A retreatant from Edmonton who had spent a lot of time in Myanmar recommended the book Mindfulness with Breathing by Buddhadasa. It is apparently a very popular book and by a famous monk named Ajahn Buddhadasa that I didn’t know.
Later I met a different retreatant who told a story about going to Thailand in the 1990s where her brother was about to ordain as a Forest Monk. She was inspired to learn to meditate, so they sent her to monastery that taught beginners. This was Suan Mokkh in southern Thailand whose abbot was… Ajahn Buddhadasa.
Interesting! Two references to Ajahn Buddhadasa in one day. 🤔
This got me thinking a little. Suan Mokkh is a monastery in southern Thailand near the city of Surat Thani. In March of 1995 I was in the area on a school trip. We visited a monastery and I remember walking around the grounds, through the trees, and seeing the biggest spider I have ever seen in my life just hanging out in a massive 5 foot tall web, nobody bothering him. It was my first lesson in ahimsa or “non-harm”. I took a photo of the spider that I didn’t realize was super blurry because… well, film camera. Anyways, at that monastery was the first time I ever interacted with a Buddhist monk (as I have mentioned before). I was 16 years old.
I got to thinking… could it be?
Then I jumped out of bed at midnight and dug around in my memory box. I found that photo of the giant blurry spider and another picture of a young monk. But no shots of the entrance or any signs of the place. As is the unsatisfactory nature of life, I kept on digging around until I found my travel journal from that trip.
Turning to the page marked “March 18 1995” it said:
The next stop was at a place called Suan Mokkh. This little enclave of monks was the home of Ajahn Buddhadasa, a famous monk who is said to have reached enlightenment. The monastery was very interesting and we talked with two monks, about the Dhamma of course. One told us a story of the turtle, and the other told us of the deer with one head and four bodies. … He also showed us a picture of the pyre where they cremated Ajahn Buddhadasa. The amazing think is, you can see a fire that looks suspicious like the Ajahn, wai-ing, formed by the flames!
On a pleasant summer’s eve, as the setting sun lit the tops of classic New York skyscrapers, I sat in Madison Square Garden Park in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. Ultimately it was here that lead me to pick up Daniel Francis’s Becoming Vancouver, a quick history of the city of a city that has been central to my whole life.
You see, while watching the crowds in the Manhattan park during my trip to New York last August (photos) I started listening to 99% Invisible’s breakdown of The Powerbroker, a veritable tome by celebrated author Robert Caro which chronicled the career of power-hungry urban planner Robert Moses, a man who transformed New York City over a 40 year career, and certainly not all for the good. The podcast series is excellent and I have been recommending it non-stop. It really is a sordid tale with many generalizable lessons on leadership, ambition, and justice. Once 99pi concluded the series they had a Breakdown of the Breakdown episode when they were asked by listeners: are there any other Robert Moses-like figures in other cities?
Looking for a Moses
Which brings me to Daniel Francis’s excellent book Becoming Vancouver. Weighing in at less than a fifth of Caro’s Powerbroker, and covering three times the timespan (from the Musqueam meeting the first Spanish explorers to the havoc wrought by COVID), it is a breezy read filled full of the kind of content you expect in a city biography: factoids about geography, place name etymology, maps showing the expansion of the city, funny anecdotes, serious incidents, and in general the book simple answers the perennial question “Why is our city like this?”
What a great reflection! Why is our city the way it is? It is really important that we know the history and stories of our shared community. It is what puts us on the path to being citizens, rather then mere passive consumers.
New Yorkers have much love for their city, but also a multitude of complaints (as you will hear if you pick up the 99pi podcast) — many of which can be tied back to the urban planner Robert Moses.
Vancouver certainly has its share of inconveniences, inconsistencies, and hypocrasies. So I set out to find if Vancouver had it’s own Robert Moses.
Jericho used to be known as “Jerry’s Cove” named after logger Jeremiah Rogers
On Jan 1, 1922 traffic was switched from the left (British-style) to the right-hand side of the road
1400 citizens died in WWI
Mostly it was interesting to see a few of the “red threads” that have strung their way throughout Vancouver history since the beginning: the role of real estate speculation, the city’s battle with drugs, and race relations.
Throughout the book are constant tales of housing shortages, police incompetence, and just endless incidents of racism against every sort of non-white person regardless whether they were here before or came after the British settled the area. Francis does an excellent job engaging critically with the history. Furthermore he also weaves another thread:
the always present fault line in Vancouver’s history between the globalists, who promoted a vision of unlimited growth, and the localists, who preferred to emphasize their version of liveability.”
There is tension between preserving Vancouver’s natural beauty and pushing forward it’s urban development.
Vancouver skyline with mountains in the background and water in the foreground. Source
The coming of a powerbroker
Like any urban biography Becoming Vancouver is features vignettes of a number of politicians, planners, and all-round characters, but the one that jumped out to me was Gerald Sutton Brown described as was “the most powerful bureaucrat in the city” during the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in Jamaica, Sutton Brown was educated in Southampton, UK and ended running the county planning office that included the cities of Manchester and Liverpool. He came over to Canada in 1952 to become Vancouver’s first chief planner.
You can learn more about the background of Sutton Brown and his impact on the city in this video by former Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan:
While there are some great visuals and some interesting facts, that video is particularly hagiographic, pushes a market-based agenda, and completely ignores the problematic aspects of Sutton Brown’s policies.
Daniel Francis’s book treats the Great Freeway Debate of 1967 with a more critical eye. Sutton Brown’s “Project 200” proposed a waterfront freeway cutting through Vancouver’s Chinatown and Hogan’s Alley, the core of Vancouver’s Black community. Sam Sullivan’s video does not question why it was stopped. The answer is the story of the Chinese community organizing and fending off the freeway plan, saving their houses. This case is important, and in fact is the final study in the book Moved by the State which covers how “the Canadian government relocated people, often against their will, in order to improve their lives” during the 1950s to 1970s. Although their protest was successful, it was not complete. Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver’s small black neighbourhood, was razed in the late 1960s in the name of “urban renewal”, and the Georgia Viaduct still stands in its place. (Check this out if you are interested in learning more about Hogan’s Alley).
God, or just a mid-century white dude
Was Sutton Brown a “powerbroker”? I could find no Caro-like biographies of the man, but I did come across this paper that paints Sutton Brown in a most Robert Moses-like light: “Is Sutton Brown God?”: Planning Expertise and the Local State in Vancouver, 1952-73” The paper’s title comes from a protest sign during the Great Freeway Debate of 1967. Sutton Brown, the “firm-handed dictator of city services” had “predetermined the freeway route without ever engaging the political process.” This will sound entirely familiar to those that know the legacy of Robert Moses in New York.
Furthermore:
Between 1967 and 1972, the public, aldermen, provincial politicians, academics, the press, and elements within the civic bureaucracy repeatedly criticized the role of planning expertise in the affairs of the local state. “Who is really running the city?” was the headline that summed up sentiment.
After a more than 20 year long career, Sutton Brown resigned his position (some said before he could be fired).
The Province, no friend of TEAM [a political party], wrote that Sutton Brown’s departure was a “guillotine job,” citing his twenty-one years of “brilliant service,” even if he was “an aloof dictator.” Similarly, Alderman Hardwick said that he did not blame Sutton Brown for being the real mayor of Vancouver as council had pushed the role on him instead of doing its job.
I am not sure if Sutton Brown is was a powerbroker in the mold of Robert Moses, or was just a powerful white British man during the 1950s, doing what he do. But I do think his case is worthy of a more indepth investigation. If Daniel Francis doesn’t want the assignment, maybe 99pi will take it? 😉
This is a beautiful interview with Lewis Gordon, scholar of the work of Franz Fanon. Gordon contends that many people mis-interpret Fanon, especially around his views of political violence. Gordon’s reframing of Fanon is succinct and captures a side I didn’t get before.
Here are couple of choice quotes, but the episode is short and I encourage you to listen tot he whole thing. Dr Gordon is a great speaker.
As a psychiatrist:
[The book] Black Skin White Masks is the argument that there is such a phenomenon as a sick society. Sometimes the people who suffer the most in a society suffer from actually being healthy. Fanon argues that colonialism produces what he calls sociogenetic, and this means socially produced forms of disorders that take the form not only of mental disorders, but forms of suffering that are political. As a consequence, if there are politically induced forms of suffering, then one has to develop political solutions for them.
(my emphasis added… just look around!)
As an activist:
In other words, Fanon argued that if you’re in a war, your goal should be to end a war to start a struggle for coexistence. Whereas there are people who are in a war who are onlly focused on one thing: the elimination of the enemy. So for them, even if they win, they keep fighting because their ultimate goal is noncoexistence, the absolute elimination of the other. And that’s what Fanon was against.
and:
The issue was the liberation of humankind. He was a radical humanist.
As an existentialist:
Well, here’s the thing. There are varieties of idealism. There are idealisms that are based on the notion of absolute perfection, but there are other idealisms that are based on the notion of reasonability and maturity. For instance, if you think about being a parent, what is an ideal parent? An ideal parent is a parent who is reasonable enough to enable their children to grow up and have room to live their lives. However, an ideal perfect parent in some models is like a god. A parent so perfect that there’s no room for the subsequent generations to grow, to emerge because daddy or mommy were absolutely perfect.
I like to think that this is the sort of idealist that I strive to be: one that can welcome others and co-create a pluralistic utopia. See: “we all can’t be Buddhas”
Really appreciate @mikerugnetta.com’s audio essay on Neverpo.st about the aesthetics of US Fascism and AI slopaganda/agit slop. He asks: “Is there something inherently fascistic about these technologies as many of these takes and headlines seem to suggest?” and takes a deep dive into media theory, coming away with a nuanced understanding of AI, its usage, and its relationship to a hollow power.
Some choice quotes (with my emphasis):
[Walter Benjamin] declared famously that fascism seeks to give the masses expression, but nothing else, thus compacting those masses into a frenzied block. No rights, no change in property relations, just feelings of power and feelings of dominance through available imagery. No actual political agency is granted. No self determination is awarded.
Talking about the Trump administration:
They are knowledgeable about, maybe even obsessed with, the media. How it’s made, how it’s useful, the social and economic position it occupies, and the power it commands. Slop, sludge, slopaganda, and agit slop included. They are posters at heart more so than they are leaders. They would appear to put more effort, effort into creating the appearance of a fascist state, a state itself all about appearances, than anything beyond that.
And finally the kicker:
artificial intelligence is not a tool of this administration, but a crutch for a group of people who otherwise don’t really know how to do much of anything… what happens when you find a way to take away that crutch? Would they not stumble?
We cannot afford cede this technological ground, we must seize the means of compute.
Early Xmas!🎄🎁 New kit! 📷 I mulled getting a Fujifilm X100VI when they came out but wanted something smaller. Been watching the iteration of GRs and when they announced the IV I signed up right away. Gonna carry this thing everywhere!
Upon arrival the leaves on poplar trees surrounding the vihara were about half green and half yellow. By the time I left they were mostly coloured gold, glowing with the rays of the early fall sun. There have been many changes at the monastery since my last visit: a new flower garden, three new rock gardens, a series of tiered decks, a covered walkway between the main house and the office/recording studio. Much of this and more was done during 2021 in the early part of the COVID pandemic when there were no guests. The monastery also installed Starlink which gave them a much faster Internet connection allowing Ajahn Sona to do Sunday livestreams on YouTube, answering questions from around the world.
Those global live streams have had an effect. One of the guests at the retreat was an Ajahn Sona YouTube fan coming all the way from Belgium! He was very excited to see Ajahn Sona during Tea Time, which happens twice a week in the intimate setting of the tea room. (He is always better up close and in person when he can really feed off the crowd! 😄). The kitchen steward was from Ithica, New York, also attracted to the monastery via Internet broadcast. Other guests came from the Vancouver area, Kelowna, Calgary, Edmonton, and of course nearby Kamloops. There were 10 of us in all. Most were staying for the week, but some were 3 weeks into a month-long retreat.
Four monastics live at the monastery full time, as well as three stewards. The monastery is a bit short-staffed right now (and is hiring for a few positions if you are interested.)
This week was for personal retreats, each person moved at their own pace. Everyone would get together at 5:30am for a 45 minute seated meditation session in the sala (meditation hall), and then again at 7pm for some chanting and meditation. We would meet for a light breakfast together at 7am, and then again at 11:30 for the main meal of the day (I have to say that of all the temples and monasteries I have been to, Birken has the best tacos! 🌮). At 5pm we would gather for some tea (and maybe a chocolate or two) and ask questions of the monastics. I gained many insights into wisdom during these discussions.
Other than that everyone was left on their own to do walking or sitting meditation, reading, yoga, or hiking — which a lot of people did because the weather was so fantastic. The pre-autumn air is so crisp, and the gold poplar leaves danced in the wind against brilliant clear blue skies. The closes neighbour to the Birken Forest Monastery is 10km away, so there is plenty of space to wander through the woods contemplating life, or walk with new dhamma friends talking through one another’s journey on the Buddhist path.
Some scenes from around the monastery by resident monk Ajahn Jotipalo
There was stress at the monastery when one day we had a bit of a COVID scare. A couple of people had been exposed outside the monastery the previous week. Immediately they masked up and took tests. After a while Ajahn Sona came down the stairs into the dining hall where the rest of us waited: “Here is the announcement!” he said, raising his arms, “There is a lot of negativity in here! As in, the tests were all negative. Excellent!” he broke out in a big grin, and we knew we could continue on in silent calm.
The last time I was at Birken was 2019, a very stressful time as I was planning to end my career in edtech and an out to embark on a journey living on a remote island between Japan and Korea. In the intervening years I completed the Upasika Program (through Birken) and maintained a meditation practice (I am currently on a 552 day streak, but probably have only missed about 7 or 8 days in the past 3 years). My home and work life have both relatively settled. So I was not anywhere as stressed out as back then. Even so, I basically slept for the first two days as my body relaxed, of wringing out all of my stress.
For me, this retreat was about settling my mind to consider next steps. 2025 is the Year of the Snake, when you are meant to explore this way and that, and not make any big commitments. It is a time for re-invention, to shed your skin. This advice has served me well this year as we have been settling into our new house and I started consulting for a few different businesses. We have been exploring our new community to determine exactly where best to commit in the near future.
Spending a week at the monastery has let my mind calm. Like the proverbial pond after a storm: the muddied water gently floats to the bottom and the pool is clear again, allowing me to better see my options. It has also energized me to continue my study and participation in this community. I really appreciate being at the monastery, able to interact with others on the same spiritual journey, and getting advice from the monastics.
In the preface to Steven Erikson’s notoriously “difficult” novel Gardens of the Moon the author describes the first book of his Malazan series as beginning “halfway through a seeming marathon — you either hit the ground running and stay on your feet or you are toast.” The world-building of Malazan is rich and lived-in, full of character gems, jaded by a grimdark world of warfare:
I’m writing a history and fictional or not, history has no real beginning point
Fantastic realism.
And sometimes, on midnight afternoons, I ask myself: what if I’d picked up that fat wooden ladle, and slopped the whole mess down the reader’s throat, as some (highly successful) Fantasy writers do and have done? Would I now see my sales ranking in the bestseller’s lists?
No Steven! Don’t sell us short!
One last word to all you nascent writers out there. Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.
That’s right! 💪 Talk yo sh✻t!
Medium matters
To be honest, when I first read Gardens of the Moon in 2017 I bounced off the book. From my original review:
This is the first in 10 novels, but reads like it is about novel number 6. About halfway through he finally settles on a group of characters to follow — at least, it seems that way, but he keeps introducing new characters and even new unknown baddies right up to the final chapters! I don’t know who edited this book, but that person needed reinforcements. Erikson has a million ideas for world-building, and every time I was about to give up on the book, he would keep me around for some intriguing concept or set piece. However the lack of any narrative build just renders this story as overly complex and disorienting. I am not likely to pick up the second.
Why did I bounce so hard? I think it was because of the medium. The nice thing about listening to audiobooks is you can do other things while you are “reading”… but some books cannot be given just a portion of your attention.
This time around I got the book in dead tree format so I could keep things grounded.
Supplements
For this marathon you gotta be in shape, so my friends got me some supplemental material to help me along the way.
First, this useful blog series originally from Tor which features two people reading a couple chapters at a time and writing down their commentary. One person is a new reader and the other is a veteran who is careful not to give any spoilers from the future. More than once they caught things that I missed, which helped me feel like I wasn’t falling behind.
Another useful aid is this set of companion guides. Each scene from the book is captured on a single slide with important bits you are supposed to remember conveniently highlighted. This is great for when you need to refresh your memory a bit, say after having put the book down for a few days.
Reading tips
The Malazan series is consistently rated up there with the best fantasy series of all time. And like most things that are difficult but worth it, going in with the right mindset can be a game-changer. Gardens of the Moon is not a lazy book, and you gotta be an active reader. Here are some tips to help you lock-in:
Read it “scene by scene”
Browsing YouTube before reading the book I came across this complete random short:
What amazing advice! So thankful that the YT algo surfaced this for me. There is a lot going on in GotM, but with aid of the supplements and this guy’s advice, I enjoyed it so much that I ordered the sequel before finishing it.
Read it like you read Shakespeare
The first draft of GotM was a film script. Erikson writes a lot of snappy dialogue, but you still have to read between the lines. By combining the supplemental material and the technique of reading scene by scene, reading GotM is almost like reading a Shakespeare play. The clues are right there on the page, and it is rewarding to feel like you are an audience member in the know. Oh, and there are laughs everywhere, too.
Read it like you are listening to your rapper’s favourite rapper
Erikson is a writer who loves a bit of wordplay. Like a talented rapper (eg Avelino or Ghetts or the Coast) he’s got bars. Doubles and triples all over the place! Be prepared to catch the punches.
Is this even a book review?
Hell no! I don’t want to spoil anything. I am merely preparing you for your own journey. Once you are done, then we can talk about the book.
The past few weeks have seen a lot of travel and I am well backed up with uploading photos. I may not get the opportunity to write any in-depth travel reports, so I thought I would just make some quick notes.
Quebec and Ontario
This September my oldest daughter will enter Grade 11. Things are starting to get serious on the academic front. Next year will be prepping for university, with campus visits and the like. So this summer’s vacation was probably our last big one as a family.
Originally we thought we would do the Grand Canyon, but with the situation in the US, we decided to stay in Canada. My oldest went for a 5 week French language program in Quebec City at Laval University, so we made the Belle Province our summer destination.
I won’t got into all the gory details, and I still have over 2000 photos to process and upload to Flickr, but here are just a few highlights from our 16 days of travelling In Quebec and eastern Ontario:
Montreal
After having our plane cancelled, put on a new flight redirected through Toronto, we finally got to our McGill University dorm hotel only to have the fire alarm go off after midnight… three times
Saw the Notre Dame Basilica, met with Vincent from Hypha, ate lobster poutine and went to Just for Laughs pics →
And even though I have been to Ottawa a bunch of times in the past, this was my first time walking down the locks and crossing the river. No wonder it is a world heritage site! (Photos and vids coming soon)
Quebec is a must-go for Canadians like me from the West. There is just something about seeing historical spots that help you really understand the history. It was also interesting to see how they present indigenous history… or the lack thereof. I think in BC we have come a long way in recognizing the victimization of indigenous groups, but in Quebec with the spotlight on the Quebecois (and Acadians), the indigenous experience is still left in the shadows.
One other note: the pedestrian streets in Montréal are amazing. Vancouver really needs pedestrian streets and a nice walkable shopping and food area like the Montréal Old Town.
Quick drive to the Okanagan
After we got back from Quebec we quickly jumped in the car and drove to Kelowna for a couple of days for a friend’s baby shower. Not much to report from this trip other than we spent time with my family and with a bunch of friends, ate loads of cake, and it was great.
”Concrete jungle where dreams are made of” 🗽
Once back from Kelowna I had a day to pack and prep for a week in New York. I stayed in Manhattan, worked out of betaworks, ran a 2-day event with publishers like WaPo, ProPublica, Semaphor and many others (I will write this up in the future but here is some coverage already) and then attended an atproto hackathon in Brooklyn. It was pretty packed but on Saturday we did a walking tour of Manhattan hitting a lot of the famous parts, like:
The Highline, the Shed, the Foot Fountain and Grand Central pics →
Times Square, St Patricks, got rainbow bagels and then Central Park pics →
It was a great experience. I hadn’t been there since 2006. I spent most of my spare time just walking the streets, moving from movie set to movie set.
Next up?
I am holding still in Surrey for the next few weeks with no travel plans until I go to Birken Monastery for a week-long meditation retreat at the end of September. Until then I am just happy to be still for a while, in my comfortable home office… it will give me a chance to process all these photos!
There are loads of things you could do to decompress. Sometimes it is use your phone, but oftentimes it’s go for a walk, like go for a swim, take your bicycle out, paint a painting, write a little story. And we’re, I think, systematically discouraged from doing those things because those things don’t make anybody any money. And that’s my beef with BrainRot. It’s not that it exists or that young people are doing it. I think that’s fine. We should let kids do what they want. If they’re enjoying it, who cares? It’s more that there’s this bigger systematic problem that all of our time is being capitalized on.
(Now some very personal blogging that will only interest a few of you)
Last week I wrote about the fantasy hole I have been in. Contributing to this is the fact that we are also in a Table Top Role Playing Game hole as well.
I have been playing TTRPGs with the same group since 2013. We started together after a big Board Game Night where we organized two simultaneous sessions of The Red Box to introduce people to tabletop gaming. My oldest friend helped found the group (I first learned to play DnD2E with him back in ‘92). We would go on to play other games like Shadowrun, classic Star Wars, MechWarrior, In Nomine, and probably a bunch other games I have totally forgotten.
Our Kelowna group has kept stable over the years. When I went to Iki it was the beginning of the COVID pandemic so we all just played online together. We kept going, and even today I beam in via FaceTime to a laptop on a round wooden table where they gather together in person every few weeks. A couple times a year I will drive up to Kelowna to play in person. These are usually 3 day events where we will play DnD, board games, drink, and cook together. Basically it is camping for nerds.
In 2013 with Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and soon made the transition to 5th Edition. We have also down some Shadowrun and Star Wars, but mostly we have been a DnD5E group. A few years ago there were some controversies with how Hasbro was managing Wizards of the Coast, the stewards of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise. As a group we made the decision to transition to another game system… and then proceeded to take like another 3 years to finish our massive Curse of Strahd campaign (which took a total of 5 years of our lives to play) 😅😅😅
Anywho, earlier this year we wrapped up the final DnD campaign and now are finally looking for something new. That’s right! We are basically divorced DnD Dads, looking to play the TTRPG field a bit. (So cool! 😎)
TTRPG Speed Dating
DnD is great and all, but is basically the overwhelming default roleplaying game due to its mindshare of appearing in pop culture (Stranger Things) all the way back to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. (If you are interested in a history, check out my review of Of Dice and Men). Defaults are okay, and can actually act as an easy on ramp tot he hobby, but it is pretty sad how many people just stay on that boring old freeway — there are so many more choices than just dungeons or dragons.
As an experienced group of DMs we decided to do a little speed dating. Of course we could just fire up Pathfinder or Daggerheart, but why not get a little more… adventurous 😉
Together we listed up a number of games that interested us, not only by genre but also by game system. We wanted to explore things like the FATE or Apocalypse system. We put all kinds of interesting systems in the pot, things we had heard about from others, or systems featured on the excellent Quinn’s Quest. Once we generated a good list, each person went off and bought the system(s) they were interested in running and started reading. Here are a bunch we are looking at:
The idea is that if we do 3-5 sessions of each system we will have quite a runway of games over the next year. By then we will have fully recovered from 5 years exclusively in the land of Lord Strahd and be ready for a more long term campaign and can commit to one of the systems we tested.
So far we have already had a few sessions of Blades in the Dark which I really like. We usually end each session with 45 minutes of reflection, talking through what we have learned about the mechanics of the game, analyzing it for features that we enjoy and figuring out what trade offs there are in the design and how the game is trying to be fun (and if this is how we want to have fun). We really want to give each of these systems a good chewing over, and since we know one another really well and have lots of trust at the table, I think we are doing a great job getting to the bottom of the system.
This exploration of game systems and settings is another reason I feel like I am down a sort of Fantasy Hole. This is not taking any more time out of my already sparse recreation time, but it is strangely focused. I am usually exploring such a wide variety of things in my non-work life (and my work life tbh) that it feels strange to me just to have a couple of things on my plate and not feel bored.
While we are changing things up…
We started playing DnD before the Snowden revelations. We relied on all sorts of mainstream technical infrastructure to keep in touch, build community, plan and document sessions. We were very aware of our lock-in and often discussed migrating away from things like Slack (or being force-migrated off Google Plus just to give you a sense). So, since we were getting off the mainstream TTRPG, we thought it was a good opportunity to get off mainstream digital platforms too. The cool thing about RPGs is that while you can buy and run adventures off the shelf, you are free to modify them to fit your group or even come up with your own… and nobody can take away those fun memories. It should be the same with technology infrastructure.
Here are a couple of things we have done:
Swapped out Slack for Zulip which we can self-host and never loses our lengthy chat history. In Zulip we have dedicated channels for each game system. While doing research we can post insights to this research channel to inform everyone else of cool tidbits from the system. We also have a dedicated channel for memes… which is self-explanatory.
Documentation for each system and each campaign has moved out of a handful of giant Google docs to a self-hosted Outline.
We currently don’t have any virtual table top management solutions since we play hybrid, but in the past we used the excellent local-first serverless VTT called Owlbear Rodeo. The new version is SaaS which sucks but the legacy version is still available.
Yeah, I have fallen down one in the past few months for sure.
Last year my brother introduced me to The Blade Itself (2006) by Joe Abercrombie, part of the (currently) 10 book series called The First Law. A year later and I have completed the first trilogy, the three standalone novels, and the short story collection. Keep in mind that I am not one to binge book series… in fact I like to spread them out a little since I prefer variety in my reading diet week-to-week.
It had been a while since I got this excited about fantasy. I read a lot when I was a kid starting with Kaz The Minotaur introduced to me in Grade 6 by one of my best friends (even today!). Two years after that we would meet another of my best friends (even today!) who would be the Dungeon Master of our very first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd Edition) tabletop role playing game adventure! In those days my fantasy reading was deep in D&D content marketing realms which are best forgotten.
As a more adult reader I am not looking for pure escape. I prefer a challenge… commentary… which tends to be more on the speculative fiction side of the ledger. Except urban fantasy, which being situated in our world demands a story to have a relevant politics. This is why I very much enjoy the Rivers of London series. But the modern fantasy movement over the past couple of decades has really pushed social commentary forward. Think of dark academia books like The Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, and Babel by Rebecca Kuang. Amazing! (ADDENDUM: Oh and if you are looking for an alternative to that wizard, check this out)
That said, the past five years of my life (and the 12 moves induced by it) have had some trials, and I discovered the joys of curling up with a cozy fantasy like Legends & Lattes or A Psalm for the Wild-Built
But back to The First Law. It is not so much a social commentary as an exploration of the human condition. Joe Abercrombie’s ability to personify deep human traits and play them out on a grim dark fantasy backdrop is just so much more satisfying than the types of stories I read (and wrote!) as a kid. Highly recommended.
I suppose the lesson is: if you are looking in the right sub-genre of fantasy, you can find what you need. In fact, if you want to take a tour of many of the sub-genres of fantasy, check out this video by fantasy YouTuber Daniel Greene:
This video has motivated me to explore more branches of the wider fantasy genre. It is like when we read Among Others for my old Genre Fic book club in Kelowna ten years ago: a network analysis of related books to help you find more of the kinds of books you will enjoy.
Since I have read many of the books on the map, I am going to be jumping in the deep end with the first book of the Malazan series by Steven Erickson: Gardens of the Moon. If you want to get into your own slightly less deep fantasy hole, I would like to recommend House of the Rain KIng an independent first novel that I recently finished and love. It is a standalone story (no 10 book commitment like Malazan!) and is more of a “low” fantasy in the vein of some of the less child-targeted Ghibli films (my spoiler-free mini-review).
Let me know if you have any recent recommendations!
Also, speaking of book clubs… I should really find (start?) one here in Surrey. 🤔 Would be a good way to find some of my people. 💪
It is possible to identify a natural scale. When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on this scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself. These scales must be identified and the parameters of human endeavours within which human life remains viable must be explored.
I was watching this cool tour of coffee shops and roasteries in Vancouver that hits a lot of the famous places. The Youtuber does some of these tours when he visits locations so I prepared some reccos for him for the next time he is in Western Japan. Thought I should share them here for you
Okay, just a regular Blue Bottle, BUT the location is amazing (in an old elementary school!) and the outdoor park is amazing at night. Also, Blue Bottle in Japan sells this amazing yōkan that is matched to coffee rather than matcha!
Here are some old school Kissa if you are interested:
The classic. It is in Merry White’s book “Coffee Life in Japan” and they have her book on display! Be prepared to breathe decades worth of second-hand cigarette smoke seeped into the furniture.
Founded in 1932, this is also old school. They have very good Japanese style sandwiches and pancakes here.
If you want the tea ceremony experience in English, go to my friend’s cafe RanHotei. Make a reservation and he will take you through the whole matcha process and answer all your questions.
maps.app.goo.gl/4GM17iCTV…
Husband and Wife duo. She is from Maui. This shop is all about the regulars… and they have a lot! Coffee nerd Mecca. You can do a pan roasting workshop here. Coffee is people.
I squeezed into this tiny hole in the wall to get out of the rain. The wife was working the cash register and the husband was doing pourovers with wicked precision. Behind him were tons of vinyl on display. There was a tiny record player on the counter with this weird single little speaker beside him. At one point between pours he quickly flipped the record before going back to the pour! 💫
Deep Work is Cal Newport’s highest selling book. He published it in early 2016 and it made waves at the time since he strongly argues against social media. Cal is infamously not on social media (unless you count blogging and podcasting 😜) so it is a little ironic that the reason I finally decided to pick up this book was due to a post I saw on social media.
Although the book explores quite a few topics, to sum it up from my perspective, he introduces a term well known in software circles to a more general audience: context switching. Basically, this is the idea that constantly switching between tasks carries a cost to your overall productivity. This is true for computers, for software developers, and for knowledge workers. Furthermore, in our hypermedia world, where everything is vying for your attention, we really need to guard our focus if we want to do this thing called “Deep Work”. I am going to get into that definition in a moment, but to break the book down a little more, he argues:
You need to train train your capacity for concentration
You need to overcome your desire for distraction
For Step One he is full of the kind of productivity tips you have probably heard of elsewhere: aggressively scheduling blocks of productivity; bucketing the “shallow work” or figuring out how to delegate it away; pomodoro-like sprinting methods; deep work retreats; say NO!; getting proper sleep and taking proper downtime; etc etc. It’s all good stuff. If you have never read a productivity book this is a great place to start since he introduces you to lots of methods for you to pick and choose from.
Step Two includes things like scheduling your internet distraction time; spending time assessing how you spend your time and harshly cutting it down to only the stuff from which you get the most benefit; and other bit. He introduces a few techniques that help with self reflection, which I can always get behind. Mostly though, it is about quitting social media. He argues against the trend of the time that authors needed to be on social media to sell books. He thinks it is a giant time suck (not wrong!) and argues that social media benefits heavily from the ”Any Benefit Mindset”, which is when any positive benefit justifies the use of a tool, no matter the negative impacts. It reminds me of the old saying “free shit is still shit.” Social media has too many drawbacks:
Attention hoarding
Context switching
Addiction
Empty information calories
A big chunk of the book goes through cost-benefit analyses of social media which made me at least feel a little guilty 😅. (Related: Checking in on online media usage)
There are a couple more things I would like to shout out in this book. Although he positively profiles lots of terrible people (eg DHH, Jack Dorsey, and Zuckerberg) he actually has a serious discussion about “internet as ideology” with reference to people like Neil Postman and Evgeny Morozov. This was a change from Slow Productivity which I was pretty critical of for not being critical.
Another topic that Newport returns to often is metrics, an important challenge in knowledge work that I think he covered well in Slow Productivity. In Deep Work he doesn’t spend a lot of time on the bigger argument, but defers to the 4DX Framework. To quickly review:
focus on the wildly important. (no multitasking! Very “deep work”)
focus on lead measures. (this is a great insight)
keep a score card. (Eg Bullet journal, Leaderboards, etc)
establish a cadence of accountability (periodic meetings to confront and review the scoreboard)
For the hardcore productivity tips there is a lot more in this book. You can read a breakdown from the productivity company Todoist here) if you want to get into more of that content. But I would like to turn away from the practical advice in the book and discuss how this book made me feel.
The Feels > Productivity
My hypothesis is one reason this book is so successful is due to anemoia, a neologism that means “nostalgia for a time or place one has never known.” I think this feeling afflicts many modern knowledge workers, and something that Cal Newport taps into in Deep Work.
Cal Newport defines “deep work” as:
Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
He peppers the book with references to concepts like ”craftsmanship”, encouraging you to take a more intentional approach to your work and the choosing your tools, “flow state”, and has a whole chapter intro dedicated to a room built for eudaimonia. Deep work is meaningful, important, a way to the good life. Shallow work is the opposite. He doesn’t quite go as far as Graeber in Bullshit Jobs but it smells similar.
What knowledge worker has not, at one time or another in their career, looked over at a craftsperson like a furniture maker with a sense of envy? Or think of the proverbial software developer that turns into a farmer? Those are “real” jobs, with “real” skills right? Not this weird thing we do shuffling around emails and kanban cards.
I think this is also the reason why so many knowledge workers refer to themselves as a “writer” — this title has way more connotations to craft than say an “operations manager” 😜
There is a widespread anomie in the white collar working class that I think Deep Work really gets. It is something that Cal Newport himself wrestles with, and I think the resulting emotions of trying to inject real meaning into our work is (one reason) why this book is so praised. It is kind of like that cathartic feeling of crying at a sad movie. Nothing has changed, but we do feel a little better after a good cry. 🥲 In the end, that is why I preferred this book to Slow Productivity. For all its practical productivity propositions, it encourages us to self-examine exactly what we are doing with our time each day, and whether it is worth it. (And usefully it does so with a lighter touch than Byung-Chul Han, which although is extremely valuable, can be a conversation-ender when talking to your virtual cubicle mates around the #water-cooler). A worthy read.
Things have gotten away from me over the past few years, but recently I have been leaning more into RSS and trying to read more blogs. I am way better at not reading a ton of international news everyday, preferring more local sources that impact my life more directly. Quitting Twitter a couple years ago had helped. I still post on Bluesky and Mastodon, but not very much. One of the feeds I fight is YouTube, which while it can be a great source of educational material, also traps me in endless UK drill reactions or nostalgic movie reacts. (A lot of evenings in March — a very packed and stressful month — were whiled away watching people cry over films from the nineties).
Anyways, like meditation practice, every once in a while you have to go back and re-up. What I mean is: most meditators will plateau in their practice, lose motivation or intensity over time. And that is why they periodically go on retreat, a time of intense practice with others, which reminds them why they practice in the first place, “re-upping” their dedication to practice. The same goes for maintaining mindfulness around your info diet. Periodically we just need to check in with our friends. This episode of Neverpo.st was that for me.
So, in the interest of transparency, here are my phone usage numbers (go to Settings > Screen Time and tap See All Website & Activity on your phone to see your numbers)
⏱️ Daily Avg = Between 5 and 5.5 hours. A lot of this is podcast usage. A media I consume a lot of.
🤳 Pickups = around 100. Podcast app and messaging apps being the leaders.
🔴 Notifications = 80-140. Lots of variation here. I don’t feel overwhelmed, but this is a lot of distraction.
This past weekend we were blessed with gorgeous clear blue skies as we took the ferry from Tsawwassen across the Georgia Strait to Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island.
Swartz Bay? But, it says “Nanaimo” in the title? you observe. And yes, you are correct. Although there is a ferry from Tsawwassen direct to Nanaimo, we decided to land at the southern end of the island and spend the Friday afternoon driving up the east coast of the island, visiting all those tiny little towns that I have heard about but have never actually visited before.
Once on the island we took the Mill Bay ferry to avoid Victoria (a city that I will visit again soon… lots of friends to see there!). We lunched in Cowichan Bay, ate ice cream in Duncan, and quickly checked out the famous murals of Chemainus. But the clock was ticking so we had to skip Ladysmith in order to get to Nanaimo in time for a special pre-conference dinner.
Arriving on Friday and leaving on Sunday at noon meant it was a whirlwind trip, and we barely got out of the hotel. The conference was about building capacity for Japanese Canadian community organizations with delegates from Nanaimo, Victoria, Greater Vancouver, the Okanagan, and the Yukon. With the BC government putting up $100 million dollars in redress funds for interning much of its Japanese heritage population during and after the Second World War, there is renewed interest in building a more united Japanese-Canadian community, those from earlier generations and newcomers.
After many hours of deliberation we caught the noon ferry home. It was a really nice trip. The conditions were excellent, and we met all sorts of interesting new people. Now we must think about what we can do to effectively build a sustainable community across western Canada.
The Vaisakhi parade in Surrey is said to be the biggest in the world, attracting over 500,000 people! (See these aerial photos from last year to get a sense of the crush).
This year’s parade also saw the appearance of two of the candidates in the upcoming election for our next prime minister: Jagmeet Singh and Pierre Poilievre.
I was down on the ground, in the mix, surrounded by the celebratory masses with my older daughter. We parked in Strawberry Hill and then walked a couple of blocks via Komagata Maru Way to the corner of 122nd and 75th. Together we weaved through the crowd, catching narrow rivulets of people as they flowed this way and that, angling towards tents to get some of the free food being handed out, or find a better perch to see the floats from. We had some pakora and took some photos and video.
The parade goes from morning until evening, following a path around one of the central neighbourhoods of the city. We just popped in for a little while to see what it was like. I had only ever been to Vaisakhi in Kelowna, which is a much smaller scale, but still a very big annual event there. One thing that felt different in Surrey, besides the sheer size, was the prominence of flags for Khalistan. They were everywhere! Moninder Singh, the spokesperson for the B.C. Gurdwaras Council, said the parade was dedicated to the memory of Hardeep Singh Nijjar who was allegedly killed by the Indian government.
Despite the serious political context, the parade was light-hearted and joyful. It had a real matsuri air, something you don’t get that much in Canada. We had a fun and look forward to going next year when I hope to spend more time. See the photo gallery below but since there are a bunch of videos I recommend looking at the gallery on Flickr →
For the past couple of years in Japan I have been really enjoying the cherry blossoms. I made cherry blossoms the theme of the Micro.blog photo challenge last year.
Prior to that, in Kelowna, we didn’t really have the cherry blossoms… for years…
But now, here in Metro Vancouver, I have noticed how many sakura trees there are around the city! Cherry blossom viewing is a real event here, with a festival and everything!
Thus I was able to get a number of cherry blossom shots from a few different neighbourhoods this year. It really made me (and my wife!) very happy ☺️🌸
I collected up a bunch of the photos that you can see in the gallery below (or on Flickr)
Very nice to see this send-off of John Dougill, an influential member of the English-speaking community in Kyoto. I have a number of his books and he came to Iki for a few days while I was there. I had the privilege to tour him around the island and talk about travel writing. I learned some valuable lessons during that trip.
As user 87 on Bluesky, I have been around the AT Protocol ecosystem — the ATmosphere — for a while. My comrade Boris Mann (@bmann.ca) started https://atprotocol.dev to serve as a place to do tech talks with developers, just like we used to do for Fission before (and Causal Islands before that and TFTRocks before that… and… 😊). When Boris was thinking of starting the first community conference for atproto devs back in early December 2024, he asked if I was in… of course! But with the sudden trip to Japan and moving house, my March was very busy and I told him I couldn’t help out much with organizing this time around. So the day after the house move, when I picked him up and we drove down to Seattle, I was in for a shock.
ATmosphereConf took place over two days at the lovely University of Washington Campus in Seattle, WA. Originally envisioned as an unconference (I dunno like 40 people in a basement with some pizzas 🤷♂️) I soon found out that there were about 170 in person attendees and about the same online! We ended up with 354 attendees in total.
Boris had recruited a great team of organizers and volunteers including Ted Han (@knowtheory.net) who helped MC the conference. Peter Singletary (@psingletary.com) managed the online experience and we streamed the whole conference on stream.place, basically Twitch on atproto, who were one of the sponsors of ATmoCon.
Isn’t it amazing that we streamed the first atproto conference using the AT protocol!?
Another amazing thing is though we excellent sponsor support, the largest amount of money came in from ticket sales!
AtmosphereConf was set up as a project fiscally hosted by the Raft Foundation, which was started by my friend Nathan Hewitt. It is amazing how quickly ATmoCon got up and running with help of so many good folk willing to pitch in. That set the tone the conference as the energy during the event was amazing.
All the videos from the two days of presentations are on this playlist, but I would like to embed the opening talks for each day which shows how this community is different
(Erin has appeared on this blog previously but I have been following her forever since the A Book Apart days).
Hard choices
Even though there was a powerful lineup of speakers, we hadn’t quite given up on the unconference. Community-led discussions were held in four other rooms. Some were pre-vetted ahead of time on the ATP community Discord, but all were scheduled on site. Starting late Friday night Boris, Ted, and I would stare at a big Excel on the screen of the TV at our AirBnB, desperately needing to go to bed and trying to solve an impossible puzzle. There were too many good topics! Hard choices lead to hard choices, and we tried to schedule discussions alongside talks with minimal disruption to attendees, but it is an impossible job. After a day of conference then dinner and afterparties (see below) we slunk back to the house to schedule the next day’s discussions, taking into account new requests made at the conference. On the final day we ended up triple tracked! 😱 I joked that all the content we were jamming onto the schedule had turned this into a turducken of a conference. There was so much people wanted to talk through!
An undercurrent of lore
Speaking of avians, probably the standout of the show was our mascot Gustopher. Designed by Andy, our friend at Internet Development Studio Company, people really took to the character. So much so that a fandom arose and started shipping Gustopher with the Untitled Goose Game Goose, and some fiction of the two appeared on AO3 which I am not going to link to for obvious reasons 🙈
Amazing.
On the floor at ATmoCon
It wasn’t just atproto devs at ATmoCon. We had Bluesky and open social media enthusiasts, investors, and people building other apps that were curious about using atproto, for example as an identity substrate to their own apps.
Since I knew about half the people there, much of my time was spent connecting different parties. I was able to take in a couple of talks and contribute to a couple of discussions, but mostly I played a concierge/connector role which worked out pretty well. This was a great learning for future events.
What was discussed
Oh boy, a lot was discussed. The videos are all out, and the notes from the discussion sessions will be released soon. But overall I saw a couple of trends.
Another theme was issue discovery. At a regularly occurring tech conference people get together in a high bandwidth mode to solve some specific problems together. Since this was the first time we were meeting there was a lot of discovery happening: this includes both what kinds of problems were people seeing and also trying to get to common terms on the language used in the space. A number of working groups have been stood up post-conference.
Lastly, a large topic was money in the ecosystem. Developers are excited to build new things… but we all need to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. We need to make it rain in the ATmosphere. Peter Wang of Skyseed Fund gave an overly short talk about the changes he is seeing in the internet, and the importance of funding infrastructure.
There were a couple other investors that I spoke to as well. But it all wasn’t about investment money: in-app payment rails was also a big topic. How can we build a sustainable market economy on atproto? There was a discussion about micropayments, and I had a couple of discussions with people about how tightly (or loosely) to bind existing payment providers in the protocol. Just like enabling commerce on the World Wide Web in 1995, this is going to be a big milestone for atproto that I really hope will come soon.
After parties
Our pal Anuj Ahooja (@quillmatiq.com) from A New Social booked a local pub for a pre-conference social. We filled that place with protocol nerds. They asked us to come back… and then again! I think it tells you something about this crowd.
On the final night I spent the evening at a rooftop bar with some fellow “oldheads” who shared stories about the old days of social networking, lore, and how things are different this time. I enjoyed a very fancy hot chocolate and spent some time with Ms Boba (@essentialrandom.bsky.social) learning about how to teach git by personifying HTML as a hot guy and dressing him up as a made. Amazing! See the photos 📸
The next morning we went for an amazing Creole breakfast before parting ways and heading back to NY, SF, and Canada.
The role of community
At present Bluesky the company is the proverbial 800 lb gorilla in the ATproto ecosystem: they built the protocol and the “reference” microblogging app Bluesky. However, since the beginning, Bluesky has been encouraging others to build with them. I know much of the team personally and they are all good people, so I am take them at their intentions. But it will take some time before we have some other companies built on atproto that can balance out Bluesky the Company and turn the ecosystem from unipolar to multi-stakeholder.
So, in the meantime, how can we balance the ecosystem? One way is to pool the people-power of the community. Bluesky the Company really needs a forum not only for needs assessment, but also for co-creating solutions. A decentralized, pluralistic system is something that we all want to work towards.
Bluesky the Company certainly wants this, as demonstrated by how they engage with the community. Yes, for ATmoCon they threw in some sponsor dollars, but they did not have a hand in organizing. As Sarah Perez said in her TechCrunch article: “Don’t call it a Bluesky conference.” The BSky team did give some talks and participated in discussions, but this participation was as a community member. I will give you one small example: after Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee gave his talk, during the next talk he lined up with everyone to ask a question… like a normal community member. The Bluesky team are long-time open source people, so they know how this works, but it was really great to see them model good behaviour.
I think the community can act as a gorilla-counterweight (800 1 lb geese) not only for Bluesky now, but for the other corporate gorillas which are sure to grow up in the ATmosphere.
What’s next?
“Where is the next one going to be?” … “I can’t wait until the next one?” …“I am suffering FOMO, I will definitely go to the next one!”
We had an overwhelming positive reaction to the conference. I remember a moment when I was walking between the discussion rooms and the main stage and thought to myself “I am tired… but this community… I can’t wait to do this again next year!” Will there be a next year? I sure hope so.
In the meantime, there is the upcoming AHoy conference in Hamburg Germany on April 24th. I am very interested in hearing the European perspective on all this. And of course there are calls for a conference in Japan, which I would love to help organize.
Working groups are forming on the AT Protocol Community Wiki. The Community Discord is seeing local meetups form. Boris will be in Toronto in a couple weeks and is hosting ATproTO at 1RG. Soon there will be more talks hosted by Boris on ATProtocol.dev. There are lots of ways to engage, and we also need help onboarding new people into the community.
There are more articles coming out about the ecosystem as people become more aware of the protocol vs the microblogging app, for example from TechCrunch:
It had been years since I had been to Shinjuku, at least, around the JR Station. It was a lot dirtier than I remember, but more than 25 years had past. It was a whirlwind trip this time to Japan, all for an important meeting for a client that asked me to come and help out. Except for taking my client to Ginza by taxi for some shopping, I stayed put in Shinjuku. The weather didn’t help with it dropping below freezing after a gorgeous 20ºC day. In a cool little coffee shop where the barista was doing multiple pourovers while flipping an old vinyl record playing on a tinny sounding wooden speaker, I chatted with some Australians from up north who were delighted at seeing snow for the first time. All I could think about is how warm and sunny it was back home in Canada.
The day after I landed I walked around the area to scout out where we would be having our meeting. I was getting a little worried when I saw a ton of police blocking off the streets. Turns out it was Tokyo Marathon Day! So there were loads of foreigners in fancy shoes and funny costumes jogging around trying to find the correct starting line (there are multiple… the Tokyo Marathon is a big production!). Other than that, I mostly worked, took a few jaunts out to buy loads of furikake and BL anime merch for my kids, and drank some very nice coffees while reading.
Luckily I was able to meet a few people. One, a developer for a cool outfit that I have been in contact with for a while, took me to a smokey kissaten. We sat for five (5!) hours talking about all the problems of the world. It was amazing, except my clothing reeked of cigarette smoke (which meant soon my room did, and then my luggage). The other meeting I had was with an old Fissioneer who has been living in Japan for the last 9 months, enjoying the country. It was nice to catch up.
Then, after a long deserved reflexology session, I was back in a taxi bound for the airport. The trip was so fast I didn’t even take my camera. I only visited one temple and one shrine! 😢 Thus, only a few photos to share:
There is no one way to raise bilingual kids. Every family is different, and the context where they learn language can change. Previously I wrote about bilingualism expectations (and plurilingualism) in the context of raising our kids.
If you think about bilingualism in terms of time, there are generally two categories: sequential bilingualism and simultaneous bilingualism. In the first case, one learns a first language and then later learns a second language. In the second case, one learns (two or more!) languages at the same time.
Just looking at my household, in a family of four we have THREE different kinds of linguistic backgrounds!
I am a sequential bilingual, going from English → Japanese when I was about 20
My wife is a sequential bilingual, from Japanese → English in her 20s
My first daughter was raised in Japanese until she went to preschool in Canada — a sequential bilingual similar to my wife but much earlier at age 5
By the time my second daughter started speaking, the first daughter was already speaking English and Japanese in the household, so she might be considered the household’s only simultaneous bilingual
Why is this important? Well, like I said, raising bilingual kids depends a lot on the context of that particular learner. We need to be aware that each of our kids have a different context and thus our expectations should be adjusted accordingly. Like I wrote before expectations around bilingualism and raising kids are often out of whack. The framework of sequential-simultaneous bilingualism adds is another useful frame for aligning your expectations (and therefore effort) to reality.
Final note: the multilingual multiverse
There are many other frameworks for thinking about multilingualism. In this post looked at time of language acquisition. In my other post I wrote on heritage language learners and plurilingualism. There are also receptive bilinguals, those who can understand a language even if they cannot produce it. And then of course bimodal bilinguals who use language in at least two different modes, for example audio-oral language and visual-spatial sign language. And these are just super-categories! At a personal level there are so many other possible dimensions… fascinating!
A few months ago we found a place and had our offer accepted. Earlier this week we finalized the documents. But now we have the keys to our very own townhouse. After many years of bouncing back and forth between Japan and Canada, and even moving within each country, the family are now settled down and committed to living in Surrey, BC for the foreseeable future.
It has been six months since we moved to Surrey from Osaka. In that time we have explored our neighbourhood, the kids have gotten used to school, and I have re-connected with friends and family, and made a ton of new connections.
We lived in Kelowna for 8 years, which is plenty of time to build up our community network, including things like Digital Okanagan, Okanagan Developers Group, Kelowna Japanese Language Society, and Okanagan Asian Heritage Month committee, among others. For the past few months I have been looking for my communities here in Metro Vancouver. Although I have found a bunch, I think there is a lot more out there. Being much larger than Kelowna, there isn’t a single place you can go to get connected. Thus I have been conducting a lot of shuttle diplomacy by meeting people all over: Vancouver, UBC, Burnaby, Surrey, and even Fort Langley out in the Fraser Valley!
Coming out of the pandemic there is certainly a thirst for more in-person connection, and to build back better. The pandemic tore up a lot of the social fabric here, which also had the effect of exposing a lot of the rot in our underlying systems. In this way, the pandemic, and the reaction to it, are like a sequel to the economic crisis of 2008-9. The dissatisfaction with “how things are” has triggered a wave of grassroots organizing of people who want to make things better. These are my people. My goal is to find them and join them, to add my shoulder to the wheel, to help raise the barn of community.
These people exist across many different domains: tech, arts and culture, economic and social justice, politics, etc. A common theme I hear in speaking to people in these different verticals is a desire for thriving. What that word means can mean different things to different groups, but I have found with the various groups I have met that people have a sense that “something can be done here!”, of potential to make things “better”. There is an energy, and I have learned it is not just in a single group.
So I have been going out and trying to meet different groups, to potentially build bridges between them, looking for opportunities for collaboration and coalitions. Metro Van is much larger than the Okanagan where we were able to build some truly amazing community in the 8 years I was there. Here there is lots more going on, but it is also much easier to work in isolation with other groups. The big city affords anonymity, which can be positive but also a negative. However, as someone I met recently said, “Vancouver is too small for us to not know what one another is doing.”
Z-Space has been great for meeting new people. It is a hub for arts and tech in downtown Vancouver. Not only do I co-work there once a week, we run all sorts of meetups and events there (including the recent #LoFiWKND). Z-Space is an excellent example of how third spaces engender community building. back in Kelowna we had CoLab, our old Rocketlaunch space, and the Accelerate Okanagan government-run accelerator. I recently ran an event in Seattle at the Internet Development Studio offices, which are turning into a cool hub in the Pike Place Market area. V2 House, from the V2 community trying to build economic and cultural thriving for young people in Vancouver, is another example. I want to find more of these “club houses” and map them all out to make it easier for people to connect, whether they have lived here all their lives and just didn’t realize, or are new arrivals like me. If you know some, let me know!
There is much more cooking that I haven’t mentioned, but let me give you a couple more examples:
At DWebYVR we are working on community-based technology agency (our version of “thriving”) but also discuss a wide range of commons-based topics such as cohousing and food security.
I recently connected with community resilience activists working on disaster preparedness (they are busy lending a hand in LA right now), something that Vancouver needs to be ready for. Mr Rogers said that when disaster strikes, “look for the helpers.” I want to find them before disaster strikes, thank you very much.
Comrades in the Library Socialism movement have been gathering resources of folk doing all sorts of good in the community.
That is just a handful of what I expect to be heaps of mutual aid and solarpunk and utopian activators out there pushing for agency and opportunity and justice. I want to know more, and am actively on the lookout for people who are looking to make Metro Vancouver thrive. If you know of a group or a person, comment below, contact me on any of my networks, or email me!
And they’re so important to the history of humanity. That was the one thing that just became so clear to me as I was researching this book, how so much human progress, so many of the things that we take for granted in the world today are the result of these radical social dreamers on the very fringes of our societies. I like to call them The Other 1%. So we have a 1% that’s the economic 1%, which is a statistical artifact of if you have 100% of the distribution of wealth, there’s always going to be a 1% that’s at the top. But the Utopian 1% is this group of people who have always been on the margins of our societies. They’ve always been out there dreaming up different ways of living and not only dreaming them up, but also trying to make them a reality. And it’s in these communities, many of which are just really crazy when you start to read about them, what they were trying to do and how they were organizing themselves and the massive Amounts of resistance that they faced. It’s in these communities from these communities that we begin to find our way forward through many historical challenges. And I would argue when I say in the book that they’re necessary for our survival, I think that the fundamental flexibility and creativity and adaptability of humanity, and we know that we are as a species incredibly flexible and adaptable and creative, that it comes and it has always come from this small percentage of the population that thinks differently about the way we should be living our lives.
Let’s connect up the Other 1% and organize community thriving together.
What a year. 😫 Closed down a company. Pulled all roots out of Japan and moved to a new city in Canada. Began settling down. Kids in a new school. Started a consultancy. Engaged with local community. Reconnected with old friends and family. Deepened my intellectual development. Found new paths to explore. Lots of progress on all fronts I suppose… Phew! I needed this winter holiday 😅
40 Questions
Last year I started using Steph Ango’s 40 Questions framework for annual reflection. Here are a few for public consumption:
What was your greatest musical discovery of the year?
Not a musician, but the YouTube Reactor TeeGo Crxzy who introduced me to Pete & Bas and a number of other artists, got me back into listening to UK Drill and Grime. I have discovered tons of new areas of music to explore because of TeeGo. Glitch Gang! 🤘
What did you do on your birthday?
Went to a bistro close to Osaka Castle with my family and was served a dessert with the message “Happy Wedding” 😅 After that went home to a couple of policeman knocking on our door. But that is a story for another time.
What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Fiscal hosting opportunity in Canada, and it’s possible impact on open source in this country!
How would you describe your personal fashion this year?
New Air Force 1s, knit pullovers, light grey jeans… Dad-hop? Or… like… Ted Lasso?
What kept you sane?
Meditation.
Of my daily practice for the year I only missed 3 days, ending the year on a 282 session streak.
Who was the best new person you met?
Oh lordy, I met so many people this year I cannot just pick one. This year, especially the last quarter, I have been on a networking tear. There are so many comrades out there trying to good, if you just reach out. Now that I am meeting them I hope 2025 becomes a year for doing good together. 🥂💪
Best of Reading 📚
Each year I submit some of my best for Fiction and Non Fic. This year for Fiction hands down it goes to The First Law Series. My brother recommended this grimdark fantasy trilogy and I just ate it up. I listened to the audiobooks narrated by Steven Pacey who is on the level of Jim Dale for skills… just absolutely brilliant.
In non-fic, the book that made me the most angriest (and recommend the most) is The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality which examines the legal methods used to secure capitalism as our society’s only mode of operation. I grouped this book with a few others in a post about economistic thinking if you are interested in knowing more about the world we live in.
An honourable mention goes to Governable Spaces (see my chapter notes). This book has given me a handy framework for thinking about how to make emancipatory online community.
As a last comment, this year I spent more time reading papers about Internet governance and policy which I have been sharing with a group of others. You can check those out at: lemmy.ml/c/mae
Best of Watching 📽
So much reading so I didn’t watch much film or television this year, and of my 23 watched films, half were re-watches. This year I really feel like I don’t know what is going on in popular film. The only two films I saw in the cinema were Dune 2 and Between Pictures: The Lens of Tamio Wakayama for the Vancouver Asian Film Festival.
Funnily enough, I watched three films starring Leo DiCaprio. Although it is not the highest rating, I still think about Killers of the Flower Moon a lot though.
For tv I went through Slow Horses seasons 2 to 4, and also finally caught up on the most recent Doctor Who. This year was more for the reading.
Now that we are at the end of the year, and I have this arbitrary deadline looming, I thought I’d better finish off my series on travelling to Taiwan. Taiwan was extremely stimulating, and I have been promising to write my conclusions after doing a series of posts. At the same time I held off for fear of putting my foot in my mouth (this post might actually accomplish that 😅), so, rather than conclusive statements or “insights”, maybe I will conclude with some questions, lines of inquiry that you or I or whoever is next travelling to Taiwan to take with them.
Quick recap: for Golden Week in May 2024 we flew from Japan to Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. We visited a few locations including Tainan and Fo Guang Shan. Then we took the bullet train to Taipei and travelled further north to the mining town of Jiufen. Finally we returned to Taipei for the last few days where we visited a variety of local spots.
It has been 8-9 months since we left Taiwan and I still think about this trip. May was hot but not too hot. Waking up to the roaring of scooters commuting in the morning, lining up at the cheap and delicious soy cafe for breakfast, having so much access to vegetarian food, visiting some truly spectacular temples and museums, getting my fortune told by a little bird — there were so many daily delights! Not to mention you could get excellent Japanese, Korean, Thai and even great burritos and other international food! I found Taiwan to offer a better array and higher quality of international foods than Japan. Taipei is surely a foodie paradise!
Other than the amazing food culture, I enjoyed trying to untangle the history. Needless to say Taiwan’s status is very complex (which is blanket statement that could extend to most countries, I admit), but since its modern history has been so compressed, I think it is much more apparent. From influxes of mainland Chinese immigrants, to Japanese occupation, post-war economic growth under military dictatorship, the democratic era, and all within a changing northeast Asia security theatre — there is a lot to take in. New systems are imposed upon old systems and there is no time for a refactor. It’s like plugging a new multi-plug power adapter into an old one, increasing plug capacity… but at what cost? I am not sure.
QUESTION: Can Taiwan just keep pushing ahead and evolving? 🚅
One way Taiwan stays resilient is by being flexible with regards to history: ignoring the bad, leveraging the good. Inconvenient history is … not forgotten… but maybe elided over…? for the sake of moving on. (This comes of as another banal blanket statement, I know. Here in Canada we ran a whole multimillion dollar multi-year campaign to deal with our history, which has been largely stalled. I suppose it should take at least seven generations, and Taiwan‘s history has never had that long to settle before the next crisis comes along).
QUESTION: What will the legacy of Chiang Kai Shek be? 🎖️
Flexibility extends throughout Taiwanese culture. I can see why so many of the would-be “lifers” in Japan left to go to Taiwan over the past couple of decades. Taiwan is safe and has a lot of the conveniences that people love about Japan. But the Taiwanese are just a lot more willing to be flexible, which makes it easier for foreigners to navigate (I would love to get more data on this. I mostly talked with Chinese and white people about this, but I am not sure how the racial hierarchy in Taiwan differs from Japan with respects to say Black or Brown people. If you know, please share!)
Okay, now for one last big question: one thing people enjoy when they come to Japan is learning about the religious syncretism. How can a Japanese family celebrate a birth at a Shinto shrine, eat KFC and strawberry cake at Christmas, and pray to their ancestors at the Buddhist shrine in their home? That is obviously a bit of a caricature, but I think Taiwanese syncretism takes this to a whole other level! Just walk around a temple like Lungshan, each cubby holds a figure that could come from a totally different system (Confucian/Daoist/Buddhist/and more!) and on the way out you can buy an omamori just like a jinja!
QUESTION: Religion in Taiwan… how the hell does it work!? 📿
Damn I wish I knew more about this before traveling. So much of it is over my head, and I suspect it would have been useful in Malaysia (travel journal Part 1 and Part 2) and even here in Greater Vancouver.
One last bonus topic: although I am really glad we got out of Taipei and saw some different cities, we spent our whole time on the West Coast. I watched some of the Indigenous TV channel, but I would really like the opportunity someday to travel to the central mountains and the East coast which I hear is beautiful, and offers more opportunities to learn about the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. There is so much more to see!
QUESTION: How does East differ from West? 🧭
Okay, that is it. I think I have probably put enough of my ignorance on display. Suffice it to say, I think Taiwan is a fascinating place to visit, and has many many points to appreciate. You should go if you get the chance… because even after I visited there and saw how people were not freaking out about China as much as the Western press insists, I am still worried that it could get absorbed into the mainland, not necessarily with kinetics, but in a more bureaucratic hostile takeover sense like Hong Kong. There is just too much integration and dependency on the mainland. 😬😬😬
Okay, now that this is done, pass me the Su Chili Crisp. I better get started on this foot.
I didn’t notice it in Frankfurt, but maybe that was because it was such a sunny day and after the 10 hour flight from Vancouver I was a bit jetlagged. Happy people enjoying the warm rays, walk the river under the watchful eyes of the statue of Karl de Grosse (aka Charlemagne), King of the Franks in the 9th century. Whether it was the weather, jetlag, or the cute little historical towncenter of Römerberg, I didn’t notice it. I walked the cobbled streets, enjoyed a kaffee mokka in a 17th century cafe, and climbed the church tower to get a view of the city.
It was the next day, after boarding the Inter-city express (ICE) from Frankfurt station that I started to clue in. The station was in that European style, with the arched metal roof, that I had seen in movies. I finally boarded a train but did not understand the seating situation. People were all over the place, sitting on the floor and stuff. Since it was just a 45 minute trip to Mannheim I stood at the exit doors and watched the landscape roll by through the tinted windows. First it was the smoke stacks of the factories as we left Frankfurt, then farmland, small villages, a low hill, copses of trees. I imagined what it would have been like to cross this land during the war. How would a platoon use those trees as cover? What would it have been like for the people in that old farmhouse to see a tank trundling across the field?
Arriving in Mannheim I had a couple days to myself, walked the streets, around the water tower, ate an Italian salad in a punk cafe and a poutine in the shopping district. Mannheim is an innovative city, a university town, known for the invention of the bicycle and automobile. Popping into a random church I was amazed to discover that it was consecrated to St Francis Xavier, a Jesuit I was well familiar with due to his exploits in Kyushu in the 16th century. Leaving the church I walked along an empty side street, along a low grey building with barred windows. I pulled my thin jacket tighter as the wind-whipped, noticed the clear visibility lines up and down the block, imagining a late night Cold War rendezvous between two trench-coated men with their hats pulled low.
Once out on the boulevard it was a different scene: students milling about a large palace complex. Mannheim University was founded inside the Mannheim Palace, a massive 17th century baroque schloss that is second only to Versailles. The center building has recently been restored and turned into a museum. I wandered inside, out of the cold, and then later went over to the university store and bought a “Mannheim U” pullover to keep warm.
I was so tired. My hotel was east of Mannheim station, the very last building before a green lightly forested area. To the south were the train tracks and on the north side was a sanitarium. My blank, tired eyes stared out of my fifth floor window into the abandoned shell of a building across the street as the grey sky turned dark. Night came, but sleep did not. I felt undead. I tossed and turned for two nights, imagining legions of ghosts wandering the city aimlessly, lost generations of the past. Was this place haunted? Or was it I who was haunted?
† † †
Even before we travel to a new country, we carry baggage. People who live outside of Japan have an impression of the country that is about twenty years out of date. When they see it for themselves, and talk to those who live there, they get a sense of actual lived reality and must discard their baggage.
I went to Germany with the intention of throwing away my baggage.
This is my first trip to Mitteleuropa, having only been to the extreme edges of Sintra, Portugal to the far west, and the European side of Istanbul on the far eastern side. My motive for going to Germany was to attend Causal Islands however the country had long been on my bucket list, especially Berlin. Being well known as a haven for hackers and bohemians, I wanted to see if the city still harboured the culture of the black clad punks and the legendary Chaos Computer Club. Or was my impression 20 years out of date and needed to be discarded?
But before I even got to Berlin, I realized I had even older baggage. My perception of Germany had been tainted by countless war stories: books, films, documentaries. Every time I turned my eyes to a street, a building, a patch of land, I viewed it through that prism.
But in Heidelberg, with its old churches and bridge and castle, I gained respite from my overactive imagination. Heidelberg’s deeper history allowed me to escape to a time before the war.
Then it was on to Berlin where the post-war is etched into the street and depicted on the walls of the buildings. Although I did visit Checkpoint Charlie and saw the location of the Nazi HQ (under which, in an undisclosed location, is supposed to be Hitler’s bunker and tomb), I did not want to dwell on Nazi history here. I did want to visit the Wall.
In 1989, the year the Wall fell, I was about 11 years old. The Canadian nightly news broadcasts showing people swarming the wall, climbing it, smashing it with hammers, tearing it apart, are the earliest memory I have a of a global political event. Thus I had to see it for myself.
But mostly, I was in Berlin to see people, to talk to residents and understand the realities of living in Germany — to discard my baggage.
Outside of the conference I connected with people doing amazing fiscal sponsor work, with orgs helping undocumented immigrants get started in Germany, with “social red-team” critical analysts and artists and musicians and internet activists. I took the trains and trams, checked out the graffiti and architecture, drank hot kaffee on the cold beach at the massive flea market at Mauer Park. I got body-scanned for interplanetary parasites at the legendary hackerspace c-base, home to Chaos Computer Club. In the nice area of town where I stayed the October nights were cold but people were still outside on the patio, bundled up in big parkas drinking tall bottles of cold beer. Smoking, hand tattoos, and bread were everywhere. Down in Kreuzberg I walked the ring and checked out the mosque, making note of the heavy polizei presence patrolling in front of the Bosnian and Turkish restaurants (I didn’t see any cops in my area of town…). I spoke to people who had lived in Berlin for many years, originally attracted by the alternative scene in the city. They were all either permanent residents or citizens. Many related how Germany’s shift to the right, its suppression of Arabic voices especially regarding Palestine (at one point Germany was funding a third of Israel’s weapons, second only to the USA), and austerity politics have changed the city. Berlin is no longer the place of cheap rents and free-flowing arts funding. Gentrification is starting to push out the black-clad anti-establishment types and anarchist intellectuals. People were starting to think about how to get out, but more importantly asking the question: where do we go?
I left Germany with that profound question about the state of the world on my mind. Loaded up with chocolate and Rhine Valley Gewürztraminer, I returned to Canada, my baggage thoroughly discarded.
For the past couple of years, some of my Fission comrades would get an Advent Calendar from Revolver Coffee in downtown Vancouver. Revolver is a pretty famous specialty coffee shop around these parts. Each year they gather together some interesting beans, package them up in little baggies, and ship them out as a mystery box. Now that we are back in Canada, this is year the first time I got to participate with the daily tasting with my friends. Here is what the box looks like:
I never used to drink coffee. I grew up straight edge but when I was 29 and climbing up the sides of ships with a typewriter strapped to my back, I learned to drink the absolute worst coffee as a way to pass the time with crews from India, the Philippines, and Ukraine. It wasn’t until I was a product developer in Kelowna with my pals Brent and Adrian that I actually learned how to appreciate a proper pourover, Aeropress, Chemex, etc. In those days we were roasting our own beans in the parking lot, shivering in the snow but casting the most wondrous smells over the neighbourhood and attracting all sorts of interesting people. Small batch coffee roasting is an amazing networking technique 😉
Anyways, back to the advent calendar. Although I have been a specialty coffee enthusiast for a long time, I have been pretty much non-discerning. I knew what I liked and didn’t like, but I didn’t know why. My favourite beans are Mocha Kadir from Yemen, but since the war it has been hard to get, so I usually go for Ethiopian beans. In my current neighbourhood is an Ethiopian coffee shop whose owner is from there and has all the farm contacts — a font of knowledge!
Anyways, back to the advent calendar again. The point is I have no idea what I am tasting. Each day was an adventure. I would brew in my normal pourover method, handwrite my impressions in the little accompanying notebook, share a sip with my wife to get her impression, and then type out my thoughts in a private thread on the old Fission Discord. Only then would I check the Revolver Advent Calendar website to find out what the coffee actually was, and how wrong I got the flavours.
And I do mean I got them wrong… like all the time. But it was fun to explore blindly with no real coaching. I would examine the size of the beans and consistency of the roast. Smell them before and after grinding, and during the pour. I noted the hardness of the beans during the grinding process, and how much chaff was in the grind. Over time I noted that smallish beans tended to be from Africa, and the big plump ones from Central and South America. Also, when there was lots of chaff in the grind, indicating dryness, this also tended to be for African beans. I would smell again after the pour, then sip a few times, swishing it around to determine the flavours. Some edited examples:
The pour was nice and chocolately. It kinda smelled nutty to me? When I drank it I got some tartness, acidity. Fruity flavours… Later when looking at the tasting notes they said Banana Pudding and Peach!
OMG Honeysuckle! Makes so much sense. I was casting around trying to figure out what that taste was: sweet? bitter? Spicy? But that sort of honeysuckle note put it together for me.
Wife was like “This tastes kinda like burnt soy sauce… me like!”
Wow that was an interesting smell and taste. Is that molasses? It is kinda sweet, but not fruity… but it did have some tang? What the hell is going on in my mouth? Why did I grow up in a small hillbilly mountain town on only THREE flavours: salt, Captain Crunch, and secondhand smoke.
There is something strange here… juicy… is it the honeysuckle again? Muscat? … tasting again… watermelon? Kinda cantaloupe or honeydew… there is definitely melons in here. Very smooth. I like. Maybe not for everyday, but for special occasions. [After the reveal:] OMFG I was right for once! It only took 23 tries!
This better not be candy cane dust 😦
This tastes like a marine’s a haircut: high & tight
One of my friends related some advice he once got from a pro: “A superior cup of coffee tastes good when it is hot, medium heat, and cold.” Interesting! Taking that advice I would not drink the freshly poured cup all at once, letting it cool and checking for consistency of taste.
The Revolver Advent Calendar was a great experience. Out of 24 cups I brewed 11 scored 4+ on the 5 point scale. And it was fun to learn how bad of a palate I have. 😅 I am really interested in doing a tasting course to try and refine my tongue. And now I have a lot of notes on the types of flavours and regions I tend to like.
Anyways, back to the advent calendar for the last time — no more digressions! Here are my top ranked coffees from the calendar (in order of day):
In Against the Dark Forest internet writer and thinker Erin Kissane (who has just been killing it recently) re-assesses then challenges the notions of the Dark Forest (and by association the Cozy Web). People in my corner of the internet will already be familiar with the writing of Yancy Strickler, Maggie Appleton and Venkatesh Rao, all cited in the piece.
But all these platforms and attendant dipshits will be replaced, eventually, and what happens next isn’t guaranteed. The British East India company was a commercial atrocity factory at near-global scale; what came after it was direct colonial rule. The assumption that “Twitter but decentralized” or “Facebook but open-source and federated” will necessarily be good—rather than differently bad—is a weak one.
Nice provocation.
our failure to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way is a failure not only of imagination, but of nerve.
PREACH! As David Graeber said: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
it seems questionable for technologists to cede the territory of the public internet to their fellow-but-worse technologists and the predatory forces they assemble and arm
Yes, we do need to build local communities of mutual aid and respect, take care of our neighbours, etc, but we should not disconnect completely from the larger context.
no longer think that it’s possible to mount an effective defense of the physical world—and of each other, in our fleshy vulnerability—without unfucking our networks.
This. People have heard struggling with how I can fight the climate crisis: I am not the engineer that can invent the revolutionary carbon capture or universal solar battery. My skills and experience are on the internet. However, the climate crisis is the biggest coordination problem known to humankind, and the internet is the best global coordination mechanism we have. So I have doubled down by dedicating myself to make the Internet global, free and open — that is how I personally can fight the climate crisis.
Anyways, this is the kind of writing that energies me and so many people around me to just DO something. Go read the piece, then let’s do something!
Why do young content creators scream into their mics and blowout all the sound? When you need to reply to an important email, do you do it on your phone or wait until you get to a computer? What is the internet “megadungeon”? What about Poster’s Disease? Why does nobody use hashtags anymore, and who ruined the Laser Eyes Meme? Is it right to create an AI or generate photos of your departed parent?
These questions and much, much more are covered by Neverpo.st, a podcast, nay, an “audio magazine”, that covers the “internet.”
Okay, that’s a lot of scare quotes, let me explain.
The show is produced by experienced sound people including one of my fav YouTubers of yore Mike Rugnetta of Ideas Channel. Each episode opens with a short news-reading then moves on to two segments separated by short interstitials which tickle that ASMR section of your brain. It can be things like binaural recordings of the state fair, meditative ambient music, or a person walking on gravel. I used to listen to the show on long walks around Osaka Castle, and every time an interstitial comes on I get transported back to that place. It has a real power to create a “space” in your mind when you are listening to it. Finally, the show often ends with some amazing poetry. The topics are broad and every ep is different, but they all sound great. This is why “audio magazine.”
“Internet” is… well, it is impossible to cover the entire internet. Neverpost tends to be on the cultural side rather than the technical. Internet aesthetics, nostalgia, meme culture… these types of topics. But they are still very much grounded in the issues of the day. Take this short clip from their most recent episode:
I find Neverpost a relaxing “read” at the end of the week. It is very discursive, hyper-reflective, nerdy, neurotic, and possibly obsessive… so right up my alley 😄 The hosts are all younger than me and American, so theirs is a different Internet than the one I experience, but also one that I can recognize. It makes me think about generational experiences of media… the kind of question that could be a segment on the show! Anyways, I enjoy the show and wanted to recommend it. Everyone involved is very cool AND it is worker-owned independent media! (listen to Episode 0)
“But why wouldn’t you use it? It’s so convenient!”
I was surprised that he was surprised. I was talking to a very intelligent technologist, someone who thought deeply about his craft. It got me thinking about the respect shown to renunciation in this culture, compared to other places I have been.
Nine years ago I renounced the eating of meat. At the beginning most people questioned it, but our culture has really come around to plant-based diets. When I was 18 my first alcohol experience was embarrassing and I swore it off. For the next decade it was “Oh, just a little won’t hurt, right?” Nowadays people don’t question it. During my year as an Upāsaka I took the 5 Precepts among other commitments. After years of living as a minimalist it was not that difficult, and very rewarding. I think I got the least pushback over that… maybe because it is religious?
Of all the renunciation choices in my life the most pushback I get from people are technology choices, like the person at the very beginning of this post. It’s okay when I tell people I quit Facebook in 2010 (Facebook is no longer fashionable anyways) but if it is a particularly popular or widespread app, I get disbelief (or dismissed as an unwashed hippie 😅).
Free and Open Source crusaders have been fighting the fight for ethical software for decades. We finally started to see some regulatory movement against tech monopolies, and I have seen more general discussion of Luddism in the zeitgeist. I was hoping for a change in the culture but now that Big Tech has captured the White House, I think we need to look elsewhere for that change. This is certainly a new opportunity to be talking more about mindful decision-making in tech adoption.
Where to start, and some provocations
Traditionally, renunciation is a practice about removing attachments to gain freedom, it is a path to personal liberation. It is about pursuing a purposeful “good life”. Renunciation of conveniences or consumer products can free up time/money/attention/etc to be spent on more deeply engaging with meaningful pursuits.
But what should we renounce? In 2018 I taught digital ethics to a Computer Science 101 class using Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, an excellent resource for thinking about the practice of moral self-cultivation in a technological world. She notes:
Aristotle explains that, just as a geometrically wise person will ‘see’ that what is mathematically significant about three intersecting lines is that they form a triangle, a practically wise person (a phronimos) will reliably ‘see’ and attend to the morally significant facts of concrete situations.
There is more consciousness-raising about tech ethics that needs to be done. Renunciation is a practice of moral cultivation, but one must have a certain level of cultivation before they can properly pursue renunciation.
I ended that first CompSci class with the following Questions to think about which I will leave for you to consider and maybe to comment on:
What do you consider when you use or adopt a new technology?
Can you think of examples of when new technology is a wholly positive thing? How about a negative thing?
Are there any examples of technology that you have adopted that harms others?
Here are some more provocations:
Think of your fav tech product, or the one you use the most. Are you aware of a friend or coworker that chooses not to use it? If you can’t think of anyone, why not?
Do you do digital detoxes, or even more general practices like camping, Lent, Ramadan, or Uposatha? How do these practices inform your tech choices?
Check out my Uses page where you will find a list of things I DO NOT use. I am by no means a perfect paragon of technology ethics ("we all can’t be Buddhas"), but this supposed to be a practice, which means it is ongoing. If you make a DO NOT USE list, please share. All of our lists do not need to look exactly the same, everyone has their own life contingencies, but I relish the free and open discussion.
The CITED podcast is back! It has been a few years. I’ve previously enjoyed their work on the reproducibility crisis in scientific publishing and many of their critical episodes on their original run in the 2015-2018 era. Gordon Katic and the CITED team have an engaging narrative technique for introducing listeners to complex topics, so I know this new series is going to be good.
This time they are taking on the issue of expertise in economics and how it is abused.
A quick, illustrative personal story: back in the early 2000s I met a professor at a tiny coffee shop tucked away behind an ivy wall north of my university in Kyoto. The flower print ceramics and doilies made me feel like I was taking tea at an English nan’s house. In this setting I asked for advice: “how can I prepare to study regional conflict in grad school?” He was quick with an answer: “Study economics.”
I did go on to study regional conflict and counter-terrorism in grad school, and encountered much economic thinking, including a prof who worked for NORAD using complex mathematical models to fight the Soviets during the arms race in the 1980s.
Economics is the science with an answer for everything. That does not mean those answers are right. In the past few years there have been a new raft of books challenging mainstream economics, and the power of economists and economic thinking in our political life. This is in some part due to society slowly coming out of four decades of neoliberalism. (I first came upon that word a decade ago reading things like Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century and Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years — another pair of books that make you question economics as a field — but finally that word has entered the mainstream, even being denounced by global leaders like former Japan PM Kishida and US President Joe Biden. This just goes to show how things had evolved over the past few years).
In terms of what society reaps when you sow such seeds, I really recommend Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (my GR Review and chapter notes) which very much brings this debate into today’s political reality. There are still reactionary elements out there, many active in my are of the internet and startup-land, so read Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (my GR Review and chapter notes) to understand where they are coming from. And if you want to imagine an alternative to global capitalism as driven by the thinking of mainstream economic thinkers, take a walk into the forest and read The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
Okay, so this turned out to be a giant book recommendation post, but it is also a podcast recommendation. Check out CITED. I will be listening along. So far the first ep on Simon Kuznets and the history of the econometric measure of GDP already has me angry. Let me know what you think, and what we can do to have better ways to think about social political issues today and tomorrow.
This was one of the themes of Causal Islands Berlin, the fourth iteration of the “Future of Computing” conference, and the first one to take place in Europe.
I flew out from Vancouver last week to reconnect with some old friends and meet new potential collaborators. I have been involved with CI since the beginning but this was the first one I could attend in person. The Hallway Track is legendary, and I can tell you I made so many great connections here in Berlin!
The talks covered the technical and the artistic, and there was an underlying message of keeping the bar to participate low so that more people can engage with technology on their terms: less power to giant centralized corporations, less siloing of our information, less intrusive surveillance, less disparity. But this is about more than merely the individual, it is about computing with our communities. To paraphrase one of the presenters (an actual poet who said this much better than I can reproduce here):
I want to co-train and co-own an LLM model with my friends. I would love to see me in their work and them in my work, since this is already happening.
💞
More local control, more agency, more flexibility, more room to remix and reform and customize software, more collaborating with friends, more parody and jokes, and many more experiments. More of what we saw on the Causal Islands stage.
The videos of the talks will be released in the next few weeks. I can’t wait to share them!
Thank you to all the attendees and supporters of Causal Islands. I look forward to continued discussion on the Causal Islands Discord, and I look forward to the next event!
Despite being the beginning of May Taipei was very warm. The sun was out as we walked the wide sidewalks around Taipei Station downtown, cars and scooters zooming by. Even when it was cloudy, crossing the Keelung River through the tech area of town (I spotted the Foxconn tower), the lush green mountains of the north were a tropical reminder. When we took the sky train to the eastern part of the city at Nangang, zooming along the edge of the pretty lake at Dahu Park, I was thankful I brought my sandals.
Half our time in Taiwan was spent in Taipei, a city that houses nearly 40% of the country’s population. It was nice to see some other cities and towns (as with most countries the capital city/economic center is not representative) but Taipei is a very enjoyable place. We travelled on trains and buses quite a bit and walked a few of the neighbourhoods. Taipei is a bustling city with way better international food than Japan (outside of Tokyo I suppose). Between trips to nightmarkets like at Raohe Street where we saw some great “bird fortune-telling”, we had tacos and steak and tacos again! The second floor of Taipei Station has all sorts of Thai and Korean and Japanese food. One late night when I was on my own, I finally partook in a Taiwanese Mos Burger, which actually was different than in Japan.
Highlights of Taipei
On the first hot day we took breakfast at a Soy Milk shop, a cramped little restaurant with a giant line of hungry tourists and locals out the front. We over-ordered many different breakfast delicacies and sampled all the little spicy and sweet sauces, crowded around a wooden table, our heads nearly touching. At the table in the corner I watched and old man rolling the dough for bao. He was in his own world, completely unbothered by the crowd, and quickly producing units of the perfect thickness with his practiced hands.
Hot stepping through the morning shadows to avoid the sun we made it to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial, a massive white building at the end of a long strip of lawn that we avoided due to fear of being cooked. The grounds are bordered with a covered walk, so we took the coward’s way and I had to satisfy myself with some photos of the building from its corner. Inside was shaded but still sweltering. Up the long stairs is an open-faced alcove. The ceiling is decorated by an intricate pattern around the sun emblem found on the Taiwanese flag. Seated at the back of the hall is a giant statue of Chiang Kai Shek, the man who brought the Republic of China to the island of Taiwan after his defeat in the Chinese Civil War against Mao’s Communist forces. A few industrial fans moved the hot air around the room, but I couldn’t let myself feel sorry for myself. At least I was not in full dress uniform like the military guard! We timed our arrival perfectly to get a good view of the changing of the guard, an elaborate and excruciatingly slow and exacting performance. I almost fell over with heat stroke just holding my camera to capture it all! After 15 minutes of slow motion goose-stepping, then rifle spinning, then standing perfectly still (for the next hour I suppose) the process was over, we took some quick selfies and then retreated inside the air-conditioned building below.
The Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Building houses all sorts of displays and shops, but the main two areas really sum up Taiwan’s split personality with regards to its modern founding. When you walk into the main museum hall you turn left into a wing that lionizes Chiang Kai Shek, the military dictator of the country for 25 years, with displays of his letters, cars, and slippers. If you turn into the rightward wing of the museum you walk through a maze of photos and videos featuring the journalists and political prisoners that Chiang Kai Shek’s regime imprisoned.
CKS is certainly a complex person, and the pastiche I have just painted is particularly simplistic. But standing at the entrance, looking left and right, I was struck by how Taiwan is still dealing with its history. (Something I also felt at the National History Museum in Tainan)
Later in the trip I had the opportunity to walk these streets at night. This area of the city has wide boulevards lined with many official buildings, all terminating at a giant roundabout where you get a great view of the President’s offices. I wasn’t able to get a good photo of it since I was rudely interrupted by a scooter accident that happened right in front of me. It happened like right in front of the National Taiwan University Hospital and a block from the Taipei City Police Department so the authorities were on the scene in a flash. Everyone seemed okay thankfully, but no cool night photos for Chad.
Luckily, I was able to go to Lungshan temple in the evening. Once again I was alone, so I could take my time photographing the elaborate rooves adorned with dragons. After feeling some cool spray from the purple-lit waterfall at the entrance, I crossed into the busy temple, where many people were throwing Moon Blocks over and over again. Waling the circuit of the temple complex, I peeked into each cubby trying to identify gods and goddesses. The place was overflowing with energy. I even picked up an omamori protective charm as a souvenir.
A lack of cabbage
Tucked into the lush hills on the north side of the city is the National Museum. As mentioned above, Chiang Kai Shek escaped the mainland during the Chinese Civil War. When he did he brought many treasures from China. 18 years later China went through the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guards destroyed much of China’s cultural artifacts. So many treasures lost! As a result, the national Museum in Beijing is pretty skint. But the National Museum in Taipei! Wondrous! There are so many pieces that you could return many times over to properly enjoy them. The tiny cabbage carved from jade is the most famous. Unfortunately it was not being displayed while we were there. I did get some good closeups of the jade meat though.
One highlight was seeing artifacts carved with kanji (Chinese Characters) dating back to the 13th-11th Century BCE! My kids said if they ever got access to a time machine they would go back and destroy these so they would not have to study kanji at Japanese school anymore.
There are amazing treasures here. One of my favourites is an ivory balls carved from an elephant’s tusk. The ball is carved with another ball inside, which moves! And inside that ball is another ball! The ball took over a hundred years, was started by the grandfather and finished by the grandson. Can you guess how many balls-inside-balls there are? (Hint, a lot more than Inception). Check the gallery below to see photos and the answer.
In Kaohsiung we saw a Grand Hotel but in Taipei we got to see the Grand Hotel. About twice the size of the one in the south, this hotel has hosted many famous dignitaries from around the world. Intricately designed there are many many details. The lobby alone features 144 pillars, 71 lanterns, and 220,000 dragons! We took a tour which included the secret slide installed to evacuate VIPs in case of emergency!
At the back of the hotel is the Centennial Dragon, which was a gift from Japan to the Taipei Jinja, the Japanese Shinto shrine that used to be on this spot. The story of the statue includes how it survived a plane crash. They know it is “obviously” a Japanese dragon because it only has 3 claws, which is how they did it back in the Tang dynasty. Since then Chinese dragons have evolved to 5 claws, but since Japan never changes…
For our final day we visited the Taipei Zoo, originally constructed about a hundred years ago by the Japanese (who really love their zoos!) We were able to get up close to many animals! The first section is Formosa animals: tiny deer, goat-like things, boars, the leopard cat, and then a huge sun bear. The zoo was too large for the half-day we had dedicated to it though, so we missed a bunch and went straight to the bird area which had the most amazing Nicobar pigeons.
At the end of the day the family took a gondola to the top of the mountain behind the zoo to get some nice night views of the city. Meanwhile I went back into the city on my own to meet with a local Microblogger at a lovely vegetarian restaurant. We had an amazing conversation, and made a great connection. I love meeting random internet people!
Next post I will try to consolidate some thoughts and impressions about Taiwan. (UPDATE: Many many months later, I present my inconclusions →)
From pages 24-25 of Babel by R.F. Kuang, where the Latin teacher scolds the student Robin for not remembering his macrons:
‘Even the length of a single vowel matters, Robin Swift. Consider the Bible. The original Hebrew text never specifies what sort of forbidden fruit the serpent persuades Eve to eat. But in Latin, malum means “bad” and mālum,’ he wrote the words out for Robin, emphasizing the macron with force, ‘means “apple”. It was a short leap from there to blaming the apple for the original sin. But for all we know, the real culprit could be a persimmon.’
This parable for accuracy in documentation reminded me of the death of the historical Buddha, Siddartha Gautama. When the blacksmith Cunda delivered the Buddha’s last mealsūkaramaddava “pig’s delight”, was it actually pork or some kind of truffle that gave the Buddha dysentery? The truth has been lost to transliteration.
The prevalence of lexical ambiguity and world-turning food items in religious texts is shocking, is it not?
Now that I am back from summer holidays and things are settling here in my new home in Canada it is time to start taking care of my health for the first time in years. I have been walking lots, building back up to jogging, but I decided to kick off September with something I did a couple years ago: #craigsgymclass
Craig Atkinson, an active member of the Anglo-Japan-Twittersphere, inspired a bunch of us with a simple way to kickstartour way to healthier living. The rules are below. I am going to take this challenge again, and will post my progress at #craigsgymclass. Join me! Let’s get work up some support from the community! 💪 👏 🫂 😭 😊
In order to flourish as individuals and a society we must free ourselves from the strictures of standardized testing, industrialized education, “accelerated learning”, technocratic utopianism, solutionism, longtermism, white supremacy and eugenic thinking, the carceral state, credit scoring and the “ordinal society” (See Fourcade and Healy), and more! It is hard to be imaginative when we are oppressed… but we have to be imaginative to overthrow the oppressors. In an ultimately hopeful argument, Benjamin provides example after example of real projects where humans work together to protect one another and lift one another up. She argues for “radical interdependence” and building a safe, equitable society to further our collective “radical imagination.”
The gold rush at the turn of the 1900s caused a boom in the small mountain town of Jiufen, with its sweeping views of the sea towards both the northwest and northeast. The narrow road switches back upon itself numerous times as you climb up the rugged mountainside. Across the valley, deep in the forest (with no visible road to get there) is a monastery poking through the trees. Once you make it to the town the road narrows even more, hairpinning around houses almost stacked upon one another. Take care to drive slow as knots of tourists suddenly run across the road to take photos of the rolling green valley below, or spill out of souvenir shops and the covered “Old Street” full of shops selling everything from ocarina to stinky tofu.
Our driver took us to the top of the mountain, the far side of the town where we had a view of the valley below. Down the hill we saw the telltale shapes of the family grave sites, which sorta look like the ones you see in Okinawa (cultural connections!). In fact, when you look on a map, you realize that half the town is graves!
Satellite imagery of Jiufen. Note the small structures dominating the hill. All graves.
It was raining when we arrived. In fact, it rained almost the whole time we were in Jiufen. Our driver could not navigate through the narrow streets and called our B&B owner who retrieved us on a scooter. We followed him on foot wheeling our luggage down the steep road lined with graves.
A few switchbacks later we made it to the B&B and dropped our luggage. “How do we get to Old Street?” He just pointed “That way!” and we were off, picking our way between houses, down random-seeming stairways, passing stray cats. There were no people, but these were no roads. We were silent as ghosts, scared to wake anyone. As long as we were heading down we knew it was the right way. Soon we came upon a narrow stairwell between two buildings leading down to a river of tourists flowing left and right in the covered shopping street.
Jiufen Old Street greeted us with the loud sounds and colours and smells of a crowded shopping area. Following the flow we branched off, stopping in a restaurant eddy where I had my first Vegetarian Red Vinasse Taiwanese Meatball. Continuing on were shoe stores and tea shops and every kind of knick-knack you can imagine, all hauled up to the top of this mountain to be sold to visitors who hauled themselves up here to buy.
But why? One reason, at least for the Japanese, is the A-Mei Teahouse, a distinctive building that has been said to be one of the inspirations for the bathhouse in Spirited Away (though Miyazaki denies this, and there are a number of onsen in Japan itself which claim this title). The souvenir shops cashed in with all sorts of Totoro and Ponyo and other Ghibli goods. The guy in the ocarina shop playing Joe Hisaishi tunes was actually pretty talented!
We took photos in front of the A-Mei Teahouse, and with a statue commemorating the gold miners in front of the building, but we took refuge in another teahouse further down the street, one with a fantastic view of the valley. This was my first Chinese tea experience. Not quite the same as cha-no-yū, but still with a recognizable level of ritual. The gentle spa music lent to the relaxing atmosphere as we drank cup after tiny cup of the smooth tea, watching the wind blow clouds up and over the mountain ridge above us. I recalled one of the one-stroke calligraphy pieces by Master Hsing Yun, the founder of Fo Guang Shan: Your mind a mountain, letting the clouds pass by.
Can you count the streets?
It started to rain again so we huffed up, up, up! Stairwell after stairwell we got progressively more soaked as we poorly navigated the maze back to our lodgings. Once back it was straight into a hot shower to ward off any sickness. Later, my wife and I walked back down and had a browse, picking up some dinner to eat back in the room. After dark we climbed up yet more narrow stairs to the roof of our B&B to take in some night views.
Waking early the next morning it was back down to Old Street before breakfast. The whole scene was very different: shutters closed, the street empty of tourists. Where yesterday there were throngs of people, now vans and trucks drove with their headlights on and barely enough clearance on either side. The narrow one-way street meant we had the pleasure of experiencing Jiufen’s daily morning traffic jam: each vehicle forced to park for long minutes as the vehicle in front finished its job of loading garbage or dirty hotel sheets, or dropping off a batch of tofu ready to be steeped in the stinky broth for the day’s sales. It was kinda like the feeling when you leave your hotel in the morning and the cleaning staff is getting to work, the mystery of the night before gone.
We stopped in the Family Mart for a little coffee and morning snack. At the back of the convenience store was a seating area with large windows, overhanging the cliff. Probably the best view from a convenience store I have ever seen. After breakfast we hiked back up to the top of the mountain and took in some more views. As I was photographing the valley we could hear the distant sound of drums, the popping of firecrackers, and see the occasional firework launched high into the air below us. May 1st.
Before noon we caught a taxi for the 45 minute drive back to modern Taipei, which is where we will pick up the story next time! 🚕
Taiwan has been on the bucketlist for a while. In the year 2000 I was an exchange student in Kyoto learning Taiwanese from a fellow exchange student who was so excited for elections that he flew back to Taiwan to vote. That was only the second presidential election since the military dictatorship (which ruled from 1949) had transitioned to democratic elections in the nineties. In 2000 things were very exciting since it was the first time an opposition party won the presidency.
My wife too had a Taiwan connection in 2000. She was friends with a different exchange student, a Korean Buddhist nun, who went on to live and study in Taiwan for many years. That was when I first learned how much of a Buddhist religious center Taiwan is, hosting monastics and scholars from all over the world. Taiwan’s religiosity also contributes to its high percentage of vegetarians, which is second only to India.
In the intervening years I have had many friends travel and live in Taiwan. When I said I was finally going, everyone was excited and encouraging: “You are going to love it!” And you know what? I did love it. And I would love to go back someday. Mostly because so many of my questions about the place were not answered… but more on that later.
I am no expert on Taiwan. Our trip was only 8 days and we mostly engaged in sight-seeing. Thus, I cannot bring you any deep insights into the politics and culture of the country. Furthermore, travelling with kids meant my opportunities to spend hours in museums or engaging in discussions at teashops was severely restricted. All I can offer are impressions, to paint with a very broad brush. If my impressions are off, you are wholly invited to correct me in the comments. I encourage it, and want to learn more!
We flew into Kaohsiung in the south, drove to nearby Tainan for a day, then took the high speed rail up the west coast to Taipei. From there we drove out to Jiufen for a night, and then spent the rest of the time back in Taipei.
Pre-processed photo counts
I took a lot of photos. I have whittled them down and posted to Flickr, but here I will accompany each album with a bit of explanation to give you some context.
I am going to break this up into a few posts which I will link to here:
Kaohsiung is a port city in southern Taiwan, developed by the Japanese as an important industrial hub. We hired a tour guide who carted us around to different locations including the port area, the old British consulate, the art walk, and to one of the most intensely nerdy coffee shops I have ever seen (run by what I am pretty sure are devotees of the Falun Gong new religious movement , check out the art to see what I mean).
Driving the streets of a non-capital city gives you another perspective into the lives of regular folk. I like just cruising and taking it in: a crowded row of store signs in bright Chinese characters pass by; students leaving university crossing the street as scooters wend past our vehicle to crowd the crosswalk; commuters in various Japanese and European cars; trucks hauling goods; glimpses down side streets as people take out their laundry or play basketball at the courts. Snapshots of lives. After the expertly brewed coffee came a sumptuous condensed-milk infused shaved ice topped with mangos and strawberries to cool off and consider all that was seen.
Fo Guang Shan
One highlight was visiting Fo Guang Shan (album) one of the four major temples of Taiwan, and home to a Buddha Tooth Relic, of which there remain only three in the world. This temple complex, built in the 1990s, is absolutely massive. Once you pass through the main entrance building which features an information center, a couple of restaurants, a bunch of souvenir stores, and a Starbucks, you are on a wide path lined by eight pagodas that leads to a main hall. Behind that hall is another building with a giant Buddha statue, overlooking the entire complex.
Each pagoda in itself is a museum of sorts. We went into just two: an information center with the history of the temple and teachings on the Noble Eightfold Path. The other pagoda we visited featured the One Stroke Calligraphy of Venerable Master Hsing Yun, the founder of Fo Guang Shan, who took up calligraphy after losing his sight — thereby restricting him to using just one stroke since he could not see where the characters were on the page.
We did not have time to peek into all of the pagodas, and since it was raining we followed the covered path that runs on the outer edges of the main route. Here we brushed our fingers along the dark stone walls, engraved with the names of every single person that donated money to the construction of this holy complex (photo). (We spotted a number of Japanese and English names too!)
Unfortunately photos were restricted in the main building. In the lobby I was able to take a shot of a carving of the 500 Arhats sculpted from roots of a 1000 year old camphor tree. Beyond that were a number of sub-shrines in this building. We navigated through groups of pilgrims and into the main temple dedicated to Guanyin (Kannon in Japanese). This was a very modern facility, circular with glass walls emblazoned with important religious figures, backlit by neon lights. The main altar featured a statue of 1000-hand Guanyin and some animatronics, and a line of small plastic bottles with red caps. At the direction of a helpful attendant, we paid our respects to Guanyin, and he filled one of the little bottles full of holy water from a dispenser in the altar. Later that night I poured some of the holy water over my head in the shower, and I think it worked! I never got sick the whole time in Taiwan, and I famously get sick on the fourth or fifth day whenever I travel abroad. We kept a few bottles to take home and put on our home altar as offerings to our ancestors.
Anyways, behind the circular shrine is a very square shrine with a heavy-looking gold statue of the Shakyamuni Buddha gifted from Thailand. This was another opulent room, which can be a little disorienting if you are used to understated Japanese temples. Next was the main show: the tooth relic. This large shrine room has a very high ceiling with wood panels carved in the images of famous Buddhist temples from around the world. I recognized Bodh Gaya right away. At the front of the room is a large Buddha, lying on one side, carved from white jade from Myanmar. Above is a little nook with the reliquary which contains the tooth. At the prompting of a nun, we each took a little battery powered candle and reverently walked up to the altar, placing it there as an offering. I just sat and stared for a while enjoying the ambiance until a large tour group came in — which is always my cue to leave.
The final area of the complex to see was the giant Buddha statue. We took a bunch of photos here, and circumambulated the Four Noble Truths Stupas on the four corners of the Main Hall, each shaped like the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya. Symbolism is everywhere at Fo Guang Shan.
After this we took a very lovely vegetarian meal and browsed the shops. In all we spent just a few hours at Fo Guang Shan, but you could very well spend a couple of days here.
A few more spots around the south
Back from Fo Guang Shan we stayed at the Kaohsiung Grand Hotel (album), a much smaller (and ahem… cheaper) version of the Grand Hotel in Taipei.
Here we relaxed in the pool, I caught up on some writing, and we watched some local television. A Fo Guang Shan channel had a bunch of religious information. An “ethnic” channel featured indigenous programming in languages that sounded very different from the Mandarin and Hokkien we heard on the streets.
For our last day in the south we drove up to Tainan, about 45 minutes north with our guide where visited the large and newly made National Museum of Taiwan History. We spent as long as we possibly could until the kids were tired out learning about the full history of Taiwan from prehistoric times, the settlement of mainland Han Chinese, indigenous communities, repelling the Dutch, the Japanese era, the postwar economic miracle, and a bit about the issues facing Taiwanese today and in the near future. I took many notes, but to be honest the facility raised a lot more questions.
After the museum we rounded off our stay in the south by visiting the old Dutch fort (Chikhan Tower) and doing some shopping at the narrow Shennong Street before catching the High Speed Rail north to Taipei. Being the evening train on a holiday weekend, it was packed, so we had to stand for the one and half hour journey.
📚 Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is an ethical framework advocating for limiting excess wealth and redistributing to the benefit of wider society. The book builds its case by historically analyzing the rise of inequality over the past 50 years through global neoliberal policy; the social problems that inequality cause or exacerbate; how taking a Limitarian stance could improve things for everyone including the wealthy; and what needs to be done to get there. She starts off the book with her proposal that there be a “political” wealth cap of 10mm $/€/£ per person, and an ethical limit of 1mm $/€/£ per person. Basically, she comes out of the book fighting. Then, throughout the author provides many shocking statistics and refers to many different academic studies. Furthermore, she runs though many of the counter arguments that have been posed to her by the public and the media, naming and taking apart each objection as a trained philosopher should. She brings a lot to the fight, and in the end settles basically on a strong welfare state (I would like to a see an anarchist argument). Altogether is a strong package. It is not the kind of thing you pass to the proverbial conservative uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table. He will scoff, reject it outright, and recommend Thomas Sowell or some other ghoul. But for people who do not pray to Ludwig von Mises or one of the Mont Pelerin set, but do not necissarly have a strong critical bent or are not as politically aware, it might serve as a good catch-me-up and help them understand why they think we might be in the Bad Timeline. I really appreciate Robeyns’s call at the end for more political engagement by regular people. Our democratic muscles have atrophied in the decades of consumerist atomization. As the classic Graeber quote goes, “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
See my short chapter notes on Goodreads or Bookwyrm to get a peek into the details of the book.
Cal Newport’s latest advice book tackles the question of productivity in knowledge work. Factory work can much more easily be measured and systematized. Newport points out that office workers, writers, artists, and scholars are often assigned tasks and must come up with their own individual system to be productive. These systems are opaque to managers, who end up relying on “visible activity” (which many busy office workers are familiar with) as the proxy for productivity. Add in always-on email and instant messaging apps, plus a global pandemic and people trying to work from busy homes, and you end up with a lot of burnout.
The initial chapters of the book will have many knowledge workers nodding along empathetically, sharing in the sense of exhaustion and overload. Taking inspiration from the “slow food” movement Newport quickly moves into his three solutionary principles:
Do fewer things
Work at a natural pace
Obsess over quality
Each principle gets its own chapter full of tips in how you can step out of the hamster wheel of “psuedo-productivity”, take back your time from your employer, and focus on truly great work. Newport takes a lot of inspiration from classic figures like Isaac Newton, Copernicus, and Madame Curie. (Pretty intimidating for your average cubicle warrior…)
Ultimately, the book is not interested in deeper, critical questions of why we are burning out. Despite calling for a “revolution” in the conclusion, Newton drops some snide comments about Marx and leftists in the text. Challenging the system is not his job. Perhaps expected of a “productivity” blogger, he remains very much imprisoned in the self-exploitative work camp of the “late-modern achievement-subject” (see The Burnout Society by philosopher Byung Chul Han, an overview and link to my review here).
Maybe I am being too “obsessed over quality.” A cynic might say this is a short book that capitalizes on people’s dissatisfaction with their work life and then doles “life-changing” advice between mentions of all his other books (on sale at all fine bookstores! And I admit I would like to get at least one more!). The advice basically boils down to: get really good at something, raise your rates, and lower the amount of time you spend engaging in capitalism. It is burnout mitigation on the level of a corporate mindfulness retreat. But that’s okay. It is better than nothing, and sometimes a reader needs a bit of prodding to be self-reflective, and the book did spur me to think about my own working habits. And though I have my issues, it is much better than other “make your bed”-style self-help books. I enjoyed the first bit and there are a few good nuggets in there. I think it would be a good jumping off point for discussion in a book club or office setting. So if you need something to spark a little rethinking about how you are doing things, this could be a good quick and moderately stimulating read. 3 stars!
Robin Berjon and Maria Farrell not only show how we have arrived at this online monoculture (and the dangers therein), but how we can take steps to seeding more diversity (and therefore resilience) for the good of the whole forest.
This article really sums up the work I have been doing over the past couple of years as a sort of armchair internet ecologist. Very happy to share it wide, hoping the seeds sprout into action by the internet-using public… which is all of us!
The HN Tokyo Meetup. As one Kansai person told me: “I can tell it’s a meetup for people who are into frameworks.”
Last week I went up to Tokyo on my annual pilgrimage to meet with old friends and make new connections. I timed my trip to coincide with the monthly Hacker News Tokyo Meetup. These social events regularly see a hundred or so hackers, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts of all kinds come out to drink and be merry. This month we were on the rooftop of the PARCO building in Shibuya. It was a bit windy but that rooftop is really gorgeous, offering excellent views of the city. Over the five hours I was there (including an after-party at a craft brewery around the corner) I met a ton of interesting people.
A small sample:
an Elixir programmer considering a side gig as a an artisinal cheesemaker
a death metal singer that flew from the US to make connections and try to get a job
a data analyst who made a “moneyball” database for Columbia Records for discovering hidden talent (I was finally able to learn from him exactly what an “A&R” is!)
It was a blast.
Community members gather to listen to announcements.
Engaging with a community of your peers is fun and rewarding. You never know who you will meet or what you will learn. And who knows what opportunities it might bring in the future?
I was a member of the HN Tokyo Slack community for 4 years before I even went to an event. In fact, I was introduced to it by a guy in the Fukuoka startup community. I am still in touch with those Fukuoka comrades… last year I was able to meet up with some at the Maker Faire in Kyoto. Nowadays I have been engaged with the the local Kansai HN and programmer community.
During the HN Tokyo event I introduced myself as a “diplomat from HN Kansai”. Many people came up to me afterwards, interested in hearing more about Kansai. I invited everyone to stop by our community meetups if they were ever in Osaka or Kyoto. I was even able to recommend places to visit in Fukuoka!
I enjoy going around to different communities and meeting people. As someone who has been between cultures (and locations!) for a long time, I suppose I also enjoy bridging different communities.
Back when I lived in the Okanagan every community had their “Geek Beers”-style of tech meetup. Working with friends in the neighbouring towns such as Vernon, Kelowna, Penticton, and Kamloops, we started an event where everyone in the region would congregate in one community. It was an annual summer event with a rotating host. We called it #megageekbeers. One year we even got corporate sponsorship to cover a bus to drive people to the next community over so they could arrive and get home safely!
I am still connected to the Kelowna and Vernon startup communities. We share job prospects, industry information, and memes 😜 through these networks across communities and now across borders.
Networking opportunities are super valuable at a personal level, whether for professional or fun reasons. We are all taught this early. But cross-community networking is how we can build movements. “Federation” has become a keyword in online social media the past couple of years. I think there is a huge opportunity to realize this concept IRL: let’s network our networks!
Community members step up to the mic to deliver announcements.
I am posting this publicly so that I can reference it in links going forward. There might be a more common way to express this sentiment, this is just the way that I often do in conversation. It is something I came up with in discussing intentional communities with my wife a while back.
Oftentimes, communities will tear themselves apart simply over battles over who is “pure” enough to belong. We see this political infighting in all sorts of communities at all sorts of scales. The “narcissism of small differences”, right? Holding an unreasonably high bar of acceptance is completely counterproductive to building the kinds of broad-based movements that we need today in order to tackle the problems all of our societies face, whether at the international or local levels.
One of the great lessons of anarchism that I learned from David Graeber over the years is how to actually go about developing the vitally effective community characteristic of diversity: learning how to listen to and respect individuals, their choices, experiences, and opinions. We cannot let “intellectual purism” prevent us from building (or burning!) necessary bridges. That is not to say there isn’t a limit. The Paradox of Tolerance is also something we need to contend with. But in general, we should approach community building with a “Big Tent” attitude.
The Buddha was a perfectly enlightened being, a singular achievement. Yet the sangha, the Buddhist community, has survived for more than 2500 years.
We all can’t be Buddhas… but with the right attitude, there are plenty of other ways that we can participate, and be together as part of the community.
Footnote
At the end of my 1 year Upāsaka program, I was given the Pali name of Sanghapāla — “protector of the sangha” — so one could say I have a spiritual devotion to community-building! 😊
Rest of World has a piece on the fastest-growing countries for software development featuring GitHub’s Innovation graph. I got a peek at this last year at the GitHub booth at the IGF2023 in Kyoto. One of my favs is Economy collaborators which represents international collaboration on projects. It is the sum of git pushes sent from one country to another. This is some real CIA Factbook or Atlas of Economic Complexity-like stuff but for software development.
This further makes the point that the centralization-decentralization debate is nuanced, and Schneider quotes another scholar saying we must go “beyond the centralization-centralization dichotomy.”
Schneider discusses entrepreneurship, co-ops, blockchain, and more, introducing three characteristics of applying the decentralization principle:
Decentralization is a process, not static. It is not one-way. Centralization is like reverse-entropy.
Decentralizing systems should be heterogenous, incorporating multiple forms of decentralization.
We must plan for centralization and ensure that it is accountable. This rhymes with Mark Nottingham’s point of the need for checks and balances.
I really appreciated Mark Nottingham’s memo RFC 9518 on Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards. In it he provides a wide-ranging and balanced introduction to the topic in quite a short article. I have been collecting bits of arguments for decentralization (in a centralized location of course 😉) for the past couple of years, with the intention to write something round-up, but have struggled. I am so glad Mark did it, and so much better than I could!
I wholly recommend reading the piece. Below I will expand on it with some more wide-ranging sources. You don’t have to read his article to understand this post, but I hope by the end you will be even more motivated to go check out his.
The RFC 9518 memo covers different types and harms of centralization in an internet context, and indicates what can be done by standards organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Nottingham notes that standards orgs cannot prevent centralization, but can make sure to consider “centralization risk” when evaluating a standard, and promote those that enable decentralization.
Yet he warns:
while decentralized technical standards may be necessary to avoid centralization of Internet functions, they are not sufficient
This is a problem for a certain sector of blockchain and web3 enthusiasts and why some pragmatic proponents came up with the term “sufficient decentralization.” Nottingham covers blockchain-style consensus in his memo. I also found Alice Yuan Zhang’s challenge of the “myths” of decentralization in web3 is a fun read. A quote from her:
Decentralization as praxis is rooted in direct action, striving to abolish capitalistic economics and supply chains which encode mass oppression into large-scale systems with many actors and minimal accountability.
Nottingham agrees, writing that centralization becomes a problem “when it has no checks, balances, or other mechanisms of accountability”. Architectural decentralization can certainly help, but it isn’t enough as explained in Capture Resistance by Robin Berjon.
Furthermore, we may not want total decentralization. Nottingham gives the example of content moderation as something that benefits from centralization, and makes the point that centralized structures such as “governments, corporations, and nonprofit organizations” can be useful. This level of nuance is what makes Nottingham’s shortish piece extra valuable. Nobody is under the illusion that decentralization is a panacea.
In discussing internet fragmentation, “public interest technologist” Mallory Knodel writes:
Sovereignty needs to be balanced against interdependence. Globalization – and its technologies – arose from the idea that interdependence prevents conflict. Economic interlinkage, or entanglement, disincentivizes attacks because it raises the risk of collateral damage and unintended consequences for the attacker. Perhaps some healthy fragmentation provides greater opportunity for interdependence beyond interconnectivity, and is an example of how to embrace a more complex internet landscape.
“Healthy fragmentation”… centralization and decentralization in balance. How do we combine them appropriately? Mike Masnick used the canonical example of the US interstate system in his essay Decentralization in All the Things:
having centralized infrastructure that is open and on which others can build in a decentralized manner can open up tremendous possibilities.
One main way we can do this with regards to internet protocols is to ensure interoperability and lower switching costs, which is where Nottingham says standards orgs can play a role. In this he is in agreement with Cory Doctorow, whose latest non-fiction book The Internet Con is a podium-pounding preachment on how “Network effects are merely how Big Tech gets big. Switching costs are how Big Tech stays big.” Interop lowers switching costs, and puts agency back in the hands of the people (see the presentation version of the book by watching Cory’s talk at DefCon last year).
Decentralization is important because building systems that distribute power is important. Building systems that resist abuses of power is important.
She argues that centralization/decentralization should not be conceptualized in terms of simple things like % control over a number of nodes, but “how trust and power are given, distributed and interact.” I think she puts it admirably when she writes, “Decentralized systems are systems that rely on the distribution of power to secure the system.”
That last sentence is certainly one to mull over.
But it is her point about who has access to power that makes decentralization such a wide-ranging topic. Once we start to go beyond the bounds of internet protocols the topic becomes more complex.
… increasing the overall quality and effectiveness of the system of governance, while increasing the authority and capacities of sub-national levels. … Decentralization could also be expected to contribute to key elements of good governance, such as increasing people’s opportunities for participation in economic, social and political decisions; assisting in developing people’s capacities; and enhancing government responsiveness, transparency and accountability.
In general we might say decentralization is a substrate for agency.
In her lovely book How Infrastructure Works, Deb Chachra thinks about the future of infrastructure over the next 50 years in the face of climate change. For her, decentralization is a key to resilience, an important ability for the climate fight we are in as we rebuild our massively centralized infrastructure systems so communities can build to their own needs. Diffuse, diverse, and distributed… which also happen to be the founding principles (values?) of the internet itself.
… like forests our infrastructure systems have the potential to be modular, networked, decentralized, responsive, and resilient
Decentralization is a technological, architectural, political, and philosophical topic that I think underlies most if not all of our coordination efforts, whether in the realm of making the net better, or battling climate change. Because it is such a wide-ranging topic, entangled in so many debates, I have struggled to solidify my personal take and capture it in a succinct blog post. The lack of a single canonical answer to “how much decentralization” makes it a slippery topic. It’s a valuable principle to guide our decision-making and I am glad to see it enshrined here in an RFC so that standards organizations like the IETF can take it under consideration as we build the next generation of internet infrastructure. Mark Nottingham has done an excellent job writing such balanced and accessible memo in a handy, shareable document to get people familiarized with the concept and its nuance. That link again: RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards
I appreciate the walkthrough and seeing others’s setup. After about 3 months on Micro.blog I feel like I could still go further. I am partial-POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) but not quite ready for PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site).
POSSE ± PESOS?
I use Micro blog as my main launch point on the web now, cross-posting to my 🦋 Bluesky (@chadkohalyk.com) and 🐘Mastodon account (@chadkoh@indieweb.social). I have Bridgy working for my Bluesky account so replies there come back here which is good, but haven’t figured out a workaround to do that for my Mastodon account. The Micro blog has its own Fedi address which can be followed at @chadkoh@micro.blog, but I x-post everything anyways so there isn’t really a need to follow that. I don’t really want to go through another Masto migration and consolidate my main fedi presence to @micro.blog 🫤 (my turn to cite Erin Kissane, this time on the challenge of Mastodon migrations).
Twitter of course is gone (archives here or here) and I do have a company Fedi handle @chad@fission.social which I actually don’t use that much since any “professional” content I post pretty much just goes straight into my normal feeds.
I really enjoy the bookshelf and photos features of Micro Blog. It gives people a good sense of what is going on in my world without overwhelming them. There is much more detail on my Goodreads (in terms of updates and tracking of reading) and Flickr (where I post a lot more pics than what goes on my blog). I could theoretically push my Goodreads RSS feed and all my Flickr posts back to Microblog but I think that might be a bit overkill for most audiences. 🤔
Social “media” sidebar
Goodreads is the social reader’s bane of existence. Truly a template of corporate acquisition, centralization, and enshittification. I was able to quit Facebook and Google (except for shared docs with people) but cannot quit Amazon! Anyways, I started using Bookwyrm (chadkoh@bookwyrm.social), a fediverse social book-tracker, last year. It is mostly okay but has some shortcomings. I would love to make a Goodreads alt using the AT Protocol (see my call on Bluesky here).
I use book social networks not for their recommendation engines, but for the social part: I want to know what everyone else is reading! ATP could be a good solution because you don’t have your book activity and reviews locked up in another silo, and ATP could provide the underlying infra for social network effects. I wonder if the ATP approach could result in a better experience than ActivityPub in this instance? 🤔
Once you have books, then you do film, tv, comics, anime, etc. Media tracking, sharing, and reviews are a huge part of user-generated content online, and just like journalists being able to take their audiences with them I think people with a large corpus of social UGC would appreciate being able to maintain control over their activity.
Concluding consensus
The online CCU (Chad Cinematic Universe) has many different components and I fear bringing them all together in one place… is just too much! Splitting things up a little, with specific feeds (just follow my books on GR or BW, or movies on Letterboxd, or photos on Flickr) allows people to get just the right amount of Chad they can handle. If they want a more general feed they can go directly to https://micro.chadkohalyk.com and get a little taste of everything. And then of course, if they want a personal wrap-up on more of a monthly basis, they can subscribe to my newsletter (glibly named chadlibs) where I just share the highlights. I try to provide options to meet people where they are at… which has led to this fairly complex setup. But I do think it could be better.
Historically my annual “best of” posts are a roundup of the best books and film I consumed, but this year I would like to add a little bit more about personal developments. With my father-in-law passing in 2022, this year was about cleaning up the estate, healing, and enjoying Japan before returning to Canada.
We were able to get quite a bit of travel in: Tanegashima, Kagoshima, and Kirishima in the south; a summer break in Iki; and in the north Iwate, Fukushima and Aomori. For work I took two trips to Canada and had the privilege to visit Istanbul. It was a good year for travel, though I am kicking myself for missing out on Causal Islands and I was hoping to visit Germany at some point this year.
Losing 5 kilograms has been on my annual TODO list since Iki, but I could not justify locking myself up in a gym multiple times a week when my time in Japan is limited and I could be out seeing things. We are in the home stretch, the last few months until we leave Japan. This time it has a feeling of finality since we leave no parents and no apartment behind. When we leave Japan this time we will do so without leaving any roots. We are on the verge of one volume closing and a whole new book beginning.
40 Questions
Last month I discovered Steph Ango’s 40 Questions, a framework for annual reflection. I used it to think about my year and found it useful. I will share a few of my answers here publicly:
Did anyone close to you die?
For the first time in 4 years I can say “No!”
Who did you miss?
Lots of people. This year has been a lonely one for me. This is probably the biggest reason I look forward to returning to Canada in 2024: to hang out with my friends in person. Now, we had some friends come visit us in Japan and I met old friends on my travels to Canada and Turkey. I was especially happy to share Kyoto with people from “back home” (none of my family could handle the air travel), but maybe that oasis of excitement ended up making me feel even more lonesome.
Whose behavior merited celebration? 100 Rabbits, who I met in person this year. They live much further along the ethical lifestyle spectrum than I can, which I admire. As a society we need examples like this. I even looked at buying a boat this summer!
What political issue stirred you the most?
Not quite sure about specific events, since there were so many, but in terms of overall trends, I got a lot more into anarchist philosophy.
What valuable life lesson did you learn this year?
How pretty much everything is a coordination problem, and we have to figure out how to work together in this world. This drives my interest in both governance and anarchism. It also leads to my conviction that the way I can fight climate change is by working for a better, interoperable, and unitary internet. The internet is the best global coordination platform the world has ever known, and we are going to need it if we are going to solve the climate crisis.
What is a quote that sums up your year?
“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
― John Maynard Keynes
A note on the Buddhist path
One of my goals for 2023 was doing more sutta study, which I did with a group of upasika from all over the world via a Zoom reading club in the early part of the year. We had weekly meetings on each chapter of The Island. This actually blends in with another trend for 2023: upāsaka training. During all of 2022 I was committed to a year of being an upāsaka, and in 2023 I actually kinda surprisingly pretty much continued that path. I meditated nearly every day this year (missed just 4 days), only drank alcohol four times, and still did about 20 uposatha days where I committed to the 8 precepts (during the upāsaka year I did about 70).
Best of Reading
Okay, now on to the more traditional annual media wrap-up.
Of my 30 book goal I read 36 books, which is not the most I have ever done, but I had a lot of podcasts to listen to this year. (24 of those finished books were in audio!)
My book club only met 3 times this year, but we read my favourite fiction book of the year: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I am not a gamer, but I am a Gen Xer and came of age during this time. The emotion just sucked me in. The book played me like a game. And I recognize a lot of the work relationship stuff from my time in startups. An excellent read.
I did not watch much cinema this year, but I did finally see 2022 Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once which blew me away. I saw it while in Canada in January, and as soon as it was available in theatres in Japan I took my wife. Many tears were shed. We watched it again in September. The Daniels captured so much about the Asian immigrant experience in North America.
Most of my movie-watching time this year was with the kids. The new Spider-Man and Barbie were good. I did enjoy the popcorn-fun of Dungeons & Dragons. When I did get some screentime alone at home it was mostly television. I caught up on the last two seasons of Ted Lasso which was my fav tv series of this year by far. It hit me on a deep level making me consider my personal leadership style and more importantly my relationship to my own mental health. Football is life!
The Numbers for 2023
🖋 16 posts on the old blog and 9 long-form posts on the new microblog which I started posting to in October
As described in my previous post, Istanbul is a city of layers. Nothing demonstrates this more than one of the gems of the city: the Hagia Sophia.
Built on the site of an earlier Christian church erected in 336 AD by Constantius II (son of the Emperor Constantine) the current building was made in the 532 AD by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. For a thousand years it was the largest building in the world. Except for a short time as a Catholic church after the Fourth Crusade in the 13th century, the Hagia Sophia stood as a cathedral of the Eastern Orthodox tradition until the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453. Since then the Ayasofya has been a grand mosque until 1935 when Atatürk, in his drive to secularize the newly founded Republic of Turkey, converted it to a museum. Most recently, in a controversial move in 2020, the long-serving conservative president Erdoğan converted it back into a working mosque.
This is the most barebones of history for structure that has been standing — and used — for more than fifteen centuries. The Ayasofya is an excellent symbol of the historical layers of the city of Istanbul, as throughout the centuries it has gained new additions, but with much of its original structure still shining through. I would like to give you just a few examples. Come with me on a short tour!
During my stay in Istanbul I went to the Ayasofya twice since it was so amazing. Both times I approached from the “back”… once coming down from the Topkapi Palace (photos) — which holds such treasures as the Topkapi dagger, the staff of Moses, and the arm of John the Baptist — the other time when a frustrated taxi driver angered by traffic dropped us off in a sidestreet saying merely “You walk from here”.
The Ayasofya stands across the plaza from the famous Blue Mosque, a beautiful built to purpose mosque made in the early 17th century. The Ayasofya in contrast has had so many additions as it changed civilizational hands that it looks more like something from the “lived in” universe of Star Wars.
From the outside you can see the red walls of the original church. The massive dome (more on that later) is 32 meters across and so heavy that the church walls have been buckling so later architects installed buttressing to keep the walls standing straight. There are four minarets which were added at various times, one made of red brick, adding to the architectural pastiche.
Circling around to the front you will see a line of people out into the plaza. Since the building is once again an operating mosque, five times a day tourists are shuffled out to make way for people doing their daily prayers. The line out front can get quite long as people wait during prayer times, but if you time it right you can basically walk right in. After passing some metal detectors you get a close view of the buttresses before entering the building from the side. In the outer hall you are treated to domed ceilings with golden tiled mosaics. It feels very Byzantine. Shoe lockers line the walls where you can store your footwear before entering the mosque. The marble thresholds have been worn down by the passing feet of millions of petitioners through the centuries, and look like melted butter.
The crowd pushes you along to enter the cavernous building. Large circular chandeliers hang from the vaulting ceiling. Looking up — and everybody is looking up — two semi-domes help to prop up the 32 meter wide main dome which at its height it 55.6 meters above the floor. There are no supporting pillars in the middle of the building, so it feels absolutely huge inside.
This wide angle shot from inside shows the two semi-domes on the left and right which support the main dome. Below are the pillars of the second floor, which you used to be able to go up into, but no longer. Around the center dome you can also spot the four “biblically accurate” angels who also support the dome. In the Ottoman era the faces of the seraphim were covered with stars, but one has been restored with its face.
Everywhere you go inside people are staring up in awe and taking photos. But there are many other details to look at other than the domed ceiling. The columns were imported from all over the Mediterranean and some have special stories. People sit on the floor and rest their backs against the columns as they gaze upward. But if you look downward, to the lush green carpet you find another asymmetry of time: the lines on the carpet are at an off-angle to the rest of the building. These are the lines that parishioners line up as they pray towards Mecca, which of course the building was not designed to line up with. I mean, it was constructed more than 60 years before the founding of Islam!
There are many, many more details but I hope this gives you a glimpse at not only of the historical significance of the Hagia Sofia, but also as a symbol of the history of Istanbul.
To see more photos and videos of the interior and surrounding area, including the call to prayer from the perfectly symmetrical Blue Mosque, see my album on Flickr.
In The Hundred Years' War on Palestine Rashid Khalidi takes us through six turning points of modern Palestinian history woven with family and personal history, including his frontline experience escaping Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War. Khalidi has a long history as an advocate and an academic and writes a highly detailed account with an insider view. He covers the early Zionist movement, the Nakba of 1948, the Six Day War of 1967, the Lebanon War, the Intifadas and the rise of Hamas, giving context throughout as to who the geostrategic players are and how they change.
The book ends in 2017, with Trump making promises for a new deal for peace. Things don’t look good for the Palestinians. Khalidi offers some ideas on how to proceed in a constructive manner, from first principles of equality for both Palestinians and Israelis. There is a lot in the book about crafting a more favourable public opinion of Palestinians around the world, from a few different angles. It certainly presented perspectives new to me. One key argument is that the world cannot afford to have the US continue as sole, self-selected guarantor of the peace process. That is borne not just of the evidence presented in the book, but of what we have seen in the past couple of months.
I listened to an interview with Khalidi on a podcast or on YouTube somewhere right after October 7th. Many people were giving this book plaudits, and since he was so well spoken I thought I would give it a try. I am no specialist, so I cannot recommend this book with any real authority. But I found it very readable, appreciated the occasional personal history elements sprinkled throughout, and came away with some new frames for thinking about the problem. But I didn’t have to read this detailed and complex book to know that they need to STOP.
Istanbul, Constantinople, Nova Roma — the city at the crossroads of the world — is a city of layers. First settled 6000 years ago each new community was built on top of the previous. And being located at such a strategic point as the world’s only trans-continental city, there have been a lot of different people groups and empires with designs on the city.
I was in town for just over ten days, mostly for work, but my old pal Chris Gunson flew up from Dubai and we toured around together for a few days. Twenty years ago Chris and I used to talk and trade book recommendations about transcontinental history, but this was the first time we could walk old streets together (a meeting in Kazakhstan was aborted in 2004 for a bad visa, which redirected me southwards to Kashgar and the Pamir Plateau. A few pics from that trip long ago.)
This post serves as a bit of a trip report. You may want to read it while browsing the galleries of photos on Flickr, linked at the bottom of this post.
A sign through the window.
Istanbul has changed hands between the Greeks and Romans a number of times, before being conquered by the Ottomans in 1453. After so many years of Turkish rule, it is easy to forget that Istanbul was once part of “Magna Grecia”, Greater Greece, and even part of the Delian League. The old names of cities found in Thucydides and other classics are still there under Turkish localized names: Smyrna is now the seaside resort of İzmir; in 325 CE the First Council of Nicaea was held in the modern town of İznik; one afternoon we crossed the Bosporus in a small ferry to visit Kadıköy, an older area of the Asian side of Istanbul that used to be called Chalcedon, where the fourth ecumenical Christian council was held in 451 CE. This is in fact the area where archeological artifacts have been found dating back to 5500 BCE.
As Constantinople, the capital of eastern Christianity and inheritor of the Roman Empire after Rome fell and the West sunk into the Dark Ages, the city suffered many attempts at conquest by various people groups such as the Goths and Persians. It was impregnable, largely due to the massive triple city wall, first built by Constantine and then added to by King Theodoseus in the 5th Century. They held for a thousand years before finally being breached in 1453, when the Ottoman conquerers used massive cannons of Hungarian design to launch cannon balls weighing 500 kilograms into the walls. This created holes for the invaders to break through, but didn’t actually destroy the walls which still stand today. Just a short walk from the 1453 Museum, which describes the conquering of the city in very cinematic fashion, you can get right up to the walls. I saw tourists crawling up and inside. Today the wall runs alongside a freeway. From working class neighbourhoods inside the walls people drive their cars through old arched gates to access the freeway. Here and there in the green space between the walls and the freeway people have planted vegetable gardens!
5th century walls of Theodoseus.
The Ottoman period lasted until 1923 when the Republic of Turkey was founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who transformed Turkish society. Driving into the city from Istanbul Airport, the busiest airport in Europe, I immediately noticed all the Turkish flags hanging from apartment windows and strung along and across the streets. This year is the 100th anniversary of the founding. Not only that, but the day after I landed was the anniversary of Atatürk’s death, on November 10th 1938 at 9:04am. Why do I know the time? Well, while we were having breakfast at the rooftop restaurant of my hotel, with an epic view of the sunrise over the Asian side of the city, all of a sudden I could hear the horns of the ships in the harbour blasting simultaneously. I thought it was some sort of earthquake warning or air-raid siren. Looking around I noticed all the hotel restaurant staff line up and stand at attention. Not knowing what was happening I stopped eating and just waited for something to indicate what was going on. After a minute of very loud silence, the staff went back to work and the harbour continued to buzz with activity. This happens every year, and I heard from one Turkish man that back in the day drivers would stop and get out of their cars to stand by open driver doors out of respect.
Turkish patriotism hangs above everyone’s heads.
Evidence of the 100 year anniversary are all over. Many shops have 100th Anniversary marketing displays in their windows. At Taksim Square, a large plaza in the heart of the tourist district, is a massive circular display blaring out patriotic messages featuring smiling families, guns, and fighter planes. There is a huge light show at the gigantic new mosque on the square, an initiative by the long-time President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Taksim Square is normally thought of as a symbol of the country’s republicanism and secularism. The new mosque, completed in 2021, is a conspicuous symbol of conservatism on Turkey’s contemporary politics.
Erdogan’s presence is easily spotted across the city. He used to be mayor of the city, but ever since the AKP got into national power and he became president, the politics of the country have slanted more conservative. Some of Erdogan’s initiatives, what he himself has called his “crazy ideas”, are large scale construction projects such as the controversial Istanbul Airport (for whom allegedly all the building and maintenance contracts went to his relations) and his giant canal proposal. Other initiatives are more on the side of promotion of Islamic culture, like the controversial Taksim Mosque. When looking across the Bosphorus Strait from my hotel, the horizon of the Asian side of Istanbul is dominated by two structures. First is the giant Çamlıca Tower, the tallest structure in Istanbul, a telecom tower with observation deck and restaurants. To the left is the Grand Çamlıca Mosque, the largest mosque in Turkey able to hold 63,000 worshippers for prayer times. This mosque was opened in 2019 and sometimes referred to in the streets as “His Mosque”. You will note that it has 6 minarets.
Tower to the right, mosque to left.
The only other mosque in Istanbul to have such a thing is the beautiful Blue Mosque, across the river to the south on the Golden Horn in the old city. This mosque was built in the early 17th Century by the master architect Sinan (who was obsessed with the Hagia Sophia, topic of a future post) at the direction of Sultan Ahmed I. At the time, the only other mosque with six minarets was the mosque of the Ka’aba in Mecca. When the Blue Mosque was completed people were shocked at the audacity, thinking the Sultan too proud. To resolve the situation he sponsored a seventh minaret at Mecca.
The area around the Blue Mosque is spectacular to walk around. But beware of the terrible Istanbul traffic in getting there! One time we had a taxi driver frustrated and yelling at everyone around us stop the car and get out, go five cars up to yell and someone, then came back to tell us “You walk from here.” In front of the Blue Mosque is a plaza that is built upon the old Hippodrome which is a few layers down. As the capital of Eastern Rome they people needed their bread and circuses! In ancient times the spina of the hippodrome, the long section down the middle which charioteers would race around, used to have many treasures brought from across the empire. Now only three remain: an obelisk brought from Egypt In 390 CE which dates to 1490 BCE; another obelisk of more murky past; and the remains of the Serpent Column which Constantine brought from Delphi in 324. I was very excited to see the Serpent Column, a bronze pillar cast by the Greeks in celebration of their victory against the invading Persians in the 5th century BCE. This thing is 2500 years old and just sitting outside! You can go and see it any time. Amazing!
Very excited to be so close to a 2500 year old artifact!
My most favourite thing of this area is the Hagia Sophia, the cathedral originally built in the 4th C and converted to a mosque in 1453. That deserves its own post.
In cold winds and rain I wandered from the Blue Mosque and the Ayyasofia up to the Grand Bazaar, a mostly covered shopping area with over 4000 stores. Here I badly negotiated for a box of delicious Turkish Delight and a nazar pendant. I am terrible at negotiating in these situations. Though all in all I think I did pretty well and was never taken for a real ride. Once we fell for the old shoeshiner- dropped-brush-scam, but other than that, our wallets were safe.
The weather was bad for some of the days. The wind rocked our ferry crossing back from the Asian side, and one freezing morning when I went to the local Kathie Dunyasi (a kind of Turkish Starbucks) all the seats were taken by cats who came in from the cold!
Other days the sky was a gorgeous blue and we could walk the steep, narrow streets around the Galata Tower, the historic district of Genoese traders. The cobblestones and European buildings reminded me of Lisbon. I have now been to the Westernmost and Easternmost edges of Europe, but never in between. Also, both Lisbon and Istanbul are Cities with Seven Hills! I am cursed! (However, I found out later that many more cities claim this honour).
On another sunny day I was able to walk up to the Topkapi Palace, built by the Sultan and home to many treasures. The Palace is located at the tiP of the Golden Horn and affords clear views of the north part of Istanbul and the main bridge that crosses the Bosphorus to the Asian side of the city. Inside the complex we wended our way through the harem, visited the sultan’s chamber room and bath, and took in all sorts of treasures like the Topkapi Dagger, which features massive emeralds on its hilt. I first saw the Topkapi dagger in Osaka many years ago when it was on tour around the world. I was very glad to see it in its home.
The Topkapi Dagger, in all its shiny glory.
In 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, the city was ransacked by Europeans at the behest of Rome. They destroyed much, but also stole important Christian relics like the robe of Mary and probably the Shroud of Turin. There still remain some artifacts, held in Topkapi Palace. There you can see the relics like the arm of John the Baptist, the staff of Moses, David’s sword, and a whole bunch of personal belongings of the Prophet Muhammad.
It was short, but I enjoyed walking the hills of this old city, visiting just a couple of its 3500 mosques and two of its many football stadiums. I ate well, but did not get the opportunity to enjoy a Turkish bath. Also, there are a lot of smokers, both inside and outside of restaurants, so beware! (In fact even the taxi drivers smoked like chimneys while they raced through the streets, or sat perfectly still in traffic banging on their car horns.)
To describe where the Internet Governance Forum fits in terms of internet governance, we have to also describe the other stakeholders in the system. Internet governance is polycentric. The IGF is just one part of a network of stakeholders that hold influence over how the internet works. Its key mandate is to bring various stakeholders together in a forum to discuss public policy, which is a key differentiator from other technology fora.
Being an initiative of the UN, you might think that nation states are the only important stakeholder, but the IGF was designed from the beginning with multistakeholderism in mind. In fact, multistakeholderism was probably one of the top three topics discussed during the week in Kyoto, possibly triggered by the actions of China at previous meetings as it tried to use its influence as a big stakeholder to try and force internet governance into mere bilateralism (You can read a little background here. I asked people who were at the meeting in Ethiopia who told me some of the stunts being pulled by the Chinese contingent there. This year it seemed pretty quiet to my eyes.).
The IGF holds dear a key belief of a singular, unbroken, and supranational internet. Thus it tries to include a broad number of regional and international actors to come and weigh in on important debates. Let’s break down the organization of the IGF first, and then connect that up to the wider web of who else is involved in governing the net.
Breaking down the IGF
First you have the MAG, or Multistakeholder Advisory Group, which is made up of 56 representatives from various stakeholder groups. They meet a few times a year in order to execute the annual meeting (you can see the list of current MAG members here). The MAG is supported by the Secretariat, which is the UN staff based out of Geneva that support the activities of the MAG. This group of just 6 people are the only full-time staff of the IGF, and are ultimately responsible for running a global hybrid conference with 11,145 registrants. 😱
Beyond those two main parts, there are something called NRIs, or “National, Sub-Regional, Regional and Youth IGF initiatives.“ This is a wider network of smaller fora organized either geographically or around a specific theme, holding their own annual meetings. There about 123 regional and national IGFs recognized by the global IGF in Geneva (here is Canada’s and Japan’s). Youth Initiatives can be part of regional IGFs or independently organized. They are the IGF’s way of capacity building by increasing youth participation in internet governance.
The stakeholder community
So, the MAG, Secretariat, and NRIs engage with other stakeholders, bringing them to the table for policy discussion. The IGF groups stakeholders into the following five categories:
Government
Intergovernmental Organization
Civil Society
Private Sector
Technical Community
When you apply to attend, you must identify yourself as coming from one of those groups. When I looked at the participants list I counted about 4000 organizations being represented. That is from 178 countries. So, I won’t list all the stakeholders, but I can give a few examples to give you an idea:
For Government there are many lawmakers and representatives of agencies from different countries. A politician from Nigeria asked some incisive questions at a DNS session I was in, and I had a good hallway chat with a person from USAID.
Representatives from the UN, the EU, ITU etc are in the Intergovernmental Organization category. I was in a couple sessions with an OECD policy analyst working on Data Governance and Privacy who I liked.
Civil Society includes human rights NGOs and other advocacy groups. The Internet Society, Wikimedia Foundation, Access Now, and the Green Web Foundation. I was very impressed with the well-spoken Anita Gurumurthy, ED for IT for Change in India. Many of these people spoke up about the IGF being held in Saudi Arabia next year, feeling like this stakeholder group is being shut out.
The Private Sector group captures companies and interested individuals. I registered as this group. But it does contain large corporate interests. Attendees from Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and Meta were there. The head of public policy Cloudflare gave a couple of good sessions, and the Global Product Policy at Mozilla was very well-spoken.
The final group – Technical Community – is a big one which includes reps from Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) like the IETF and W3C, professional orgs like IEEE, as well as important internet organizations like IANA which delegates IP numbers to the five Regional Internet Registries who coordinate via the Number Resource Organization (NRO). There was a large ICANN contingent in Kyoto, and booths from various operator organizations such as ISPs, IXPs, and Telcos like NTT. However, I felt that the technical presence was a bit lacking. More about this in another post.
One other group that was well-represented was academia. There were many scholars and students there, especially from Kyoto which is a college town.
Internet governance is continuously evolving as we try and solve complex problems as the internet not only expands in usage across the world, but brings new problems due to scale. Since the first event in 2006, IGF participation has grown, especially with the ability to attend virtually. Here are the registration numbers for the last 10 years (includes both in-person and online):
Bali 2013 - 2,000
Istanbul 2014 - 3,694
João Pessoa 2015 - 2,130+ (couldn’t find online attendance stats)
Jalisco 2016 - 4,000
Geneva 2017 - 3,680
Paris 2018 - 4,400
Berlin 2019 - 5,679
Online 2020 - 6,150
Katowice 2021 - 10,371
Addis Ababa 2022 - 5,120
Kyoto 2023 - 11,145
More and more stakeholders are taking an interest. Countries may make the laws and look for input (or don’t) from other stakeholder groups, but they aren’t necessarily the final stop on the power spectrum. For example Mark Nottingham points out (in an excellent post!) that what standards orgs do is a kind of ”architectural regulation” which:
… sits alongside other modalities of regulation like law, norms, and markets. Where the FTC uses law, the IETF uses architecture – shaping behaviour by limiting what is possible in the world, rather than imposing ex post consequences.
That makes Standards Development Organizations another kind of Transnational Private Regulator (TPR).
There are many ways to get your say and how we govern the internet is not set in stone. We still have another 2.6 billion unconnected, the ongoing threat of a splinternet, geopolitics and geoeconomics amongst other influencing factors. And we need need NEED to have this communication and coordination infrastructure up and running if we are ever to work together globally in defeating the biggest existential threat on the planet: the climate crisis. Ultimately, this is why I find the IGF process so fascinating and intend to become a more engaged stakeholder.
The Kyoto International Conference Center is a sprawling complex on the north side of the city, at the very last stop of the Kyoto Municipal Subway line. The subway exit features a circular chamber with a 10m wide IGF logo on the floor welcoming visitors. Hallways are lined with posters for the event, and two escalators later you exit to the ground floor and a red carpeted entrance.
Participants take selfies at a couple of entrance displays before heading into the building and passing through one of about ten metal detectors. On the left of this “new hall” are about thirty booths where you can complete your registration and retrieve your security pass for the five day conference. UN Security personnel augment the facility security, with prefectural and national police positioned outside the building at secure points.
The Kyoto International Conference Center is made up of a number of buildings but at the center is the original concrete building finished in 1966 in the style of Metobolism (a la the Nakagin Capsule Tower that was torn down last year in Tokyo). It has nary a straight wall, with vaulted ceilings that remind me of the shinmei-zukuri architecture on display at the Ise Grand Shrine in Mie (see a trip report from a few years ago).
It was here at the KICC in 1997 where the Kyoto Protocol bound the world in an ultimately failed commitment to lower greenhouse emissions and avoid the climate crisis. Luckily the Internet Governance Forum is a gathering for dialogue, without any mandate for decision-making. This freedom of discussion gives participants a chance to speak their mind and not temper their views in order to release a singular consensus-circumscribed statement.
The schedule of 355 sessions was broken down by a few tracks covering the following themes:
Al & Emerging Technologies
Avoiding Internet Fragmentation
Cybersecurity, Cybercrime and Online Safety
Data Governance and Trust
Digital Divides and Inclusion
Global Digital Governance and Cooperation
Human Rights and Freedoms
Sustainability & Environment
Each of the above themes was its own track, but there were also the cross-cutting:
High-Level Leaders Track
Youth Track
Parliamentary Track
Intersessional Work
Newcomers Track
That is a lot of content! Every room was equipped with a multi-camera setup and a whole A/V staff so you can watch all the videos on YouTube (with Spanish, French, Japanese, Russian, or Arabic simultaneous translation).
Every session I attended started about 10 minutes late. The speakers were all accomplished public speakers, especially notable considering that for many English would be their second, third, fourth, or fifth language. People would float in and out of the room, either checking it out to see if it was worth it, or seeing what they could before having to rush off to another session which clashed on the schedule.
There are many different sized rooms. A session might be in the main plenary hall, which seats 2000, or in a smaller side room shaped like a classroom for only a couple dozen people. Up on the sixth floor were a bunch of boardrooms where the invite-only bilateral meetings were held. There was a whole other conference going on up there.
Between sessions people would leave the wood-panelled rooms, cross wide fields of thick green carpet traversing stairs going in every direction past banquet tables laden with silver-aluminum kegs of conference coffee (a very special global brand that might also be the outcome of some international global standards conference decades ago), down one hall and then another, to the Annex or second Annex. At every juncture you were pretty much guaranteed to see a handful of the 6,279 on-site participants perusing large displays of the floor map, packets looking for the best path to their next session.
Attendees came from 178 countries. Many represented in their cultural regalia: you could see sari, topi, gele, and more. I was there as a boring middle-aged white North American in a blue striped buttondown and black slacks. 😅
Along the halls were low leather couches where people would meet, holding paper cups of coffee while deep in discussion in many different languages. Many people seemed to know one another. Or they might be typing into a laptop catching up on work, or even napping on a bundled up jacket catching up on sleep as they suffered jet lag.
At about 11:30, for two hours, lunch was served in the two great dining halls where people would gather and discuss over bento boxes or a plateful of buffet food. There was also a cafe area with an outside patio where people could enjoy the warm October Kyoto weather (and a cigarette… except for that one handsome French guy who dressed really well and smoked a pipe! ).
At the end of the day, usually close to 7pm I would trudge back from the Annex, past the garden and by the lounge area, down the main stairs and across the bridge over the canal (with many police standing around on watch) to the Event Hall where all the now empty vendors booths are located, then out the New Hall past the metal detectors and into the cool evening air only to head into the underground for the subway home.
The Internet Governance Forum is a multistakeholder forum established by the United Nations and held annually around the world since 2006. The 18th edition was held in Kyoto, the city in which I reside, so I decided to attend.
I have been to a few technical conferences, barricaded in rooms with passionate technologists arguing over the most minute details of a newly forming standard, but the IGF promised something different. This is a policy forum to discuss the societal impacts of digital technology worldwide. It is “multistakeholder” in that participants come not just from the national governments of UN member states, but also inter- and non-governmental organizations, private sector, and the technical community. The forum brings together people from all over the globe (11,145 registered participants with 6,279 from 178 countries showing up in person in Kyoto) to talk about how we should govern this supranational resource we call “the internet.” It is certainly my kind of place!
Over the five day period I attended just 21 of 355 sessions. My approach was simply to spend the entire conference listening and learning. I did not speak up during sessions, but approached panelists afterwards or in the halls including people from more familiar technical forae like the IETF, ICANN, and IEEE, but also many human rights activists, politicians, and even more lawyers. High-level speakers included people like Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, former PM Jacinda Ardern, Maria Ressa, Meredith Whittaker, Vint Cerf, and more. I spoke to many people on duty in the vendor booth area, including the policy team of Wikimedia, The Citizen Lab, Github, LEGO, and more. Each time I chatted with someone I would ask the same three questions:
How many IGFs have you been to?
Has it changed over the years?
What is the goal of your organization in attending?
That was usually enough to kick off a conversation, sometimes leading to a second convo, and always to an exchange of business cards.
I wanted to find out a few things: 1) why do people go to IGF? 2) why should the average dev working on an app care? and 3) as someone who works in tech, has an MA in International relations, how have I not heard of this before?!
There are many answers to those above questions, and I spent the five days from morning to night learning a lot about the structures and actors involved in internet governance. Too much for a single blog post, so I think I will post a series of shorter notes in the coming weeks. Some topics I would like broach are:
How the event was structured and what it was like shuffling from room to room
how the IGF fits into the global internet governance regime as a whole
Multistakeholderism and its challeng{es|ers}
What trending topics were being covered in the sessions and in the halls
Some of my memorable sessions and interactions
Outputs from the forum are still being released, so there might be some other topics to report on. If you have any questions or requests please let me know and I will try to cover those as I progress.
Posts in the Attending the Internet Governance Forum series
Appreciate the discussion in this piece. It is something I have thought about for years, and actually one of the reasons I don’t look forward to when I return to Canada where everything is so remote. Imagining a no-fly future — whether due to carbon laws, massively increased expense, or the threat of RPGs (see Ministry for the Future my fav book of 2022 for more on that extreme form of flygskam) — I would rather live some place like Europe or Japan: dense with a good rail system. Even if you could never leave by air, the on-the-ground travel links are so good you could still enjoy the travelling life without the extreme GHG emissions. It is like buying two cakes.
Over the past couple of years I have been eyeing Micro.blog as an alternative to my “legacy blogger” setup that dates back some time. I plan on focusing my attention here as a way to lower the boundaries of posting. I was really sold on the idea of Mb as an IaaS “indieweb as a service”, and have been following Manton for more than a decade. I still have some customizing and theming to do, but I won’t let that get in the way of posting. 💪
If you have recommended follows or Mb tips, please let me know. Cheers!
Unboxing my new Starter Set of The One Ring.
Now that we are at the end of the year, and I have this arbitrary deadline looming, I thought I’d better finish off 
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