t remember what we talked about any longer, but I know I always enjoyed visiting, and he was always open to my visits if he wasn’t busy.

In hindsight, in my late teens and twenties I befriended several older men who I learned from. Three of them were friends I met through Amateur Press Associations, and all of them were generalists, with a variety of interests, often with connections among those interests. The impression in my memory of Dr. Morillo is that he also had a breadth of interests, and that we’d end up talking about nothing in particular whenever I’d visit.

But he was also a Shakespeare professor as his main focus. By senior year I was deep in my major in computer science, and was looking at a year of nothing but programming and related topics. Figuring I should have a little bit of variety, I signed up for Dr. Morillo’s senior Shakespeare class in the fall, and enjoyed it so much that I signed up again in the spring.

In contrast to the freshman class, this was a lot of reading – more than a play a week (and it focused on the plays, with only a little time spent on the poems). This was more than I could get through, especially when we got to the long plays (Hamlet, King Lear and Richard III), so I concentrated on the ones I knew we’d be discussing in class or had to write a short paper on. Nonetheless, I had a great time. I had by this point been heavily involved in criticizing Star Trek: The Next Generation on the USENET newsgroups, which might have helped me hone my critical literary skills that I could deploy in these classes.

I have two enduring memories of these classes. The first was of being cornered by a group of women who asked me who I was having showed up in these senior English classes when they hadn’t seen me before as they’d been going through their major. I told them that I was a CS major and that I was taking these classes for fun, which I think annoyed them somewhat (I guess the classes had a reputation for being hard).

The second was of sitting outside the English department in mid-December (New Orleans, remember? I may have even been in shorts), when Dr. Morillo walked up and asked what I was doing. I said, “I’m trying to get through the plays I wasn’t able to read during the semester, before the final.” He replied, “Well, I’m not sure if I should applaud you for trying to finish all the reading, or upbraid you for not finishing it when it was assigned.” Chuckles all around at that one.

And yes, I got A’s both semesters. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get an A in the freshman class, but I’d learned a lot in three years. Mostly about how to study.

My favorite Shakespeare play is Richard II. “Don’t you mean Richard the Third?” people ask when I say this, but no, I actually think III is pretty tedious to read. I appreciate in Richard II the inevitable downfall of, well, everyone involved: Richard is a bad king, and he’s overthrown because he’s a bad king, but the Divine Right of Kings dictates that England will be in a bad way because of his overthrow, culminating in the detestable Richard III. So it’s a bad situation with no good solution (within the parameters of Shakespeare’s setting), and its events lead to 7 more plays of troubles until things are finally resolved. It appeals to both the structure wonk in me.

I’ve never seen the play performed, and maybe it’s just no good on stage, but it really captured me in class.

I think I went by to say goodbye to Dr. Morillo when I graduated. I have a dim memory of doing so, but at this point maybe it’s more of a memory of intending to do so. I hope that I did.

Recently I was curious to find out what happened to him. He retired just a couple of years after I graduated, in his mid-60s, and moved to Washington state, where he lived until he passed away in 2015. It sounds like he had a good life after Tulane (as, to be honest, have I). I regret not thinking of trying to reconnect when I had the chance, and that my memories of him aren’t clearer but I’m glad to have known him.

Rough Season For Local Coffee

One of my many habitual behaviors is that I drink coffee most weekday afternoons. When at the office we usually walk over to Philz Coffee, though occasionally we go to Starbucks or another independent store. I had a little victory there last fall when I complained through the Philz app that the store’s outside seating was in poor repair (mostly plastic chairs and tables which were falling apart), and within a couple of weeks they had replaced most of them with sturdy metal chairs and tables. I’m taking full credit for that one.

When working at home I’d drive to Philz Coffee on Middlefield Rd. in Palo Alto, which I discovered during the pandemic. One attraction for that location even in the pre-vaccination pandemic days was that they have two nice patios with ample seating, and even over the winter it can be a nice spot to hang for 10 minutes or so as long as it isn’t actively raining.

Sadly, in early February the building which housed that Philz had a major fire, which also destroyed the Bill’s Cafe location two doors over, which Debbi and I had started patronizing for lunch last fall. Reportedly the fire started in the dry cleaners, and also damaged the liquor store which was the fourth tenant. Sadly, I expect the building will be razed and replaced with something else, likely pushing all the tenants elsewhere. There aren’t really any other retail buildings in that area, so if any of them move and re-open, it will probably be at least half a mile in either direction on Middlefield, and probably in not-as-nice a spot.

So I’ve been really missing that Philz the last couple of months. I’ve been driving down to the Philz in Sunnyvale, which also has ample seating, but in a large and usually empty public plaza, which is neither as comfortable nor as interesting for people-watching. Plus it gets cold when the wind blows! I also go to the nearby Starbucks when I don’t feel like driving that distance. (It’s only a few minutes further than the Palo Alto Philz was, but somehow that makes a difference.)

On top of that, in mid-March Philz’ main roasting warehouse had part of a roof collapse in one of the intense wind storms the area experienced in late winter. (We had three sections of fence come down at home, and several extended power outages.) Worse, one person was killed by the falling ceiling. Consequently, all Philz locations have been gradually running out of beanz, until finally last week they only had one or two varieties left. Which made me even less motivated to drive there.

It sounds like the warehouse is ready to re-open, so things should improve. But it’s been a rough winter for my usual caffeination spots.

Now if Bill’s can just find a convenient spot near us to open a new restaurant.

What a Week

It’s been a rough time around here at Château Whatever-We-Call-Our-House lately.

For me, the rough part actually started exactly two weeks ago, when I woke up to what turned out to be a pinched nerve in my right clavicle, with accompanying soreness there and down my left arm. Coincidentally this was just over 14 years since I had a pinched nerve in my neck on the right side with very similar symptoms. The difference is that last time I found a way to hold my head which could relieve the pressure temporarily, while this time I found one somewhat awkward position (holding my left arm up and bending it to touch the back of my neck) which provided a little relief, but not a lot. And it wasn’t conducive to, well, being able to do anything else. It was also worse when I was seated while driving. It was bad enough that it was disrupting my sleep.

Coincidentally I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for Friday, where my doctor – who I’ve had for 20 years – prescribed the same thing he’d given me last time – methylprednisolone, a cortical steroid. I started the treatment on Saturday and slowly felt better over the next few days.

I also learned that I am probably developing tinnitis, which stands to be somewhat annoying, although my brain already seems to be rewiring itself to ignore it pretty effectively. It’s also been coming and going, so who knows. It beats the alternative, which apparently is that hearing sounds can be associated with cardiovascular problems. No, thanks.

Should I be feeling old now? Honestly I feel rather lucky: I could be dealing with much worse. I am so over this nerve pinch, though.

The next thing arrived on Tuesday, when a rain storm followed by an incredible wind storm knocked out power at home, and at work, and in large swaths of the South Bay. It also knocked over two sections of our fence. This has happened before, about 8 years ago, and we’ve had a number of posts replaced since then since the original builder did a poor job of putting them in cement. But it seems there’s yet more to do.

The power was projected to be out until Friday night. We picked up dinner both nights, and went to bed early. The animals were very confused. Debbi’s office had power, so she went to work on Wednesday while I walked to have breakfast at Hobee’s, and then cut back the jasmine on the fallen sections of fence so the repair guy could examine it.

A downed fence is not very compatible with a dog who spends a lot of time outdoors. Domino was actually really good about not going into the neighbor’s yard, though he was curious. (His yard is also fenced in, but not necessarily dog-proof.) So I took his 30-foot leash and attached it to our outdoor couch, which did a pretty good job to keeping him from wandering.

We charged our phones and watches from our laptops – since we weren’t really using them anyway. My comic shop guy even let me charge the laptops at his store when I went over on Wednesday.

Happily, the power came back on Thursday morning, a day and a half ahead of schedule, and I was able to go back to work, too. But we did throw away a lot of refrigerated and a little frozen food. (Our chest freezer in the garage did a good job of keeping everything solid, though.) I made a grocery store run to replace most of the food we’d tossed.

Friday the fence guy came by to give us an estimate, but also the bad news that they were scheduling out in May already. Boo! He said they were so busy they might start working Saturdays and might be able to fit us in that way. So this weekend we went to Home Despot and bought some temporary fencing. I mowed the lawn for the first time this year and then put it up. Domino was a little baffled but didn’t really test it. Debbi also bought a cable with a corkscrew anchor to attach him more firmly.

Finally, today while I was out for a post-lunch walk, the fence guy called Debbi and said they had an opening today. By the time I got back they were already setting up. So I grabbed some shears and cut away the rest of the jasmine blocking one of the posts they had to replace, and by the end of the afternoon our fence was back!

Amidst all this I’ve also been working on pulling together taxes, paying bills, and trying to have a little fun here and there as well.

My nerve is not entirely better, but it’s not significantly affecting my sleep (just annoying it a little). Hopefully it will clear up over the next month or so, and that it will be more than 14 years before I get another one.

Anyway, I think I’m ready to sleep for a week or two.

What Mastodon Needs

I’ve been on Mastodon for about two and a half months now, which I think is long enough to have formed some opinions about where it could use some improvement. (“Where Mastodon Could Use Some Improvement” is a less-catchy title than “What Mastodon Needs”, though.)

Things are starting to move a bit faster in Mastodonia, since Twitter has started blocking its third-party client APIs, which killed off my preferred Twitter client, Tweetbot, a couple of weeks ago. Consequently, I have barely logged into Twitter since then, since as I’ve written before, the official Twitter client just isn’t good enough. And not supporting Elon Musk: Space Nazi is a side benefit.

So like many others I have just moved my microblogging over to Mastodon.

Some people who fondly remember the early days of Twitter (n.b.: I am not such a person) are excited about this period on Mastodon because we’re starting to see more client apps appearing in app stores. For example:

Aaron Ross Powell (@arossp@mastodon.social) toots: I love that I have half a dozen #Mastodon client apps installed on my phone, they're all under active development, and they all have as many (or more) features as the official app. It feels like the early days of Twitter apps, but without even the possibility of the rug getting pulled out from under it.

Federico Viticci (@viticci@macstories.net) toots: What a time to love indie apps. Third-party Mastodon clients are bringing back a sense of curiosity and excitement I hadn't felt since the heyday of Twitter clients in 2009-2011.

What am I missing? Are you working on one not on shown here? I'd love to know.

Time to work on a story

While this is exciting, for people like me it’s also a little concerning: I’m not going to use or even try every client that comes out (probably ????). I’m going to settle on one, and probably fairly soon, and it’s going to be the client that provides the best user experience for me, and which has the features that aren’t part of Mastodon itself which I really want.

When I wrote my initial post about Mastodon two months ago, I was using Metatext as my iOS client. That app’s developer has stopped developing it “for a while”, so I switched over to Toot!, which I like a lot and which is under very active development. Meanwhile the situation on macOS is still quite dire. I’m still using Mastonaut, though I really tried to use Whalebird for a while, but it has a lot of polish issues which pushed me back to Mastonaut even though its dev has stopped supporting it (because he now works for Apple).

One of the problems here is that interoperability between these apps is only what the Mastodon server software supports, so switching back and forth between them is awkward at best. So I think it’s really important for the Mastodon server software to start ramping up significantly to add features which will be widely-used. I don’t have any real visibility into how often it gets updated, or how many people are actively working on it, but hopefully we’ll see a lot of movement this year.

With that as a preamble, here are things that I’m really missing in my Mastodon experience:

1. Remembering my reading position: John Siracusa summed this up well:

John Siracusa (@siracusa@mastodon.social) toots: I think all Mastodon client apps should at least have the option to resume reading your timeline from the last place you left off. A surprising number of them seem not to.
Some don't even preserve your position when tapping "load more" or similar when some posts are missing above your current position.

I know not everyone reads their entire timeline, but one of the advantages of a chronological, non-"algorithmic" timeline is that people (like me) who do want to read everything can do so in a straightforward way...provided apps track and respect my last-read position.

Also, I'm told that the Mastodon API supports a last-read position, so, in theory, this state could be preserved across Mastodon client apps. Instead, it's often ignored even within a single app, let alone across apps.

Toot! remembers your position in any given instance of its client, but it isn’t synced to your other devices using Toot!, much less to other clients. Toot! sort of helps with this by not showing you every single toot in your timeline as you scroll up from your last position, but letting you click “load more” as you scroll up. It’s the bare minimum, but it’s not enough. Mastodon should remember this on the server side and let all clients access it. And it should remember it for other timelines (Local, Federated, Trending, and Lists) as well.

(I have no idea how Twitter or its third-party clients handled this. I suspect Tweetbot remembered this position and synced it to other instances of its client via iCloud, but I don’t know. And it doesn’t really matter how it works, just that it should work.)

Toot! did add an unread count to the timeline recently, which is really nice, but still not quite enough.

2. Lists need a more prominent UI: Toot! has a pretty nice UI on the iPad for accessing lists:

The lists are shown right in the sidebar, as are saved hashtag searches. Very convenient (or it would be if I actively used them – more on this in a moment). This might not scale if you have a lot of these things, but some sort of disclosure UI would probably do the job, and there might be even better ways.

By contrast, here’s the UI to access lists in the Ice Cubes app on iPad:

You have to click on the Home dropdown, click on Lists, and then select a list. This is so hidden that I’ll probably never use it. It needs to get rid of at least one click.

The UI in the Mastodon web interface is so bad I’m not even going to screenshot it. It’s not worse click-wise than Ice Cubes, but it’s much more obscure.

If Lists are going to be useful then they need to have a prominent UI. Each client should keep this in mind. I also like the model of pinned lists in both Tweetbot and the official Twitter client.

3. More powerful muting of users: This is a key feature to make Lists useful. Right now when you add someone to a list they also stay in your main timeline. If you mute them, then they get muted everywhere. This makes Lists basically useless to me: The whole point of lists for me is to disperse the people I follow.

In Tweetbot I did this with selective muting: I could mute a user from my main timeline, from lists, or from searches. Usually I’d mute them from my main timeline and show them everywhere else. It seems that Tapbots’ upcoming Mastodon client Ivory is going to have a “Filter User From Home” option:

Screenshot of Ivory's Filter User From Home option.

This will probably meet my needs, but it’s something else that the server software should handle. (I did a search a while back and found a commit to the Mastodon source from a couple of years ago which seemed to be exactly this, but it doesn’t work so it might have been backed out.)

And this is the sort of thing which is going to lead to client lock-in where people like me who rely on this functionality will not only not try clients which don’t support it, but will be reluctant to switch clients at all because we won’t want to spend time reconstructing our mute lists.

(As a small aside, Tweetbot had an annoying behavior when you turned off retweets for a user in that it would only apply to the main timeline and not to lists. This made for a pretty crappy experience for how I used lists and led me to unfollow some users who retweeted a lot. More control here would be nice, but “turn off boosts everywhere” should be the default behavior if we can only have one.)

4. Bookmarks should have a more prominent UI: Mastodon has separate “like” (called “favourite”) and “bookmark” functionality, which is great since it was never entirely clear on Twitter when you Liked something if you were expressing approval or just saving it for later. (I used Likes as bookmarks and rarely liked something I didn’t want to save to find later.)

Unfortunately Bookmarks in Mastodon have a pretty hidden UI. Most clients seem to only let you access them from your user page, and don’t have a button to bookmark a toot – it’s hidden under a “more functions” popup. I think Bookmarks are likely to be a desirable feature that lots of people will want to use and they should get a more prominent UI.

dougal (@dougal@mastodon.social) toots: I wish #Mastodon clients would make #bookmarks a first-class toolbar feature, alongside commenting, favoriting, reblogging, and sharing. One use case that happens for me a lot is to see a reference to an article I want to read. But I'm busy right now and I don't want to decide whether to star the toot until I've read the article. I want to bookmark it so that I can find it again later, so having that feature immediately available
saves me trouble and time.

(All of this might indicate that Mastodon clients will want to provide some sort of configurable interface so users can set things up so they can easily get to the features they want and put the ones they don’t behind a menu. For example I almost never look at the Federated timeline. We’ll see.)

5. Saved searches: As seen in the screenshot above, Toot! has a nice feature to save searches which as far as I can tell is exclusive to Toot!, and isn’t synced at all. This isn’t essential to me, but I used it sometimes on Twitter, and Mastodon’s hashtag-based searching is really handy in directing you to toots that are highly likely to be of interest, so I would love to see this get server support.

6. Filter by toot type or content: This was a nifty little feature of Tweetbot where you could filter whatever you’re looking at to see only tweets with media, or without replies, or various other options. I used it some and while it wasn’t essential, it was really useful when I did.

It’s definitely true that Mastodon – despite being almost 7 years old – both has a lot of room to grow, and is well-positioned to see many exciting and useful innovations in the near future. But I hope the server software authors and the app authors will keep these features in mind, as I think for many mid-range users like myself (and maybe some power users as well) there’s going to be a limit to how fully we’re willing or able to engage with Mastodon without features which significantly improve our ability to control what we read and when, and how much effort we need to put in just to get to the new material.

I expect we’ll see a lot of innovation and competition in the client space this year, but if we get to the end of 2023 and we haven’t seen at least one or two of the early items on this list knocked out on the server side, then I’m going to be pretty disappointed. And I bet there are other features I don’t even think about which are important to others to have on the system.

(P.S.: I despair that we’ll get a good Mac client any time soon. But I’d settle for an iPad client I can run on Apple Silicon Macs.)

Fifty-Four

I think it’s been a while since I’ve posted a photo of myself here, so that’s me up there, a few days after my actual birthday since I’m back-dating this entry. My hair has been doing some funky things in the front lately, it’s continuing to gray in little bits around the edges, and my face is developing those telltale signs that I’m not a young guy anymore. (The furrow between my brows is especially annoying.) I thought about being artsy and doing this in black-and-white, but that made me look terrible, so instead you get to see the color of my current favorite shirt. And my apparently larger-than-I-realized forehead.

Anyway, John Scalzi posts a portrait of himself each year on his birthday, so maybe I should do the same.

My birthday fell on Martin Luther King Day this year, which meant 3-day birthday weekend! Saturday we watched the 49ers obliterate the Seahawks in the playoffs (sad Pete Carroll is best Pete Carroll), and in the evening we went to dinner at Sundance the Steakhouse, which was as good as I’d remembered. We’d only gone once since the pandemic started – when they still had an outdoor seating area the winter of 2020-21 – and I’ve missed it.

Sunday we went over to visit our friends the Hoffmans, where Domino got to play with their pups, including their current foster pup who I think needed to get some orientation to other dogs. It has been raining like crazy in California for the last month, and there was more rain on Sunday, so everyone mostly stayed inside. I played Magic with their son D which was fun – introduced him to a different 2-player draft format – and then they made pot roast for dinner and a chocolate cake for dessert.

We had a quiet Monday, and Debbi made a cinnamon Chocolate Chip cake for dessert, which ended up especially moist and yummy. We ate some while watching Moon Knight as we’re still catching up on television series from last year.

I used to throw parties for my birthday, but even without the pandemic I think I’d enjoy having low-key ones, as I do in reality. I miss holding our summer open house parties, but otherwise I’m happy to see friends in smaller groups these days.

A Very Doggo Christmas

Debbi and I are both off work this week for the holidays. We haven’t really been feeling in the holiday spirit this year: It took us three weeks to put up most of our outdoor Christmas lights (in part because it rained two consecutive weekends), and we decided not to put up a tree. I’m not entirely sure why, but December has been a real slog for us.

I think the enduring memory of this holiday is going to be taking Domino to the park, which Debbi has been doing for a few weeks, and I started joining them in the afternoons the Friday before Christmas. We have a surprising number of dogs in the neighborhood, and many of their owners bring them over in the morning or late afternoon to let them off leash so they can run around. The park is completely fenced in (it’s a locked-gate school field during the school day), so it’s pretty safe for trained dogs to get off leash.

Training Domino to coexist for our three cats has been a big source of stress for us this year, and while he’s getting better, he and Jackson have some sort of antagonism going on, which has meant we’ve had to work to keep them segregated a lot of the time. He’s doing better with Simon and Edison, but not so we can leave them alone together.

The park is different. While he can be barky towards trucks, bikes, and joggers, at the park he goes around and says hi to every dog and human, and plays nice with pretty much everyone unless they’re a jerk to him. He enjoys chasing and being chased by other dogs, and while he sometimes wanders off a bit – sometimes even behind a building – he’s always come back so far. Debbi thinks he suddenly realizes he can’t see us and comes sprinting back.

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying these outings. We’re getting to know some neighbors – even if we only know them by their dogs’ names. I am still definitely more of a cat person, though.

Christmas Eve we went to Cascal for dinner, and then drove around looking at Christmas lights as we do every year. I noticed my car was struggling a bit to start at each place we stopped, and figured the battery might be nearing the end, and resolved to call on Monday to get it replaced.

We had a quiet Christmas Day. Debbi made very yummy cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and I made my traditional meatloaf and potatoes gratin for dinner. Last year I had a pretty stressful time making the meal, so this year I looked ahead to plan. Debbi suggested I could prepare the potatoes and hold them until I was ready to put them in the oven with the meatloaf, and it turned out that just starting the potatoes first made all the difference, because they had to boil for a while before baking, and I used that time to make the meatloaf. Anyway, it was all delicious as always, and I added the beet salad that I concocted for Thanksgiving dinner. We also called our families during the day.

Our gray-and-white tabby cat Jackson sitting in the middle of a pile of wrapping paper

Monday I made an appointment for my car for Wednesday, but it turned out my car didn’t start, so I figured I’d have to have AAA tow it in. Worse, late in the day we encountered a serious problem with our freezer: It had been having trouble closing at times, and now was both not opening all the way, nor closing all the way. I finally managed to close it after 15 minutes of tinkering, but we removed the important stuff to our chest freezer in the garage and decided to just leave the troubled freezer closed until it could be looked at.

Monday night Debbi ended up with what we think was food poisoning, maybe from one of the chicken pot pies we’d had for dinner after rescuing it from the freezer. It made her pretty miserable for a couple of days. We took COVID tests in case it was that, but they both came back negative.

On Tuesday Debbi made an appointment with a repair company for Friday – the fridge is still under manufacturer’s warranty, so we crossed our fingers that this would just be an inconvenience. Meanwhile I called AAA to tow my car, but the tow truck driver saw that I had a AAA-installed battery (from 2018) and that it would be a lot cheaper to do that than to go to the dealer. And indeed after a couple of phone calls (by him and me), we determined that it would be less than half as much, so I did that, and 30 minutes later the car was starting again. I cancelled the appointment for Wednesday.

Thursday we had our friends Chad and his son D over in the afternoon and evening for several hours of playing Magic together. Their family has also had a month, so I think they appreciated some downtime away from home. I gave D a playmat and some packs from The Brothers’ War as a late Christmas gift. We also picked up pizzas and subs for dinner from our nearby hole-in-the-wall place, which went over well. They were also Domino’s foster family and I think Domino really liked seeing them, even though I think he was confused that they were at our house and their dogs weren’t.

Friday we waited around for the repair guy, who arrived 3 hours into his 4 hour window. Fortunately it turned out to be an easy fix. The freezer had a number of cables inside which were getting twisted and blocking the track. I wondered why they’d have cables like that rather than just having the drawer be on the track, and it turns out – they didn’t. The cables were there to keep things from shifting around during transit, and they weren’t removed when the fridge was delivered like they were supposed to be. I don’t know why we were able to open the freezer at all, but the repair guy removed them all and it’s working fine now. The stupidity of the problem aside, it’s a relief that it wasn’t a problem with the freezer that could break again in another year.

Over the week I also watched the Watchmen TV series from 2019, which overall was excellent. I suspect people who aren’t pretty familiar with the graphic novel wouldn’t get as much out of it as people who are, but it’s well worth watching anyway. I’m not surprised the show runner decided not to do a second series, because it comes to a pretty definitive conclusion.

Finally, we’ve had a quiet day today. Domino has been going a bit stir crazy because it’s raining out and he doesn’t want to be out in the rain, but he doesn’t want to be inside all the time either. Debbi took him for a couple of walks, and then gave him a bath. I’ve mostly been hanging out on the couch. Tonight we’re playing games remotely with family and friends (probably Jackbox), and I’ll likely go for a walk after the rain ends since I haven’t gotten any exercise today.

2022 has been a pretty bumpy year, with a lot of ups and downs, and I suspect 2023 will be similar. But I’m hoping we don’t have to get as many things repaired.

Steven Brust: Vlad the Assassin

Last spring I read and reviewed Steven Brust‘s first novel Jhereg, which is also the first in his Dragaerian series of novels, most of which are about the human assassin Vlad Taltos living in the house-based Dragaerian empire. Despite its short length (though not really all that short for when it was published, in the early 1980s), I was really impressed with its scope and world building, while still having a lively and textured story.

I’ve read several more in the series since then (yes yes, I am a slow reader, but these are not the only books I’ve been reading), and reached what I think is a good point to review a batch of them. Spoiler: I don’t think any of them attain the height of Jhereg, though most of them are entertaining in their own way. Consequently I don’t have as much to say about each of them as I did about Jhereg, so I’m covering them all in this entry.

I’ll try to keep this spoiler-light.

These early novels in the series are published out of chronological order. In Jhereg, Vlad is an established mid-level mafia boss for the Jhereg, he’s married to a woman named Cacti, and he has powerful Draegarian sorcerer friends. Yendi takes place a number of years earlier, when he’s a low-level boss, and gets into. turf war with a rival boss. The early chapters spend a lot of time on Vlad’s territory (including a map!) and organization, and it is, frankly, kind of dull.

It gets more lively when his rival starts trying to assassinate him, which leads to him meeting and falling in love with Cawti, while he’s convalescing from one attempt. The two fall head over heels in love (and into bed) with each other, and while I understand that this happens sometimes, it felt very abrupt and unlikely. I would have chalked it up to an awkward moment in the story which didn’t quite work, except that it unfortunately sets the tone for Cawti’s presence in the series: She’s not really there as a character, we never get a feel for Vlad’s relationship with or love for her – it’s mostly told and not shown. She feels less fleshed out than Sethra Lavode, who only appears in a few scenes across all these books.

The story otherwise is structured as a mystery/puzzle similar to Jhereg, but while the final conflict is lively enough, the reveal of who’s behind it feels not at all well set up. This is in keeping with the spirit of the Yendi house in Dragaera, but it doesn’t work well in a story of this sort.

While most of the Vlad novels are named after Dragaerian great houses, Yendi seems an odd choice of title for this one. Sure, the villain is a Yendi, but it’s such a small part of the book, and doesn’t even seem to capture the spirit of the story overall that it feels forced. This isn’t the first time I’ll feel this way about the title.

Cover of Brokedown Palace by Steven Brust

This is not a Vlad novel, but takes place an indeterminate – but large – number of years earlier, in the Eastern lands of Fenario that Vlad’s human family hails from. Fenario is ruled by the eldest of four brothers, Kind Laszlo, with the middle two as his right-hand men. His youngest brother, Prince Miklos, has a strained relationship with him. The family’s difficulties are also embodied in the the decaying palace in which they live, problems which Miklos perceives but Laszlo feels defensive about, further straining their relationship. Following an especially violent falling out, Miklos spends a couple of years in the west, in the lands of Faerie – which we know are Dragaera – and returns to try to save his family and homeland.

The story has the feel of a lengthy fable, with characters which feel like archetypes rather than rounded people, and events which often seem arbitrary and portentous, leading to a climax which seems like it should be meaningful but felt empty to me. I’ve read that the book is pretty polarizing, so put me on the side of those who didn’t enjoy it so much. Many of the details of the setting show up in the later Vlad novels, so in that sense I’m glad to have read it, but I’d say it rates at the bottom of the books in the series I’ve read so far.

Teckla takes place not long after Jhereg. Cawti gets involved with some revolutionaries in South Adrilankha – the section of the city where most of the Easterners (i.e., humans) live, including Vlad’s grandfather. Humans and the Teckla house are oppressed in Dragaerian society, and the revolutionaries want to end the oppression. Trying to keep Cawti from getting killed, Vlad gets tangled up with the Jhereg boss who’s attacking them, as well as the revolutionaries themselves, including their leader, Kelly, even as his marriage is disintegrating.

There are a lot of moving pieces to this one, but the overall impact is badly undercut by Cawti still being just a shadow of a character, and us having very little insight or investment in her and Vlad’s relationship. Their struggles feel very true-to-life – Vlad doesn’t understand Cawti’s behavior, he’s driven to try to protect her whether she wants it or not, and he makes some bad decisions as a result – but it’s just not a very good story. The thread of the oppression of the lower classes would be plenty on its own, maybe even better if Cawti wasn’t involved, or if they didn’t have such a big wall between them. But, it is what it is. The ending feels too pat, but I think this volume is largely about putting storylines in motion.

Taltos again rolls back the clock and takes place even before Yendi, when Vlad is a fairly new member of the jhereg. It’s the most enjoyable entry since Jhereg, even if it is mostly filling in missing pieces to his background. The main story explains the origins of his friendship (or is ‘alliance’ a better term?) with Morrolan, Aliera and Seth Lavode. Interspersed are passages which detail his life from childhood to joining the Jhereg, about his father and grandfather and developing his hatred of Dragaerians.

Unlike earlier novels which have a “vexing puzzle to solve” structure, this one has a combination of coming-of-age and mythic-quest structure, which gives it a rather different feel. The coming-of-age part feels more organic and satisfying, while the later mythic-quest part feels a bit preprogrammed (as these stories often do – it’s why I don’t care for The Dark is Rising, which takes that fault to the extreme), though it does humanize Morrolan considerably over his previous appearances. In the aggregate it does a lot to tie together the different pieces of Vlad’s life and personality – all the pieces except his marriage, really. If anything his life as an assassin feels like it never got explored as deeply as it could have, which is a shame since that part of his life takes a sharp turn in the next book.

This volume brings us back to the events following Teckla, but quickly head off in a surprising direction when the Demon Goddess of Vlad’s Fenarian heritage personally hires Vlad to kill the king of an island some distance from the empire. Vlad does this, but has to be rescued by Morrolan, Aliera and Cawti when he’s unable to get away – a good trick since most sorcery is blocked on the island, including most teleportation. The assassination leads to war between the Empire and the island, which in turn escalates the conflict between the Empire and Kelly’s revolutionaries, which in turn put’s Cawti at risk and forces Vlad to try to protect her.

The story jumps all over the place, and ends with one of Vlad’s more daring gambits to “solve” the problem. It also raises serious questions about the roles of deities in Dragaera (the risk when bringing gods into a story as characters is that you inevitably see them as having their own motivations and foibles, and we certainly get that here; they’re really just much more powerful characters. But perhaps that’s what Brust is going for, showing that the fable-like feel of Brokedown Palace isn’t really how things are). But it is definitely lively.

Phoenix seems to mark the end of the first phase of the series, as Vlad leaves the Jhereg and puts his old life behind him – or at least announces his intent to do so; I guess the book is called Phoenix is because he’s experiencing a rebirth. It feels like the end of the first act in a larger story, setting up whatever follows. (The house of the Phoenix plays no real role in the story.) I’m not really going to miss the Jhereg (other than Vlad’s lieutenant, Kragar, who is the most entertaining character in this slice of Vlad’s life), and Vlad’s role as a mafia boss has been feeling increasingly fraught for the nominal hero of the series (to be fair he was getting uncomfortable with his job a bit at a time over a few novels). Of course I won’t miss Cawti either (though I expect she’ll show up again). I bet we’re heading into more serious Dragaeran territory next, which means more of Morrolan, Aliera, and Seth Lavode. Which is fine with me as they’ve been the most interesting members of the supporting cast.

I think these novels feel more like an author’s early novels than Jhereg did, fumbling around a bit trying to figure out what their ultimate direction is, or maybe just the right way to head there. Despite their flaws, I’m looking forward to what comes next.

Short Ribs Day

For Thanksgiving Debbi and I went over to our friends Chad & Camille’s house, bringing Domino so he could play with their dogs.

There was actually a fair amount of prep involved: Camille was making the main dish and hors d’ouevres, but we bought the sides: Debbi made 10 pounds (!!) of mashed potatoes, green beans with bacon and maple syrup, and an apple pie, as well as bringing a pumpkin pie. I decided to try making a beet salad, with candied pecans. I also brought the makings of Aviation cocktails, since Chad and I are both gin drinkers. So Wednesday was mostly a day of cooking and baking at our house (followed by comic book night, of course).

Thursday morning I also convinced Debbi to give me a haircut, as it was getting uncomfortably long for me.

We’re having unseasonably warm weather this month – it’s cracked 70°F a few days this week. I almost wore shorts! The four of us and their kids H & D played games outside for a while before settling back to munch and chat. And that’s pretty much how the day went – other than revving up the dogs from time to time – through dinner, until we all collapsed in food comas. (And it got cold enough after sundown that I was glad I didn’t wear shorts.) The short ribs were fall-off-the-bone delicious. I put a little too much dressing on the salad but otherwise it turned out great.

Debbi and I have been doing Thanksgiving dinner by ourselves for quite a few years so this was a really nice change of pace.

Shorts ribs and gravy over mashed potatoes, green beans with bacon and maple syrup, and beet salad. Partly eaten.

Mastodon

A popular destination for participants in the Twitter diaspora has been Mastodon, which broadly resembles Twitter (you have a timeline of people you follow, you respond to their posts, like them, and add them to your own timeline) but is different in some key ways. The most important way is that it’s a distributed network, where people join a specific instance (the term for a server), but can follow people on that or any other instanced.

I joined Mastodon briefly back in 2018 during some other scare over Twitter that I don’t even remember anymore, but the instance I joined is now defunct. With the Twitpocalypse apparently upon us I looked around for a new instance. I was reluctant to join one of the really big instances (like mastodon.social), though I’m now not sure why. Mastodon gives you a timeline of people you follow, but also one of everyone on your instance, so I decided to look for an instance with a community I might enjoy following, and ended up on sfba.social, and you can find me here.

Things are moving pretty fast and people are now recommending joining instances which are well-supported, able to handle the influx of new users, and have good moderation policies regarding the usual racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic and other shitheads. While I don’t think my instance has been put to the moderation test yet (though it does have a list of limited and blocked instances), they’re doing pretty well on the other scores – it was under 3k users when I joined, doubled that in a day, and is now closing in on 30k, and while there have been a few bumps they’ve been ramping up capacity and asking for donations to pay for it.

As a Twitter substitute Mastodon works pretty well, depending on what you’re looking for, and keeping in mind that it hasn’t yet scaled to anywhere near the size of Twitter. For example, you can’t limit who can reply to your “toots” (as posts are called there), and it’s not even clear how that would work in a distributed system like this. I also don’t think the Legion of Shitheads has yet descended on the Fediverse (as the collection of federated servers is called), so there hasn’t been a real trial of the agglomeration’s moderation facilities.

The web interface is serviceable, and there are some good apps for iOS out there – I’m using Metatext. macOS apps are more of a work in progress: I’m using Mastonaut there, and it’s okay, but (for example) it doesn’t support bookmarks. (I’ve also been using Metatext on my Apple Silicon Macs, and it’s really close as to whether I like it better than Mastonaut there. So far Mastonaut is winning.) I also just started using Toot!, as it released its first update in a couple of years this week and it has good word-of-mouth. (It’s not available for Apple Silicon Macs, though.)

There’s a lot of opportunity for UI innovation in these apps, because for the most part they’re fairly small refactors of the web UI. Maybe Tapbots will fill that space. I wasn’t really around for the era of innovation in Twitter clients over a decade ago, so this is a new experience for me. All the clients I’ve tried so far are superficially similar but can be very different in the details. UI design is hugely influential in whether certain features are discoverable and usable, and if people are using a variety of different clients then that could really impact how the system evolves.

Functionally, I appreciate that Mastodon separates favourites (a.k.a. likes) from bookmarks, as I mainly used likes on Twitter as bookmarks and so was somewhat stingy with what I’d like. I’m starting to use each differently on Mastodon.

I haven’t yet tried the lists feature. I use lists a lot on Twitter, but in an idiosyncratic way: Most people I add to a list I mute from my main timeline, but a few I don’t, and I don’t know if I can do any of that on Mastodon. Lists looks like it’s not yet a first-class feature, as it’s somewhat obscure in the web UI, really obscure in Metatext, and doesn’t seem to be supported yet in Toot! (though it might be coming).

One thing I really miss from Twitter is an unread count for my main timeline. I realize the distributed nature of Mastodon probably makes this a little tricky, but it seems like it ought to be possibly to provide a reasonable estimate. I also miss syncing my read location across my devices, something Tweetbot does really well for Twitter. I read social media across something like 7 devices (3 iOS, 4 Macs), so it gets annoying to always be scrolling up to find the last few toots I’ve read.

It feels like Mastodon is still in its honeymoon period, and I see quite a few tweets indicating that people are aware of that. The culture is a combination of what the software supports, enforces or guides users to, and the norms that long-time users have imposed. If the system continues to grow, I expect those norms will be gradually (and at times abruptly) transformed as newer users vote with their behavior for what sorts of norms they’re willing to follow, and what they want to encourage others to follow. For example, there’s currently a norm of putting a broad array of topics behind content warnings, which hides them until you click on it, and I have a hard time seeing that enduring at the level it is today.

Mastodon seems to have tipped into having a critical mass of users, so I’ve been hanging out there more often. (A few folks I used to follow on Facebook but who dropped off of that platform have also popped up there.) I think it has a lot of challenges ahead of it, though, perhaps as soon as this year. For example, once the shitheads show up en masse I expect there will be many blockings and bannings and evictions, and some sites “defederating” other sites so they no longer receive their content. I think it’s gonna be rough, at times acrimonious, and might take quite a while to settle into a steady state (which I bet will involve several largely-separate federations). And even then it will continue evolving, just as Twitter did, as users find new things they want to and can do with it, and the software maintainers encourage some of those things and not others.

(This doesn’t include the potential issues of the U.S. or E.U. governments turning their eyes to certain instances via – for example – DMCA takedown notices, or other potentially complicated liabilities. Social media in 2022 is not social media in 2010 or 2006 or 1999, as this thread makes abundantly clear (TW: stories of some pretty nasty things the poster saw while working at LiveJournal).)

So far Mastodon gets a thumbs-up from me, and I’ve been using it about as often as I use Twitter, sometimes posting to both places, and sometimes only to one. I can see some of the rough edges and the barriers to entry that it presents, especially to non-technical users. Hopefully its growth will lead to faster evolution of the platform, although as a largely volunteer endeavor there’s no guarantee of that. But it seems to have handled the early waves of the Twitter diaspora fairly well, so I’m optimistic.