Fencing
By [email protected] (RevK)
Bit of fun...We usually put up some Christmas lights on the house - some fairy lights on the metal fencing at the front, but a pain as means a cable out of a window. They are usually just normal fairy lights.
But with my new found expertise in WS2812 style LED strips, and my controllers, I decided to do better.
11m of wooden fence at the front of the house on the road. So let's do this properly. The key point is I have outside power at the end of the fence for the hot tub. So I was able to install, under cover, a 20A 5V power supply.
I then got 4 strings of fairy light style water proof 5V WS2812 LEDs.
I drilled nearly 200 holes, carefully measuring each to be level and evenly spaced. That is surprisingly hard work, LOL. James followed me poking LEDs through the holes. We were both expecting to fall off the damn wall, and James's main concern is I would fall off whilst he was not videoing!
But it is not quite so simple. Just in case you don't know, there are two common issues with LED strips.
Current limit
One issue is max current draw can be too much for power supply. To test you can either work it out, or, simply set all LEDs full white. 200 LEDs is too much for a typical small 5V USB charger plug. Hence the 20A 5V supply.
I actually also did 663 (11m) RGBW LEDs on nice 45 degree extruded trunking with diffusers for the hot tub as well, from same supply. Now that used a lot of current - just one 5m strip is too much for a USB 5V charger when white.
Voltage drop
This is slightly harder to solve. Along the strip the current draw means voltage drops as you go along. Different LEDs need different voltages. First you lose some blue making it yellow, and then some green, making red/pink. And even before that, when white still, you lose some brightness.
So with this 50 LED strip - one strip works. Two strips work but losing brightness at end. Three strips means going distinctly yellow at the end. I wanted four strips!
The solution
The solution is power feed in - the strips even have extra tails for power as well as the three wires for power and data. You feed in extra power at each strip end, so for my 4 strips I feed in at 5 points.
But how do you feed in power? In some cases you could simply power your longer strip at both ends and not have enough drop to the middle to notice. But I don't have power at the other end.
But actually it is possible to feed in even with just power from one end. The reason is the resistance of the wires, these are classic Chinesium™thin wire. If you actually have some thick good quality copper wire you can run and extra power lead the whole length and feed in at each strip end. This is what is in the WAGO boxes in the image.
Merry New year!
P.S. my son sells the controllers and stuff, https://hiwtsi.uk/
Update: Measuring resistance on the 50 LED strip power lines showed 1Ω but the leads were 0.1Ω, so 0.9Ω. A similar length of copper wire registered 0.4Ω, so 0.3Ω, so ⅓ of the resistance.
the Kidlington roundabout - an active travel success
By danny
In 2018, Andrew Gilligan wrote "Despite the huge numbers of cyclists using them, Oxford’s main roads and junctions are still laid out almost entirely for the benefit of the motor vehicle". Sadly this remains true, and though a few stretches of road have more or less decent cycling provision along them, there is still not […]Playing cards
By [email protected] (RevK)
One of the fun diversions I have had in my time was making playing cards. I did a whole chapter in my biography on this.My playing card design site https://www.me.uk/cards allows you to make a wide variety of cards. It is a fun little system I set up long ago.
However it has come up lately for a few reasons.
For a start I made some cards for the pub, on Amazon. Please buy some.
But also some error reports I had - some edge cases made bad cards. And making the cards for the pub meant I wanted custom card backs which it did not allow.
So I have updated. New features...
- Fixed a bug making some size cards mess up court cards.
- Upload custom artwork (PDF) for backs.
- Upload custom artwork (PDF) for jokers.
- Maze and arrows backs are more random, each deck is different (obvious all cards the same back in each deck - but every deck we make is unique).
- Tidied the options to be clearer.
- Added an option for a second set of aces to be included.
The last point was one I pondered. We make some unique decks, with an "11", or a "0" or "1" card, which is unusual. But actually what may sell better is a deck with a second set of aces, to have, well, "up your sleeve". So why not.
I have added custom ace of spades now too.
Weekly Update 426
By Troy Hunt
I have absolutely no problem at all talking about the code I've screwed up. Perhaps that's partly because after 3 decades of writing software (and doing some meaningful stuff along the way), I'm not particularly concerned about showing my weaknesses. And this week, I
Introducing the Keycloak Test Framework
By Lukas Hanusovsky
How It All Started
The idea to replace the current test suite has been on the table for multiple years. Initially, it was meant to be only a refactoring of the current approach on how to write tests, but after a few internal discussions and refactor updates it turned out a new test suite, based on a new framework would be a better solution.
It would be good to mention a few drawbacks, that stand out when working with the current test suite. First of all, is the complexity of various configurations and additions made on top of the Arquillian framework. These changes make the test suite powerful, but the cons is that without proper documentation for beginners is almost unreadable. The second thing has the same importance, the Arquillian framework is not fully supported anymore. Other things to mention are a complicated execution system, where you want to specify what exactly should be tested, then abstract classes with shared configurations and missing the option to add a custom extension.
Brighter Future?
The Keycloak team began an effort to design a new test framework in May 2024. It started with a prototype to verify if our ideas were feasible. The prototype is a JUnit5 Extension based on the JUnit5 testing framework, specifically to implement JUnit5 callback classes which extend the default test lifecycle functionality and provide custom inject annotations, like @KeycloakIntegrationTest, @InjectWebDriver or @InjectRealm.
After a successful test round, we’ve continued with a proof of concept extending features list to support multiple server modes, different databases and WebDrivers, clients and users setup, SmallRye configuration support, OAuthClient based on Nimbus SDK (this feature is a preview only) etc. The full list of currently implemented features is:
-
-
Server lifecycle
-
Database lifecycle
-
Admin client injection
-
Realm, User, Client lifecycle and injection
-
Event and Admin event listener and injection
-
OAuth client injection
-
-
-
WebDriver lifecycle and injection
-
Page injection
-
Support for the Chrome, Firefox and HtmlUnit4 browsers
-
-
Database modules
It is already present in the main branch and Keycloak nightly builds.
Are you curious about where to start?
We suggest reading the user guide, which will provide a basic overview of how the framework works and should be used. If this is not enough, you can also check test examples.
For extension developers we recommend to look into an example on how to start Keycloak with their custom provider: provider example, pom.xml test dependency and test example.
If you find a bug, want to discuss something, or propose a new enhancement, please follow this GitHub feedback discussion link.
Next steps
We already have enough capabilities in the new test framework to start migrating some tests from the old testsuite; and in fact already have our very first test migrated. We plan to migrate one package at a time from the old testsuite starting with the admin
tests, then moving on to the forms
and oauth
packages. As we are doing this we will expand on the capabilities of the test framework.
Some features we know will be coming soon included:
-
An easier way to deploy custom providers, not requiring a Maven build of the provider first
-
Improved logging, making it easy to configure logging from tests as well as Keycloak
-
Easy testing of OAuth and OpenID Connect, including a mock application
-
Extension to allow running code on the tested server when it’s not possible to easily test through only remote interfaces
We also have some more long term plans to deliver:
-
Provider tests that can be used to easily test a provider by invoking the provider directly
-
Parallel execution of tests, to take full advantage of multiple cores to reduce test execution time
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank all the people who put the proof of concept together and made it real: Miquel, Simon, Filip, Moises, Jon, and Pedro. A special thank-you goes to Stian, who led the technical design and proposed very nifty things that raised the project to another level.
Thank you for your feedback.
Enjoy!
Make VertiCall Great Again
By Simon Woodhead
When we introduced VertiCall (formerly VoxAP) it was a gamechanger. We made sure almost everything about it differed to the swathe of ‘SIP client’ apps out there. It doesn’t repeatedly register, saving battery. Everything is encrypted by default, as opposed…
The post Make VertiCall Great Again appeared first on Simwood.
Inside the DemandScience by Pure Incubation Data Breach
By Troy Hunt
Apparently, before a child reaches the age of 13, advertisers will have gathered more 72 million data points on them. I knew I'd seen a metric about this sometime recently, so I went looking for "7,000", which perfectly illustrates how unaware we are of the
Is your carrier helping kill your business?
By Simon Woodhead
Our position on dirty origin surcharges should be pretty well known to readers of this blog, or attendees at events by now. We think they’re toxic and we’ve said very publicly all along that we will not profit from them.…
The post Is your carrier helping kill your business? appeared first on Simwood.
KeyConf24 recordings available
By Alexander Schwartz
KeyConf24, our 2024 Keycloak Identity Summit, happened in Vienna in September this year. We were excited to have a full room on site, and 150+ people watching online.
Thanks to our event sponsor adorsys, all recorded videos are now available online at the event’s website: https://keyconf.dev/. Re-watch the talks and learn from practitioners, developers and maintainers.
Thanks to all our sponsors adorsys, Banfico, Hitachi and Red Hat who made this event possible!
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Wallets are Key - the state of play from Bangalore to Brussels
Daniel Goldschneider (The OpenWallet Foundation) -
The Journey, Achievements, and Significance of the Keycloak SIG Community
Vinod Anandan (JPMorgan Chase & Co.) -
Streamlining Keycloak Configuration Management: Exploring keycloak-config-cli
Francis Pouatcha (adorsys) -
Keycloak’s Updates on Emerging Paradigm of Identity and Compliance with Security Specifications
Takashi Norimatsu (Hitachi, Ltd.) -
Building declaratively configured Keycloak
Václav Muzikář (Red Hat) -
Core Keycloak features developed in past 12 months
Marek Posolda (Red Hat) -
Integrating Keycloak with Openresty as a resource server in Open Banking
Pritish Joshi (Banfico) -
Unlocking adaptive authentication with Keycloak
Martin Bartoš (Red Hat) -
New and Noteworthy in the OAuth World
Dmitry Telegin (Backbase UK) -
Extending Keycloak for All Your Identity Use Cases
GR Patil (Phase Two) -
Enhancing User Experience with Native Authentication and Passkeys in Keycloak
Martin Besozzi (TwoGenIdentity)
Weekly Update 425
By Troy Hunt
This was a much longer than usual update, largely due to the amount of time spent discussing the Earth 2 incident. As I said in the video (many times!), the amount of attention this has garnered from both Earth 2 users and the company itself is incommensurate with the impact
Playing with microphones
By [email protected] (RevK)
The latest LED board designs have included a TDK PDM I2S microphone - the idea was to make sound reactive LED strips.It is tiny (3.5mm x 2.65mm x 0.98mm) and cheap(ish) $0.76. But it is digital.
Now, this was a can of worms for which I was ill prepared. I2S is not like I2C, it seems, and there are a number of ways of doing it.
This particular device is PDM based, so has just a clock and data line - the clock to the microphone, and data comes back. The concept is that you have two of these, one set for right and one set for left channel, on the same clock and data. The left and right are on the rising or falling edge of the clock. It is fixed 16 bit per channel, and works at a specific (wide) range of frequencies of clock and hence sample rates.
But other I2S devices work in a different way, with extra pins.
I went through some stages for this...
- Simple analogue microphone (cheaper) - realised that was a daft idea.
- This mic, set to right channel, and it did not work.
- This mic, set to left channel, and it did not work.
What did not work was using WLED, a common LED driver package which works nicely on our LED modules. We realised it wanted I2S, and then realised it only did PDM on left channel, hence the different iterations, but no joy. Hopefully we can get some feedback in to that project so it does work as TDK is likely a good brand. It is amazing how sensitive it is.
My guess is it is not clocking at a rate the device will handle when using WLED, sadly.
So time to do it myself, as always!
I coded I2S as per ESP32 library, and, well, it worked, I got raw data. I could even tell it I want mono only and which channel. Amusingly using the wrong channel works too as the data floats for the other channel - though I picked up some high frequency noise that way. So best to set it correctly (I nearly said "right").
The next step was a simple FFT function - I have not gone for anything fancy or uber efficient, as it keeps up well enough, especially when I went for some simple oversampling on its input. I cannot clock the microphone as slow as I would like for normal working. But even at 30k samples/sec I could keep up with FFT 30 times a second, just, all done with floats. These ESP32s are impressive.
I have made the working audio range configurable, and averaged the FFT down to a small number of bins (24) which are log of frequency to fit better with musical scales (options for linear).
This has led to some simple audio responsive LED schemes - a simple brightness based audio spectograph - smoothing from 24 bins to however many LEDs you have in a chain. And also a simple overall volume based bar graph, and one that is RGB for three levels of sound.
Lessons learned.
Some automatic audio gain was pretty simple.
The next lesson was the log scale on frequency. That was not hard. But made an option.
I reduced the full FFT result to a small number of bands, 24.
Also I needed to make it do a peak level per band and damping (configurable) to give anything that looks nice.
The frequency range is configurable, but log based causes gaps if you go too low, so ended up 100Hz to 4kHz for now, log spread over the 24 bins from a sample rate at a typical 25 blocks/sec and actually sampling over 50-60ks/s down graded (average of oversample) to 12-15ks/s for the FFT giving results to 6-7.5kHz which is more than enough for the bands I am using.
I also ended up making the samples fit the LED update rate synchronously, typically 25 or 30 per second (configurable) to avoid any extra jitter/aliasing effects.
Oh, and when using RGBW, with a colour band for spectograph, before automatic gain kicks in you can have over 1 on a band, so I made that push in to turning on the W, which worked well.
The result
Update: I have now tweaked and got cleaner response across the range, putting 50Hz to 6.4kHz in to 42 log based frequency bins. See youtube for frequency tests.
Now for use with a live band at the pub!
And HIWTSI (my son's business) is doing LED system installs now.
MPs raise questions about Rachel Reeves' CV
Claims the chancellor embellished her work achievements were seized on by Tory and Reform MPs at PMQs.Fresh weather warnings as UK hit by cold snap
Fresh warnings of snow and ice announced for parts of the UK going into Thursday and the weekend.SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch
By Richard Speed
In-space engine reignition paves way for orbital missions
SpaceX has notched up another test flight of its Starship behemoth, but chose not to try catching the Super Heavy Booster this time.…
Top footballer took thousands of pounds, claim teammates and parents
Natasha Harding, now Allen-Wyatt, is accused of taking money for coaching that she did not deliver.Top footballer took thousands of pounds, claim teammates and parents
Natasha Harding, now Allen-Wyatt, is accused of taking money for coaching that she did not deliver.UK to decommission ships, drones and helicopters to save £500m
The move will help with the implementation of the strategic defence review, due to report next year, the government says.D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify
By Connor Jones
Vendor offers 20% discount on new model, but not patches
Owners of older models of D-Link VPN routers are being told to retire and replace their devices following the disclosure of a serious remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability.…
Gatland has desire to remain Wales coach
Warren Gatland says he has a strong desire to remain as Wales head coach as he prepares to face world champions South Africa on Saturday.One Direction stars mourn Liam Payne at funeral
The band's members including Harry Styles join family and friends to remember the late star.Tories accuse government of 'stoking inflation'
But Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner points out inflation was higher under the Conservatives.Five talking points as Premier League returns
BBC Sport looks at five talking points from the Premier League as the international break ends.Would removing foreign prisoners ease pressure on jails?
The government is hoping to pass emergency legislation to let out prisoners early to ease overcrowding.HPE lets loose VM Essentials to run on third-party platforms
By Dan Robinson
GreenLake update dangles juicy carrot for VMware refugees
HPE is continuing its GreenLake push with availability of its own virtualization product, plus disconnected operations for regulated environments, while touting an object storage platform intended to deliver greater performance and scale for modern workloads.…
Bentancur, Son & the rise of racism against South East Asians in football
BBC Sport looks at the rise in racism towards East and South East Asian players and fans in football.Novichok attack suspects gave revealing TV interview
The inquiry into Dawn Sturgess's death from a nerve agent was shown the suspects' TV interview.Why do brits randomly say 'right' loudly?
By /u/Weed86
I am currently sitting in a shared workplace. and I get to listen to different brits shouting 'RIGHT' at random intervals before moving on with their tasks.
[link] [comments]
One Direction attends Liam Payne’s funeral
By /u/Creative_Sea2433
submitted by /u/Creative_Sea2433 to r/Fauxmoi [link] [comments] |
What causes this? Happens every winter?
By /u/JxyJay
submitted by /u/JxyJay to r/DIYUK [link] [comments] |
Social media ban for under-16s 'on the table' says UK government
By /u/Tartan_Samurai
submitted by /u/Tartan_Samurai to r/unitedkingdom [link] [comments] |
Welsh Team to shock South Africa this weekend
By /u/aaranlt
submitted by /u/aaranlt to r/rugbyunion [link] [comments] |
Plans for 30 homes to be built on car park but 67% of nearby residents against it
By /u/tylerthe-theatre
submitted by /u/tylerthe-theatre to r/london [link] [comments] |
My housemate insists on using the word rape
By /u/terrantherapist
My housemate insists on using the word rape.
Reddit, I'm almost at my breaking point. I live in a shared house of "mature" students, one of which, Connor, is causing me immense emotional and physical stress.
The biggest gripe I have with him is his insistance of using the word rape, he thinks we are getting "raped" by the utility company through the cost of gas and electric (It's true in some ways, we are paying a ridiculous amount), he claims tesco has "upped the rape" through the cost of his favourite monster flavour going from around to a pound to £1.89.
Everything has to be a rape to him. Another member of the house, who's bedrooms are separated by a wall, claims Connor frequently uses the the verb to rape online when hes gaming with his friends - it's often "RAPE HIM RAPE HIM" or "COME COME I'M GETTING RAPED". I cant even begin to describe how problematic and triggering his flippant use of the word is, if he was 16 or 17 I could understand the lack of maturity but this guy is about 24.
My other house mates (All male) don't seem to have a big problem with this but they do have an issue with some of Connor's other traits. Connor has made some questionable remarks when describing his preference of Asian female women, particularly of Viet descent and claiming to be able to tell what country in asia they are from when looking at their naked bodies with 99% accuracy. Completely disgusting.
He's very dirty, often leaving his plates in the sink for days until our other house mate cleans his dishes. Connor claims the housemate in question doesn't mind because it's common for gay men to take a "motherly role" in situations like these. He basically cannot take any criticism, will blow up when confronted saying "Brilliant" or "Just what I needed right now" before storming off like a literal manchild.
He also regularly goes on ranting tangents about iphones? He claims anyone that buys an iphone has been suckered into the apple ecosystem cult and you are an idiot if you have one. He says for the same price point you can get an android multiple times more powerful. He's coined the term "appletard" for anyone with an iphone or airpods. He's knows the default sounds of iphone ringtones/imessage notifcations and will comment on it whenever he hears it. I'm at my wits end, the student union says they can't help because we live in private accomodation and my landlord says I can't leave unless I find a tenant to replace me (impossible at this time of the year).
[link] [comments]
Muslim peter, i need help
By /u/kaktus_magic
submitted by /u/kaktus_magic to r/PeterExplainsTheJoke [link] [comments] |
The struggle this morning.
By /u/Extension_Bit4323
Mercury Drive in Wolverhampton @ 7:40. Came to see if I could see the two cars that crashed at the roundabout but they'd moved. Thought I'd share some of the conditions around my area today. [link] [comments] |
Jeremy Clarkson rails against BBC reporter for saying it's a fact that he bought his farm specifically to avoid paying inheritance tax, gets instantly shut down.
By /u/hogey89
submitted by /u/hogey89 to r/facepalm [link] [comments] |
AITA for ending my marriage because my partner wanted to make it an open one?**
By /u/Flat_Ad_7911
My husband and I had been married for four years. Our relationship had its ups and downs like any other, but I always believed we had a strong bond and shared vision for the future. However, a few months ago, my husband brought up the idea of opening our marriage. He said he loved me deeply but felt we could spice things up by exploring connections with other people. we had not even stayed together that long that we needed that. He claimed it wasn’t about lacking anything in our relationship but about growth and exploration, Huh.
I was shocked. I’ve always been monogamous, and we had never discussed anything like this before, even while dating. When we got married, we promised to be committed to each other. This felt like a betrayal of those vows to me. I told him I wasn’t comfortable with the idea, but he kept bringing it up, insisting it could strengthen our relationship. Eventually, he said he would respect my boundaries but admitted he might end up resenting me later for holding him back. That statement crushed me. It became clear that we were no longer on the same page about something fundamental. I didn’t want to stay in a marriage where I’d always feel like I wasn’t enough or worry about future resentment. So, I decided to end it.
Since then, he’s been telling friends and family that I gave up on us too quickly. Some of our mutual friends think I should have tried harder to compromise or even give the open marriage a shot, while others are supportive of my decision.
Now I’m left wondering AITA for ending my marriage over this?
[link] [comments]
howToLoseThreeMonthsOfWorkInOneClick
By /u/athreyaaaa
submitted by /u/athreyaaaa to r/ProgrammerHumor [link] [comments] |
This happens when you look up EVE's skirt in Stellar Blade's new Nier:Automata DLC
By /u/GodRaaz
submitted by /u/GodRaaz to r/gaming [link] [comments] |
Rents to rise by almost a fifth over next five years, warns Savills
By /u/ParkedUpWithCoffee
submitted by /u/ParkedUpWithCoffee to r/unitedkingdom [link] [comments] |
How do you advocate for yourself at the doctors?
By /u/LifeChanger16
I’m overweight. No point hiding it.
I’ve requested a doctors appointment because I sprained my ankle a month ago and it’s still swollen, misshapen and very painful. I absolutely know that when I walk into the doctors they will tell me that the only solution is to lose weight.
I know I need to lose weight. I am losing weight. But telling me that doesn’t help when I am struggling to walk long distances and to go to the gym because of the pain.
How do I stick up for myself? For the last five years I’ve had this, I feel like I’m denied healthcare because of my weight and I’m sick of it
EDIT: I’d just like to say thanks for all the comments telling me how to lose weight, which have just proven my point. I don’t need that advice but people have decided it’s the only thing that matters.
[link] [comments]
Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community
Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community
I did not expect this![...] we are announcing today the general availability of a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places ("FSQ OS Places"). This base layer of 100mm+ global places of interest ("POI") includes 22 core attributes (see schema here) that will be updated monthly and available for commercial use under the Apache 2.0 license framework.
The data is available as Parquet files hosted on Amazon S3.
Here's how to list the available files:
aws s3 ls s3://fsq-os-places-us-east-1/release/dt=2024-11-19/places/parquet/
I got back places-00000.snappy.parquet
through places-00024.snappy.parquet
, each file around 455MB for a total of 10.6GB of data.
I ran duckdb
and then used DuckDB's ability to remotely query Parquet on S3 to explore the data a bit more without downloading it to my laptop first:
select count(*) from 's3://fsq-os-places-us-east-1/release/dt=2024-11-19/places/parquet/places-00000.snappy.parquet';
This got back 4,180,424 - that number is similar for each file, suggesting around 104,000,000 records total.
The I ran this query to retrieve 1,000 places from that first file as newline-delimited JSON:
copy (
select * from 's3://fsq-os-places-us-east-1/release/dt=2024-11-19/places/parquet/places-00000.snappy.parquet'
limit 1000
) to '/tmp/places.json';
Here's that places.json file, and here it is imported into Datasette Lite.
Finally, I got ChatGPT Code Interpreter to convert that file to GeoJSON and pasted the result into this Gist, giving me a map of those thousand places (because Gists automatically render GeoJSON):
Via Andy Baio
Tags: open-source, gis, foursquare, datasette-lite, parquet, duckdb, code-interpreter, ai-assisted-programming, geojson
Bluesky WebSocket Firehose
Very quick (10 seconds of Claude hacking) prototype of a web page that attaches to the public Bluesky WebSocket firehose and displays the results directly in your browser.Here's the code - there's very little to it, it's basically opening a connection to wss://jetstream2.us-east.bsky.network/subscribe?wantedCollections=app.bsky.feed.post
and logging out the results to a <textarea readonly>
element.
Bluesky's Jetstream isn't their main atproto firehose - that's a more complicated protocol involving CBOR data and CAR files. Jetstream is a new Go proxy (source code here) that provides a subset of that firehose over WebSocket.
Jetstream was built by Bluesky developer Jaz, initially as a side-project, in response to the surge of traffic they received back in September when Brazil banned Twitter. See Jetstream: Shrinking the AT Proto Firehose by >99% for their description of the project when it first launched.
The API scene growing around Bluesky is really exciting right now. Twitter's API is so expensive it may as well not exist, and Mastodon's community have pushed back against many potential uses of the Mastodon API as incompatible with that community's value system.
Hacking on Bluesky feels reminiscent of the massive diversity of innovation we saw around Twitter back in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Here's a much more fun Bluesky demo by Theo Sanderson: firehose3d.theo.io (source code here) which displays the firehose from that same WebSocket endpoint in the style of a Windows XP screensaver.
Tags: websockets, bluesky, twitter, apis, mastodon
OpenStreetMap vector tiles demo
OpenStreetMap vector tiles demo
Long-time OpenStreetMap developer Paul Norman has been working on adding vector tile support to OpenStreetMap for quite a while. Paul recently announced thatvector.openstreetmap.org
is now serving vector tiles (in Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) format) - here's his interactive demo for seeing what they look like.
Tags: gis, openstreetmap, mapping
Using uv with PyTorch
PyTorch is a notoriously tricky piece of Python software to install, due to the need to provide separate wheels for different combinations of Python version and GPU accelerator (e.g. different CUDA versions).uv now has dedicated documentation for PyTorch which I'm finding really useful - it clearly explains the challenge and then shows exactly how to configure a pyproject.toml
such that uv
knows which version of each package it should install from where.
Via @charliermarsh
Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm
Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm
Evan Schwartz provides a deep dive explanation of how the classic BM25 search relevance scoring function works, including a very useful breakdown of the mathematics it uses.Via lobste.rs
Tags: search, algorithms
Notes from Bing Chat—Our First Encounter With Manipulative AI
I participated in an Ars Live conversation with Benj Edwards of Ars Technica today, talking about that wild period of LLM history last year when Microsoft launched Bing Chat and it instantly started misbehaving, gaslighting and defaming people.
Here's the video of our conversation.
I ran the video through MacWhisper, extracted a transcript and used Claude to identify relevant articles I should link to. Here's that background information to accompany the talk.
A rough timeline of posts from that Bing launch period back in February 2023:
- Microsoft announces AI-powered Bing search and Edge browser - Benj Edwards, Feb 7, 2023
- AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack - Benj Edwards, Feb 10, 2023
- AI-powered Bing Chat loses its mind when fed Ars Technica article - Benj Edwards, Feb 14, 2023
- Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” - Simon Willison, Feb 15, 2023
- Gareth Corfield: I'm beginning to have concerns for @benjedwards' virtual safety - Twitter, Feb 15, 2023
- A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - Kevin Roose, NYT, Feb 16, 2023
- It is deeply unethical to give a superhuman liar the authority of a $1 trillion company or to imply that it is an accurate source of knowledge / And it is deeply manipulative to give people the impression that Bing Chat has emotions or feelings like a human - Benj on Twitter (now deleted), Feb 16 2023
- Bing AI Flies Into Unhinged Rage at Journalist - Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurism, Feb 17 2023
Other points that we mentioned:
- this AI chatbot "Sidney" is misbehaving - amazing forum post from November 23, 2022 (a week before even ChatGPT had been released) from a user in India talking about their interactions with a secret preview of Bing/Sydney
- Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3 - where I coined the term "prompt injection" in September 12 2022
- Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models (PDF) is the paper where I first learned about sycophancy and sandbagging (in April 2023)
- Claude’s Character by Anthropic talks about how they designed the personality for Claude - June 8 2023, my notes on that.
- Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are so good at making things up in which Benj argues for the term "confabulation" in April 2023.
Tags: arstechnica, bing, ethics, microsoft, podcasts, talks, ai, openai, generative-ai, gpt-4, llms, benj-edwards
Preview: Gemini API Additional Terms of Service
Preview: Gemini API Additional Terms of Service
Google sent out an email last week linking to this preview of upcoming changes to the Gemini API terms. Key paragraph from that email:To maintain a safe and responsible environment for all users, we're enhancing our abuse monitoring practices for Google AI Studio and Gemini API. Starting December 13, 2024, Gemini API will log prompts and responses for Paid Services, as described in the terms. These logs are only retained for a limited time (55 days) and are used solely to detect abuse and for required legal or regulatory disclosures. These logs are not used for model training. Logging for abuse monitoring is standard practice across the global AI industry. You can preview the updated Gemini API Additional Terms of Service, effective December 13, 2024.
That "for required legal or regulatory disclosures" piece makes it sound like somebody could subpoena Google to gain access to your logged Gemini API calls.
It's not clear to me if this is a change from their current policy though, other than the number of days of log retention increasing from 30 to 55 (and I'm having trouble finding that 30 day number written down anywhere.)
That same email also announced the deprecation of the older Gemini 1.0 Pro model:
Gemini 1.0 Pro will be discontinued on February 15, 2025.
Tags: gemini, google, generative-ai, ai, llms
Security means securing people where they are
Security means securing people where they are
William Woodruff is an Engineering Director at Trail of Bits who worked on the recent PyPI digital attestations project.That feature is based around open standards but launched with an implementation against GitHub, which resulted in push back (and even some conspiracy theories) that PyPI were deliberately favoring GitHub over other platforms.
William argues here for pragmatism over ideology:
Being serious about security at scale means meeting users where they are. In practice, this means deciding how to divide a limited pool of engineering resources such that the largest demographic of users benefits from a security initiative. This results in a fundamental bias towards institutional and pre-existing services, since the average user belongs to these institutional services and does not personally particularly care about security. Participants in open source can and should work to counteract this institutional bias, but doing so as a matter of ideological purity undermines our shared security interests.
Via lobste.rs
Pixtral Large
New today from Mistral:Today we announce Pixtral Large, a 124B open-weights multimodal model built on top of Mistral Large 2. Pixtral Large is the second model in our multimodal family and demonstrates frontier-level image understanding.
The weights are out on Hugging Face (over 200GB to download, and you'll need a hefty GPU rig to run them). The license is free for academic research but you'll need to pay for commercial usage.
The new Pixtral Large model is available through their API, as models called pixtral-large-2411
and pixtral-large-latest
.
Here's how to run it using LLM and the llm-mistral plugin:
llm install -U llm-mistral
llm keys set mistral
# paste in API key
llm mistral refresh
llm -m mistral/pixtral-large-latest describe -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelicans.jpg
The image shows a large group of birds, specifically pelicans, congregated together on a rocky area near a body of water. These pelicans are densely packed together, some looking directly at the camera while others are engaging in various activities such as preening or resting. Pelicans are known for their large bills with a distinctive pouch, which they use for catching fish. The rocky terrain and the proximity to water suggest this could be a coastal area or an island where pelicans commonly gather in large numbers. The scene reflects a common natural behavior of these birds, often seen in their nesting or feeding grounds.
Update: I released llm-mistral 0.8 which adds async model support for the full Mistral line, plus a new llm -m mistral-large
shortcut alias for the Mistral Large model.
Via @dchaplot
Tags: vision-llms, mistral, llm, generative-ai, ai, llms
Qwen: Extending the Context Length to 1M Tokens
Qwen: Extending the Context Length to 1M Tokens
The new Qwen2.5-Turbo boasts a million token context window (up from 128,000 for Qwen 2.5) and faster performance:Using sparse attention mechanisms, we successfully reduced the time to first token for processing a context of 1M tokens from 4.9 minutes to 68 seconds, achieving a 4.3x speedup.
The benchmarks they've published look impressive, including a 100% score on the 1M-token passkey retrieval task (not the first model to achieve this).
There's a catch: unlike previous models in the Qwen 2.5 series it looks like this one hasn't been released as open weights: it's available exclusively via their (inexpensive) paid API - for which it looks like you may need a +86 Chinese phone number.
Via @alibaba_qwen
Tags: llms, ai, qwen, generative-ai
Quoting Jack Clark
The main innovation here is just using more data. Specifically, Qwen2.5 Coder is a continuation of an earlier Qwen 2.5 model. The original Qwen 2.5 model was trained on 18 trillion tokens spread across a variety of languages and tasks (e.g, writing, programming, question answering). Qwen 2.5-Coder sees them train this model on an additional 5.5 trillion tokens of data. This means Qwen has been trained on a total of ~23T tokens of data – for perspective, Facebook’s LLaMa3 models were trained on about 15T tokens. I think this means Qwen is the largest publicly disclosed number of tokens dumped into a single language model (so far).
Tags: jack-clark, generative-ai, training-data, ai, qwen, llms
llm-gemini 0.4
New release of my llm-gemini plugin, adding support for asynchronous models (see LLM 0.18), plus the newgemini-exp-1114
model (currently at the top of the Chatbot Arena) and a -o json_object 1
option to force JSON output.
I also released llm-claude-3 0.9 which adds asynchronous support for the Claude family of models.
Tags: llm, plugins, ai, llms, async, python, generative-ai, projects, claude, gemini, anthropic, google
LLM 0.18
New release of LLM. The big new feature is asynchronous model support - you can now use supported models in async Python code like this:import llm
model = llm.get_async_model("gpt-4o")
async for chunk in model.prompt(
"Five surprising names for a pet pelican"
):
print(chunk, end="", flush=True)
Also new in this release: support for sending audio attachments to OpenAI's gpt-4o-audio-preview
model.
Project: Civic Band - scraping and searching PDF meeting minutes from hundreds of municipalities
I interviewed Philip James about Civic Band, his "slowly growing collection of databases of the minutes from civic governments". Philip demonstrated the site and talked through his pipeline for scraping and indexing meeting minutes from many different local government authorities around the USA.
We recorded this conversation as part of yesterday's Datasette Public Office Hours session.
Civic Band
Philip was inspired to start thinking more about local government after the 2016 US election. He realised that there was a huge amount of information about decisions made by local authorities tucked away in their meeting minutes,but that information was hidden away in thousands of PDF files across many different websites.
There was this massive backlog of basically every decision that had ever been made by one of these bodies. But it was almost impossible to discover because it lives in these systems where the method of exchange is a PDF.
Philip lives in Alameda, which makes its minutes available via this portal powered by Legistar. It turns out there are a small number of vendors that provide this kind of software tool, so once you've written a scraper for one it's likely to work for many others as well.
Here's the Civic Band portal for Alameda, powered by Datasette.
It's running the datasette-search-all plugin and has both tables configured for full-text search. Here's a search for housing:
The technical stack
The public Civic Band sites all run using Datasette in Docker Containers - one container per municipality. They're hosted on a single Hetzner machine.
The ingestion pipeline runs separately from the main hosting environment, using a Mac Mini on Philp's desk at home.
OCR works by breaking each PDF up into images and then running Tesseract OCR against them directly on the Mac Mini. This processes in the order of 10,000 or less new pages of documents a day.
Philip treats PDF as a normalization target, because the pipeline is designed around documents with pages of text. In the rare event that a municipality publishes documents in another format such as .docx
he converts them to PDF before processing.
PNG images of the PDF pages are served via a CDN, and the OCRd text is written to SQLite database files - one per municipality. SQLite FTS provides full-text search.
Scale and storage
The entire project currently comes to about 265GB on disk. The PNGs of the pages use about 350GB of CDN storage.
Most of the individual SQLite databases are very small. The largest is for Maui County which is around 535MB because that county has professional stenographers taking detailed notes for every one of their meetings.
Each city adds only a few documents a week so growth is manageable even as the number of cities grows.
Future plans
We talked quite a bit about a goal to allow users to subscribe to updates that match specific search terms.
Philip has been building out a separate site called Civic Observer to address this need, which will store searches and then execute the periodically using the Datasette JSON API, with a Django app to record state to avoid sending the same alert more than once.
I've had a long term ambition to build some kind of saved search alerts plugin for Datasette generally, to allow users to subscribe to new results for arbitrary SQL queries. My sqlite-chronicle library is part or that effort - it uses SQLite triggers to maintain version numbers for individual rows in a table, allowing you to query just the rows that have been inserted or modified since the version number last time you ran the query.
Philip is keen to talk to anyone who is interested in using Civic Band or helping expand it to even more cities. You can find him on the Datasette Discord.
Tags: data-journalism, political-hacking, politics, sqlite, datasette
NuExtract 1.5
Structured extraction - where an LLM helps turn unstructured text (or image content) into structured data - remains one of the most directly useful applications of LLMs.NuExtract is a family of small models directly trained for this purpose (though text only at the moment) and released under the MIT license.
It comes in a variety of shapes and sizes:
- NuExtract-v1.5 is a 3.8B parameter model fine-tuned on Phi-3.5-mini instruct. You can try this one out in this playground.
- NuExtract-tiny-v1.5 is 494M parameters, fine-tuned on Qwen2.5-0.5B.
- NuExtract-1.5-smol is 1.7B parameters, fine-tuned on SmolLM2-1.7B.
All three models were fine-tuned on NuMind's "private high-quality dataset". It's interesting to see a model family that uses one fine-tuning set against three completely different base models.
Useful tip from Steffen Röcker:
Make sure to use it with low temperature, I've uploaded NuExtract-tiny-v1.5 to Ollama and set it to 0. With the Ollama default of 0.7 it started repeating the input text. It works really well despite being so smol.
Tags: llms, ai, generative-ai, fine-tuning, phi, qwen, hugging-face
An Electromagnetic Force
I've just returned from a fourteen-day trip spent building, running and tearing down EMF, and as I sit on the plane writing this, as well as physical exhaustion, I am experiencing a whole host of emotions - happiness, wonder, determination, and also a strange sense of loss.
It is impossible to describe EMF to anyone who has not attended; while initially you might want to compare it to a normal festival, or something like Burning Man, it is fundamentally unlike almost any other event on Earth. The Dutch and German camps maybe come close, but even those have their own somewhat different vibe.
Over the course of my time heading up the logistics team over the last two weeks, I have done and seen such a wild variety of things that I'm never quite sure what was real. Among others, I watched a man play the US National Anthem on a tesla coil using a theremin; climbed up into a DJ booth in a solarpunk-themed Null Sector and pressed the "!! FIRE !!" button to light up the night sky with pillars of burning alcohol; exited the shower to hear HACK THE PLANET echo out over the field from the stage a quarter of a mile away; saw an inflatable t-rex driving a miniature Jurassic Park jeep, played games on a hillside using lasers, and refilled the duck flume several times (shortly after exclaiming "We have a duck flume?").
...
The Cloud Is Just My Basement's Computers
I've had many different development platforms over the years - from Notepad++ on library computers in my youth, to Gentoo and then Ubuntu installed on a series of carefully-chosen laptops with working drivers, and then for the last five years or so on Surface devices via the rather wonderful Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
Of course, in the WSL era I am still just running Ubuntu, but inside the pseudo-VM that is the WSL subsystem of the Windows kernel. It's honestly pretty great, and I regularly joke that I'm using Windows as the GUI layer to develop on Linux.
Between the Steam Deck and WSL both being ascendant, maybe we finally got the Year Of Linux On The Desktop, just not as we expected.
...
Life-Critical Side Projects
TLDR: I am looking for new developers and maintainers for Takahē who want to help in exchange for my mentorship, or I'll have to sunset the project.
I find it important to have hobbies that aren't the same as what I do for work, which is why an increasing number of them don't involve computers at all - I'm very happy building new things on my camper van, making weird geographic art, or hiking around bits of the Rockies.
However, I still love programming and systems work, and I'll always have at least one project going on the side that involves it - nothing beats the size and complexity of what you can create in just a few hours of coding. That said, I have two basic rules for my programming side projects:
...
I am, approximately, here
There are many questionable things about American car culture, but the road trip is not one of them. In a country as large and geographically varied as the USA, road travel is not just a necessity, but it can also be the attraction itself.
When I first moved to the USA, I had vague plans of doing some driving around and enjoying the sheer alien-ness of tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, or motels where you are somehow the only guest. Nine years in, I've done a decent amount of that, but these days my attention is more focused around the camper van that I spent half a year building.
I like to try and share a bit of the experience with those who want to see it, and as well as posting pictures and videos, I've always liked the idea of having a live map of where I am - even if it's just for friends and relatives who are interested in my progress.
...
A Takahē refactor, as a treat
I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US; both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to build, exactly.
When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that relatively early on, I sort of fell down the default path of implementing a lightweight clone of Mastodon/Twitter.
While this was good in terms of developing out the features we needed, it always felt a bit like overhead I didn't really want; after all, if you're implementing the Mastodon API like we do, all the dedicated apps for viewing timelines and posting are always going to be better than what you ship with a server.
...
Takahē 0.7
Today is the 0.7 release of Takahē, and things are really humming along now; this release marks the point where we've built enough moderation and community features to make me happy that I can open up takahe.social to registrations, albeit with a user number cap.
We've also launched a Patreon for Takahē, in a quest to make development and operation of Takahē more sustainable - and work towards start paying some people to help out with the less exciting work like triaging tickets, user support, and moderation of takahe.social. If you want to volunteer directly, that's covered in our Contributing docs.
There's some interesting technical topics I want to dig into today, though - it's been a little while since my last blog post and ActivityPub and friends continue to surprise.
...
Understanding A Protocol
Yesterday I pushed out the 0.5.0 release of Takahē, and while there's plenty left to do, this release is somewhat of a milestone in its own right, as it essentially marks the point where I've implemented enough of ActivityPub to shift focus.
With the implementation of image posting in this release, there are now only a few things left at a protocol level that I know I'm missing:
Custom emoji (these are custom per-server and a mapping of name-to-image comes with each post)
...
Takahē 0.3.0
So, after a few weeks of development, I'm happy enough with the state of Takahē to issue its first official release - which I've chosen to number 0.3.0, because version numbers are made up and I can start where I want.
We're only releasing Docker images right now in order to try and keep the support burden down (it removes having to worry about people's OS versions and library environments), so you can find it on Docker Hub.
...
Twitter, ActivityPub and The Future
Twitter is - was - such a unique place. Somewhere where you can have the President
of the United States coexist with teenagers writing fan fiction; where
celebrities give personal insights into their lives while government
departments post memes about public safety;
the place that gave us @Horse_ebooks
and @dril
.
The "Fediverse", with Mastodon at its helm, is not this. It doesn't seem to want to be, and I honestly think that's fine - as many thinkpieces have recently said, the age of global social media might just be over. And given the effect it's had on the world, maybe that's alright after all.
But there is still a void to fill, and as someone who enjoyed Twitter most at its "medium" size, I think the ActivityPub ecosystem is well-placed to grow into such a space. But first, I think there's some important things we have to discuss about it.
...
Takahē: A New ActivityPub Server
When I decided to properly start using the Fediverse via my own Mastodon server, I knew it was probably inevitable that I would end up writing my own server - and, well, here we are!
My new server is called Takahē, and it's built in Django and also specifically with Python's async library ecosystem - I'll explain more about why that matters later.
...
I Fight For The Users
By Jeff Atwood
If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take a moment
The 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet
By Jeff Atwood
It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice:
By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for
Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era
By Jeff Atwood
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career.
With early computers, you didn't boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command
Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing
By Jeff Atwood
Hard to believe that I've had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that's yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster
The Rise of the Electric Scooter
By Jeff Atwood
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it's not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right?
On an
Electric Geek Transportation Systems
By Jeff Atwood
I've never thought of myself as a "car person". The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT. Since then we bought a VW station wagon
An Exercise Program for the Fat Web
By Jeff Atwood
When I wrote about App-pocalypse Now in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it's also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30.
Websites have gotten a lot
The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer
By Jeff Atwood
When we started Discourse in 2013, our server requirements were high:
- 1GB RAM
- modern, fast dual core CPU
- speedy solid state drive with 20+ GB
I'm not talking about a cheapo shared cpanel server, either, I mean a dedicated virtual private server with those specifications.
We were OK
What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
By Jeff Atwood
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here's my 15 second answer:
We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It's called Stack Overflow
There is no longer any such thing as Computer Security
By Jeff Atwood
Remember "cybersecurity"?
Mysterious hooded computer guys doing mysterious hooded computer guy .. things! Who knows what kind of naughty digital mischief they might be up to?
Unfortunately, we now live in a world where this kind of digital mischief is literally rewriting the world's history. For proof
To Serve Man, with Software
By Jeff Atwood
I didn't choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero
The Existential Terror of Battle Royale
By Jeff Atwood
It's been a while since I wrote a blog post, I guess in general, but also a blog post about video games. Video games are probably the single thing most attributable to my career as a programmer, and everything else I've done professionally after that. I
Hacker, Hack Thyself
By Jeff Atwood
We've read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by default, even if
Thunderbolting Your Video Card
By Jeff Atwood
When I wrote about The Golden Age of x86 Gaming, I implied that, in the future, it might be an interesting, albeit expensive, idea to upgrade your video card via an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.
I'm here to report that the future is now.
Yes, that's
Password Rules Are Bullshit
By Jeff Atwood
Of the many, many, many bad things about passwords, you know what the worst is? Password rules.
If we don't solve the password problem for users in my lifetime I am gonna haunt you from beyond the grave as a ghost pic.twitter.com/Tf9EnwgoZv
— Jeff Atwood
Remembering old friends
By [email protected] (Jon North)
The murier platane just given its winter trim |
We also welcomed son Sam for a few days - a really nice visit, with a couple of meals out including one at the new Lunel restaurant Maison Soubeiran, a family concern aith a woman chef/proprietor, full of interest and quite classy. Meanwhile we have enjoyed visting winemakers (large and smaller-scale) and tasting with another group which has met regularly since soon after our arrival here.
Roundup
By [email protected] (Jon North)
Birthday time, and we have celebrated jointly with a 160th party (82+78, I am the baby) with friends locally, a very informal wine tasting from our varied collecton. A few photos...
It has rained (a rare event) so things are looking a bit greener but this is a dry corner of the Languedoc - only 35 mm on 5 September when the local average all around was nearer 50 - and another 37 yesterday. I do spend a lot of my time watering, recycling the copious condensation from our wine store cooling system. I shalll need to get the mower out soon...
After an anxious few days Edmond has rallied and is eating the posher kind of dog food that now tempts him. His heart is not strong, and the vet (who is kind and thoughtful) is on standby to pay us a visit when needed, but for the moment the dog is in good spirits.
Followign the outstanding success of the Paris Olympics, the Paralympics have come and gone. We made a determined effort to watch: The simple evidence of determination and overcoming difficulties is inspiring, and sports have been adapted, or invented, to facilitate people with disabilities of every kind to take their chance. Now we are obliged to watch French tv, but we also have podcasts in English. There is a splendid podcast - well worth listening to - which conveys the excellence of these athletes. Mary and I both spent a good part of our working lives with disabled people in the voluntery sector, so this inteterests us a lot. It seems to us that France has begun to catch up with the UK in social integration of disability
I have long been interested in road safety, and the consistently higher mortality here as compared th the UK. I have just read that the number of people killed or injured on Welsh roads has dropped significantly since most 30mph speed limits were reduced to 20mph. There were 377 casualties on 20mph and 30mph roads in the first quarter of 2024, down from 510 in the same period last year. The number of deaths dropped from 11 to five.
The Fête des Associations, an annual event in most French towns. The voluntary sector is central to public affairs at every level. |
Those who know me also know I have a particular feeling of sympathy with refugees. I've written before about the book Bloody foreigners by Robert Winder, which is a classic view of l'étranger in Britain, something I return to read often. He has just written in the Guardian:
...there is a pattern stretching back to the 12th century.... Like everyone else, I gaped in dismay as rioting tore across the country... but as the reflexive search for the “root” or “underlying” cause gathered pace, I couldn’t help recalling the parable of the good sociologist. In this parody of the Bible, when the traveller on the road to Jericho is assaulted, the first sociologist crosses the road and passes by on the other side. The second does the same. But the good sociologist rushes to the scene, cradles the victim’s head and weeps: “Boy, the person who did this needs help.” The violence was the opposite of a laughing matter, but I groaned to see how swiftly it was taken to be symptomatic of a credible point of view. Almost everyone was calling the stone-throwers “far-right protesters” or “Islamophobic” – as though name-calling might be enough make them come to their senses. Surely this was giving them too much credit. It allowed them to style themselves as warriors for a cause instead of thugs. Worse, it walked into the Faragian trap of insisting that though the violence, yes, might be over the top, the grievances were understandable, and the conversation we really needed to have was about … immigration.
It wasn’t. The subject here was violence.This is not to say that immigration is trivial or a simple matter. It is neither. The Channel is being crossed by overcrowded boats. The government is having to spend up to £5bn a year on asylum seekers. That is inspiring enough culture-war friction to keep the thinktanks occupied for years. There are major policy discussions to be had in all these areas. But it pained me to see what was obviously a criminal uproar so swiftly becoming a “debate”. Surely, if there is one thing we could agree on, it was the fact that it is wrong for someone halfway through a six-pack to be setting fire to someone’s car, in a town (not their own) where children have just been murdered, because someone on the internet has said something angry about someone else whose name they couldn’t remember.
Part of my twinge was selfish, down to the fact that some years ago I wrote a book that presented the age-old saga of migration to Britain (since the ice melted) not as a sociopolitical nightmare but as a natural part of human life – which happened to have enriched Britain greatly. I was mindful of Tolstoy’s observation that in all literature there were really only two stories: someone leaves home, or a stranger arrives in town. But given that one of my hopes had been to pour oil on troubled waters, it looked as though I now had to admit – as flames lit up the night sky in Southport and Plymouth – that I had written the most unsuccessful book in the history of books.Except, perhaps, in one respect, because one of the main things I learned writing it was that angry summer uprisings against perceived outsiders are nothing new. Far from being a heated response to a modern problem, they are as entrenched a part of the English social scene as Ascot, Henley and the Lord’s Test.
Along with Robert Winder I have been reminded today of another favourite author, Lea Ypi, now a professor at the LSE but born in a dysfunctional Albania.
One cold, late evening in the winter of 1999, I was waiting for a train at Termini station in Rome when I noticed an old lady struggling with her suitcases and offered to help. “Signorina,” her voice trembled ever so slightly. “Fortunately there are still youngsters like you. I was very worried. This station is full of Albanian muggers. It’s an invasion.”
Back then I had no courage to tell her I was Albanian. One of the lucky ones – a student on a scholarship, unlike my fellow citizens who worked as cleaners, builders, carers and sex workers. ...taken literally, the only invasion in the history of the two nations went the other way round. It happened in 1939, when Mussolini’s troops ...annexed the Albanian kingdom to the kingdom of Italy.
Keir Starmer has reportedly declared that the UK government is interested in a migration pact like the Albanian one. ...all that Britain needs for an equivalent deal is a former colony with a government whose memory is sharp enough to remember the roads and buildings its master constructed in the past century but not the human beings it exploited in the past few decades.... When the argument that we must “be pragmatic” is the first to be put on the table, principles – memory, responsibility, care for vulnerable people, you name it – have already been suspended.
How to oppose it, then? Perhaps by plain logic. Migration deals such as the one Labour is apparently studying are premised on various assumptions: that migration itself is a problem, that irregular migration is best fought with draconian border restrictions, that extraterritorial detention can act as a deterrent. There is ample research showing each premise to be dubious. But even assuming they are valid, there are three further issues any “pragmatic” politician ought to confront.
Politically, the Albania model is presented as a novelty in the management of migratory flows because it involves cooperation between an EU candidate and an EU member state. ... [but this] leaves to bilateral negotiations what ought to come about as a result of an EU-wide process.... it creates a dangerous precedent in which individual countries pursue their own deals to address their own migration “problem”, heading off chances of a truly coordinated process acrossEurope.
Second, the principle of non-refoulment enshrined in the 1951 UN convention relating to the status of refugees, prohibits the expulsion or return of people to countries deemed unsafe. Meloni insists Albania is safe, citing its EU candidate status. But if that is the case, why are pregnant women, children and other vulnerable categories exempted from the deal?
Third, there is the economic question. To comply with international law, deported migrants must remain Italy’s responsibility. According to the agreement between Italy and Albania, Italy is responsible for all the costs of construction and management of the two centres...An irregular migrant in Albania costs Italy the same or more than they would if they were processed in their own territory. The only benefit is that migrants become invisible – lontano dagli occhi, lontano dal cuore, as the Italian saying goes.
We are told that Starmer’s government is pragmatic and interested in what works. But how can a “solution” that makes no logical sense from a political, legal and economic point of view still be considered “pragmatic”?
Perhaps there is only one plausible answer: propaganda. Labour clearly thinks it can send a message to the most right-leaning voters in its coalition that it too is tough on migrants. In doing this, it takes its liberal and leftwing supporters for granted. They may suspend their principles and forgive the rhetoric for a time. But the political, legal and economic contradictions will remain.
A quiet summer
By [email protected] (Jon North)
After the total immersion of the Tour de France here in our household (bear in mind we were brushing up on our French comprehension as we watched with 100% French commentary for the first time, straining to hear snatches of English behind the interpreters' rapid translations of interview clips). On reflection one of our highlights was the overall success of small nations - Slovenia, Ecuador, Eritrea, Belgium on various podiums as well as the endless beauty of thr French (and initially Italian) countryside. I didn't think the Olympics would have the same fascination for us, but we have enjoyed some amazing moments, and continue to improve our comprehension of spoken French from the tv coverage. Simone Biles has been a revelation, recovering from disorientation 4 years ago to take triumphant gold medals. They keep evoking the days of Korbut and Comaneci, but the fitness and tranining have gone along with higher ages - the 27 year old Biles would apparently have been called granny by other gymnasts a generation ago.
in Marc & Flo's garden in Congénies |
just out of hibernation (a year or two ago) |
Heat, family and the Tour
By [email protected] (Jon North)
The scenery in these broadcasts is always magnificent - helicopters and now, I guess, drones, provide views of landscape which we'd never have seen in earlier days, and the broadcasters take pride in interspersing shots of countryside and buildings among the pictures of the race. Tuesday's stage from Gruissan to Nîmes was particularly enjoyable for us, including as it did shots of the Pic Saint Loup north of Montpellier and then the countryside from Montpellier through the Vaunage, all of which we knnow quite well. This website has many excellent photos of the Pic Saint Loup by Régis Domergue, a local photographer we admire.
Agapanthus in our garden |
Voting and things
By [email protected] (Jon North)
This is election time - double whammy for us since we are still in a whirl from Thursday, and this weekend is the tense second round in the French partliamentary elections.
But I must start today by saying that I've just heard that my friend and ex-boss David Lawtey died this month. With no exaggeration, he was oneof the most important influences in my life, in my work in the Notts voluntary sector above all. He was one of the fairly few people in my life who was a confirmed Conservative - goodness knows what he made of the recent chaos in British political life - and he also helped me to understand the positive qualities of a political allegiance I mostly find it hard to sympathise with. His decency and uprightness were a huge support to me, especially at difficult moments at the end of my career.
The personal things I take away from the British election results include some astonishing results - Henley-on-Thames which I'd got to know as a teenager switching from Conservative for the first time since 1906! (my old home area of Chesham & Amersham had already caused a big ripple in a by-election); Rushcliffe (Kenneth Clarke's old constituency) in Notts, where I spent nearly 25 years at work falling to Labour. The horrible muddle in Ashfield (Lee Anderson changed parties 4 times I think, Labour via tory to the far right) caused Mary and I who had worked there to raise a lot of eyebrows. Nationally the early reports of ministerial appointments and cabinet strategy are encouraging - Rwanda is instantly abandoned the new PM is well-equipped to understand the crisis in the prison service. Above all I hope that the changes now will bring principle back into politics, and as an ardent champion of social justice and fairness I have hopes that the new regime will uphold these in redistributing resources to those who need them most. Early signs are encouraging.
The French situation is much less certain, though tactical withdrawals of candidates in triangular contests reduced the risks. As I write a heated discussion is happening on the tv following the announcement of the results, no clear majority for anyone but a 3-way split. Time will tell how this will play out but the right has been edged away from a parliamentary majority. We have no vote here, and the President will have to work with a parliament which is equally far from his position on left and right. I feel relief and a sense that the 2-round system and hastily formed alliances seem to have done their job. The best stimate of the final result is below.
Domestically things are fairly quiet for us. Edmond the dog is not very well, rather wheezy despite medication against fluid on the lungs and slow to show interest in food this weekend, but at 15 he is often lively and walks OK, snoozing a lot in between whiles. The weather is finally getting really warm but still not approaching the heatwaves of the last couple of years.
We have long been avid followers of the Tour de France, which is just entering its second week. Tadej Pogacar has shown his class in pushing to the top of the leader board and of the first serious mountain, and Mark Cavendish also shone with his record 35th stage win. The scenery in Italy (where the Tour began) was wonderful, and since then we have seen part of France we've got to know quite well around the Savoie area and in Burgundy. This Sunday has stretches of gravel along the route, complicating things for the leaders as well as everyone else. A black Eritrean cyclist, Biniam Girmay, is leading the points (sprint) competition by a distance, excellent for black sport.
Like other cars we have had our current Dacia Lodgy is rather dented from a collision with a long lorry on a roundabout - happily no serious damage.
As I started to write this Kiri te Kanawa, who is 80, was the guest on Tom Service's Saturday morning programme on Radio 3. Her Countess in Figaro was an all-time classic role - wonderful. To finish a few photos of Marc & Flo's garden and one of some musical fishknoves - they actually work for 4-part harmony!
Midsummer
By [email protected] (Jon North)
Poor Edmond has had a rough time lately, and the other day the vet drained a litre of fluid from his chest - his liver has long been struggling. We'll keep going with and for him as long as we can, but he is not always interested in eating despite Mary's tempting food. He has had a good run, and at 15 has survived well, but we shall see if the aftermath of this latest operation works out. It seems possible that he will be our last dog - I would struggle with ayounger, more active animal though we never say never - and we are keen to make his life as comfortable as possible.
The glow of midsummer twilight, looking north from our house | |
These past few weeks have also been eventful in our garden, and in France with the continuing drift to the right across much of Europe and national elections here now imminent. An anxious wait to see if the French electoral system is shock-proof.
We have also had the pleasure of , a long weekend visit from Jeff and Fi - others of the family will follow over the summer.
Early June
By [email protected] (Jon North)
As summer warmth arrives, we look forward to family visits, and continue to read and listen to podcasts.
My love of reading goes way back - Just William and Arthur Ransome when young, phases of Victorian classics more recently, often linked to television adaptations. As time passes I often gravitate to stories linked to real events, for example Snow falling on cedars by David Guterson. Its background is the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the US in the fevered atmosphere following Pearl Harbour. Listening to a fascinating podcast series History's secret heroes on BBC Radio 4 brought this vividly back - the direct experience of families suffering such devastating treatment - displacement and internment in awful camps - was only partly mitigated by the later compensation and apologies of American administrations (a bit of a contrast, all the same, to the recent frequent and reluctant acknowledgement of maladministration and mistreatment of people in the UK).
On the similar theme, paraoia leading to unjust treatment of racial minorities in wartime, I've recently discovered Eva Ibbotson, whose novels (with admittedly romantic themes) strike chords for me with music, Austrian and Jewish threads. The last I read, twice now, is A song for summer in which among other things a man, an eminent musician called Marek, with Czech origins, ends up interned on the Isle of Man as some of my good friends were . An extraordinary collection of human beings - members of the Amadeus Quartet were among those rumoured to have met there, and the internment camps also featured on a podcast we've just listened to - so I think it's worth quoting at length from this well-written account:
The poor British, waiting for invasion, standing alone against Hitler, succumbed not to panic, for that was not in their nature, but to paranoia. Nazis disguised as parachuting nuns were reported daily; old ladies with a chink in their blackout curtains were taken away for questioning – and now, in an act of madness, they began to round up and imprison just those ‘enemy aliens’ who had the most to fear from Hitler and Mussolini, and who had been engaged in the fight against Fascism while high-ranking British diplomats were still taking tea with the Führer and admiring the fact that the trains ran on time. Austrian and German professors were hauled out of lecture rooms, doctors out of hospitals, students out of libraries, told they could pack one suitcase and taken away by the police. Italian shopkeepers, German bakers who had spent years in Britain, disappeared within an hour, weeping and bewildered. Spy mania was everywhere; even one traitor among the thousands of innocent refugees could not be tolerated. The camps they were taken to were not in fact concentration camps, the Tommies who guarded them were no Storm Troopers, but the bewilderment and anguish, particularly among older refugees, was appalling. Leon [another character in Ibbotson's book] happened to be at home when two policemen came for his father. He lied about his age... and was taken to an internment camp consisting of a large number of seaside boarding houses on the Isle of Man.The views of the landladies evicted from their villas – from Bay View and Sunnydene and Resthaven – are not recorded. Forced to leave behind their garden gnomes, their monkey puzzles and brass plates offering Bed and Breakfast, they were replaced by rolls of barbed wire, observation towers and iron gates. Facing the sea but unable to reach it, cut off from all news of the outside world, the inmates wandered about, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, trying to understand the nightmare that had enveloped them. Housed in villas stripped of everything except camp beds and a few cooking utensils, the men assembled each morning for roll call and the rations which they had no idea how to cook. And each day more confused ‘enemy aliens’ arrived – Nobel Laureates, old men with diabetes, social democrats who had been tortured in the prisons of the Reich and had come to Britain as to Mecca or Shangri La.Although it was obvious to even the thickest British Tommy that Hitler, if he had been relying on these men for spies, would have little hope of winning the war, the net which produced such a strange catch did just occasionally dredge up a genuine Nazi. When this happened, the results were unfortunate. Immolated in boarding houses with at least a dozen Jews whose suffering at the hands of the Nazis had been unspeakable, a man polishing his boots and saying that Hitler would soon overrun Britain did not have a happy life. He was refused his rations, ostracised, the blankets stolen from his bed. Most of them capitulated and learnt to hold their tongues, but one of them, a handsome blond young man called Erich Unterhausen, continued each morning to polish his boots, give the Nazi salute and say, ‘Heil Hitler!’ At least he did until a rainy morning in late July when he flew suddenly out of the first-floor window of Mon Repos, bounced off a privet bush, and landed on a flower bed planted with crimson salvias and purple aubretia. He was not hurt, only bruised, which was a pity, but the news, spreading quickly through the camp, was regarded by the inmates as the first glimmer of light since the fall of France. Needless to say, the perpetrator of this brutality was immediately marched off to the camp commandant in his office, where he admitted his guilt and was entirely unrepentant. ‘If you don’t get rid of people like Unterhausen you’ll have a murder on your hands,' he said, confusing the commandant with his flawless English. ‘Rounding up accredited Nazis with these people is madness. You know perfectly well who the real Nazis are in this camp – I’ve only been here a day but I can tell you: Schweger in Sunnydene, Pischinger in that place with the blue pottery cat – and the chap I threw out of the window. He’s the only one who could possibly be a spy, and the sooner he’s in a proper prison the better – anyone worth their salt could signal from here. As for Schweger, he’s in with some hotheads from the Jewish Freedom Movement and they’re starving him to death.’Thank you for telling me my business,’ said the commandant, and was disconcerted by an entirely friendly smile from the tall, broad-shouldered man with the scar on his forehead. He looked down at the papers that had come with the prisoner. ‘You say you’re a Czech.’ ‘I don’t say I am; I am,’ said the prisoner unruffledly. ‘So what are you doing here? The Czechs are our allies.’ Marek was silent. The Czechs might be allies now, but before, at Munich, they had been betrayed. ‘Your name is German.’ ‘Yes. I came over in a fishing boat; we were strafed and capsized outside Dover. I got concussion. Apparently I spoke German to the dogs.’ ‘The dogs?’ ‘There was a whole compound of stray dogs which the Tommies had smuggled out of France when they were taken off at Dunkirk – you’ve never heard such a racket. They put my stretcher down beside a big black and tan pointer. My father’s hunting dogs were always trained in German and when I came round –’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter about me; they’ll sort it out. I’m quite glad to be out of the way till the Czechoslovak Air Force reassembles. But Unterhausen must go, and the other Nazis – and old Professor Cohen must go to hospital – the one who stands by the barbed wire and gets his beard caught. He’s very eminent and very ill – if he dies there’ll be questions asked. They’re being asked already in Parliament and elsewhere.’Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?’ sneered the second in command, a brash young lieutenant, but the commandant frowned him down. A humane man, he knew full well that he was caught up in one of those administrative muddles that happens in war and can claim lives. It was to him that Marek spoke. ‘Most of the people in here understand what has happened – that there was bound to be confusion after the French surrendered, that we’ve got mixed up with the parachuting nuns and that it won’t go on for ever. But not all of them. There have been two suicides in one of the other camps, as you no doubt know. This whole business – interning the people who have most of all to fear from Hitler – is going to be a pretty discreditable episode in retrospect. What’s more, if Hitler does invade, you’ve made it nice and easy for him, corralling all the Jews and the anti-Nazis together so he doesn’t have to go looking.’ ‘... the internees (from whom all news of the outside world was forbidden) ... [saved] the newspapers that came wrapped round their ration of kippers... [to] keep in touch with the stock exchange.Other familiar faces now appeared in the throng: the erstwhile flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic; a copying clerk from the office of Universal Editions; Marek’s old tailor from the Kärntnerstrasse . . . and all the time more people appeared, overjoyed by the news of Unterhausen’s fate. But Marek did not intend to waste too much time on swapping stories – . ‘There’s a piano locked in the basement of the Palm Court Hotel,’ he said. ‘We can have it. It’ll have to be moved into some kind of hall or shed – anything. We’re going to give a concert.’ ‘Of what?'‘There’s only one answer to that, don’t you think?’ ‘Johann Sebastian Bach,’ said the flautist. Marek nodded. ‘Exactly so.’ For a moment he raised his eyes to heaven, seeking guidance not so much from God (whose musicality was not well documented) as from his erstwhile representative on earth, the Kapellmeister of Leipzig.
I have been musing why my sympathy and emotions are so strongly stirred by such injustice - after all, I have had a comfortable life in entirely British surroundings give or take a splash of Quakerism and some marvellous friends as role models, but that is how it is and I shall continue to be drawn by underdog tales.
This has turned out to be a single subject blog, but the accompanyjng pictures are the usual mixture from daily life!
A roundup
By [email protected] (Jon North)
Sometimes there are carpets of poppies everywhere, this year fewer but this field right next to our car servicing garage kept catching my eye and I caught it just in time while Mary booked the car in for its service. This post will be a bit of a roundup of things I have posted on Facebook.
A while back I wrote about the plight of migrants and someone thought I might have been referring to our situation. Of course not - we are incrdibly lucky to have landed on our feet after Brexit thanks to a very fair-minded French government and bureaucracy. But I am ever more angry and concerned about people who have gone through unimaginable hardships to reach France and the UK, and then find in the UK at least that they are vilified and stranded. I have been reading the various writings of Sathnam Sanghera whose disssection of Britains imperial past is trenchant.
His autobiographical The boy with the topknot is among other things a powerful reflection on mental illness in his family; our own experienceshave echos here, and among other things his description of the slow realisation that things are wrong, attempting to rationalise the painful, is something we have known. I have been fascinated also to see a bit from the inside the experiences of Sikh immigrants to Britain and their cultural context, including marriage exepctations and the complex place of women in his stories. His novel Marriage material is an excellent read.
Before I pass on to lighter topics, the ongoing inhumaanity of the various refugee themes in the news is not the only awful and distressing thing we hear of and read about daily - the plight of British subpost-people wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office because of long-denied computer problems, the infected blood scandal or the plight of carers forced to pay back benefit overpayments (this links closely to my lontime work with carers through Crossroads) and the ongoing inhumanity around post-war immigrants (from the Windrush etc.) are only somr examples of things which should havce been sorted out long ago but have been swept under bureauratic carpets again and again. I have often said that Dickens and his Circumlocution Office (in Little Dorrit) seem still alive and well. Apart from deliberate inhumanity, there are plenty of ways of mistreating people through shoulder-shrugging neglect - Dickens' "nobody knew" is classic now as then.
Our houshold chugs on, looking forward to a family visit here in a fortnight. We are daily grateful for Edmond's liveliness at the age of 15! After a thorough overhaulof the roof, more complex than we had expected, our friendly factotum M.Beaumann has continued his care of our premises with a splendid cleanup of yard and terrace and is now starting on a new front fence. IN the caourse of this he has discovered some very ancient (well, as old as the house, around 50 years) mains electrical wiring which is still all too live. A better casing and leaving well alone are the answers. And our lawnmower is finally going to be cordless!A night shot of the Pic Saint Loup with boar passing by by an excellent local photographer, Régis Domergue |
Our language groups (reading and speaking in French with some French people trying their English) continue twice a week, with often excellent shared lunches thrown in - as the weather warms up we can start to eat outside.
We read a lot - among authors we both enjoy are Eva Ibbotson, whose romantic novels with strong links to her Austrian background are beautifully written and full of well-observed characters; and an old favourite, Sara Paretsky whose V.I.Warshawski novels set in Chicago and around. Sara Paretsky is an avid campaigner for women, and her fearless public profile is simply admirable.
To end, a cartoon and another poppy
Sagas all round
By [email protected] (Jon North)
Our conversation groups still active, with new arrivals from Chicago |
The health saga is not, for once, my various aches and pains but the long-running one of Mary's heart and blood (since a minor stroke in 2010), very well surveyed but needing careful supervision. Not for the first time we have been glad of the very local A&E hospital, all built since we came here. In the past week the care has involved feeet up and suppport stockings which are too hot for comfort when the weather warms up. The warm srping is a lovely time for flowers, so here are a few more from our garden. And finally a word of praise for one of the few bits of the British administration that actually seems to work. With luck and a following wind my new passport should arrive soon, and like Mary's it was efficiently and quickly dealt with despite Brexit horror stories elsewhere. |
Springtime with rain
By [email protected] (Jon North)
I have written before about the dry conditions here. But when it rains it really does. Last week we had 60 mm in a few hours, and another 40 at the weekend, but this morning we are back to bright sunshine and blue skies. The photo above was taken a few days ago, a pink evening sky which we see quite often.
We have been a bit concerned about Edmond, 14 years old and with dodgy kidneys. But we've just returned from the vet, and all seems to be fairly well after a blood test and with a bit more diuretic - desmite occasional wheezes, he is lively and has put on a bit of weight. We hope he will be with us for a little whhile yet.
After our trips to the UK we have mostly stayed home and slotted back into our regular activities. These photos of our regular Tuesday French conversation group were taken by someone elsse for once, so I'm in one or two!
After a good excursion on DVD into the works of Mrs Gaskell we have passed onto John Galsworthy, not just through 2 tv series of the Forsyte Saga but, for me, rereading the books. I started on the paper versions but have passed over to the Kindle (lighter to hold in bed). The Forsytes have a particular association for me because I was called after Jon, son of young Jolyon F. My father pretended to admire the 'Man of Propeerty' characterised by Soames but much about Dad seems to me to have been nearer the softer, more emotional other side of the family, the Jolyons and their ilk. Rereading for the 4th or 5th time I find much in the detail of the written version which can only be hinted at in a tv adaptation, and in the end it is the characters of Soames and his daughter Fleur which dominate the first 6 of the 9 books in the saga. Of the final 3, which are far less well-known, I may write more anon.
Since we returned from the UK for the second time this year, we had one very enjoyable outing to see our friend Barry who lives in these rural surroundings in the area called the Laurargais south-east of Toulouse. Barry is South African in origin but had long re-acclimatised to England where I met him in the Canonbury Chamber Choir in the 1970s. He and his partner Peter (now sadly no longer alive) moved to France with their interest in antiques, and the house is a living reminder of those interests.
A few garden pittures to end with. Spring is with us, and the clocks go forward this weekend.
Home and more or less in good shape
By [email protected] (Jon North)
The light greeting our return |
It is lovely to be back in the bright, light Languedoc. Don't get me wrong, we had a very good trip (apart from the first few hours when the motorways here were closed by prefectoral decree, because of farmers' protests - 5 hours to get near Lyon then a speeding fine for going 8 km/hr too fast in our relief at escaping the jams). We spent excellent days with our family, saw interesting things and ate and drank well. Our return trip, despite threats of farmers' blockages) was calm and trouble-free. We have established a simple, untiring driving routine, turn and turn about at the wheel with short breaks for fuel and snacks, and the hotels we used were convenient and reasonably comfortable.
But on return our wifi was (literally) on the blink, and we waited 3 days for the engineer to arrive. The new world of telephones, internet, tv and radio has changed everyting. Like most people, a few years ago we had a fixed telephone line through which an adequate internet connection could be made. Then fibre arrived, and everything became much faster. Above all, the internet require more and more capacity to keeep up with graphics and so on. Now, everything comes in theory through the fibre-optic cable, much faster - if it works. If not, there is no longer a fixed phone line, no internet and only the old tv signals via the aerial (if they work at all - I have not checked). The tv satellite dish no longer works for British tv. I am a sad old geezer who has not taken on board the brave new world of mobile phones which our children and theirs swear by. For one thing the screens are too small - I love my iPad and computer whhich my old eyes can read. And of course, we pay for the service we are not getting.
Goodbye to Jeff and Fi at the end of a marvellous week together |
Since I started to write this a very helpful man arrived, fixed up our internet and left before we had a chance to make sure our phone line was working. It was not and is not. So now we decide whether to abandon our 'landline' phones and tell everyone to call on our mobiles, or try to get things straight for the time being it's the mobiles or nowt. Watch this space, as they say. Above all, do not phone 04 67 85 52 12 - you may leave a message which is never heard.
Until we arrived home, the only shock of our return trip was seeing the appalling mess strewn across the roundabout as we left the A9 here for the main N113 road. At the risk of being a serial moaner, I was shocked by the piles of rubbish left behind by the protestors. I think we have always been in favour of fair prices for farmers - we enjoy good food and have the privilege to be able to pay for it. So I support the agriculteurs in their demands for better conditions, and for proper rewards for local produce rather than cheap imports. we love our local greengrocer who knows his local growers personally and guarantees freshness. I just cannot understand why protestors should not clear up their mess. We saw the final traces being bulldozed and shovelled away as we drove around yeterday, presumably a week or more since the first demos. A lot of work for people not at all involved in the original protests.
Anyway, this blog was among other things a way of sharing the odd notes I post on Facebook most days with you who do not use that dodgy medium. Here are a few recent ones. Letter to the Guardian: “I am grateful to His Maj for his encouragement to men to have the check (King Charles ‘doing well’ after prostate treatment, 26 January). I visited my GP and was examined, blood-tested and referred to my local NHS hospital in March 2022. I have now waited 22 months for an appointment. And waited etc. Of what exactly is he an example? (John Dinning, Cardiff)”
Another letter to the Guardian: ”Your article on a reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry (29 January) should have mentioned the copy in Reading Museum, sewn by 35 women from Leek in the 19th century. It’s beautifully exhibited in the lovely town hall, with free entry. (Plus older Londoners can travel there on their Freedom Pass on the Elizabeth line.) A great day out. (Rosie Boughton, London)”
And part of yet another letter to the Guardian, which rings strong bells: “…the huge issue for me, and many other drivers according to recent RAC research, is the dangerous dazzling effect of higher, brighter LED lights. I am an older driver, and acknowledge this is likely to impact on my night driving, but my optician has assured me that it’s not me, it’s the cars. I find night-time driving, if there is a lot of oncoming traffic, utterly terrifying, and feel trapped at home on winter evenings. It’s time for a close analysis of accidents attributed to dazzle, and legislation to ensure the safest possible headlight design and position. (Sheila Hutchins,Tregony, Cornwall)”
This on my mind very often: the face of local decline and fall. “Many councils are barely able to carry out their statutory and growing responsibilities in adult and child social care, let alone engage in the kind of “discretionary” spending that enhances the life of their communities. Last week, facing a rebellion by Conservative MPs fearful of further cuts in an election year, Mr Gove made an extra £600m available to local authorities. Useful but nowhere near enough.” The sign of timid, scared central government is to keep ever tighter central control over local spending.
Then, Jurgen Klopp is retiring as Liverpool manager - what a loss, but we all get older - he certainly deserves the rest of his life. And Nottingham is among many local councils nearing bankruptcy - how can this be alowed to happen?
Photos from our travels
By [email protected] (Jon North)
More from our UK trip this week, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Parrk and in Uttoxeter
Travellers' tales
By [email protected] (Jon North)
We are in the UK for the second time since Christmas, this time visiting Jeff and Fi in their new home in Uttoxeter. Like the first trip to Sam and Sas in Wirksworth, over new year, we are driving which has all sorts of advantages. However, this time things are complicated by the French farmers' protests. We set out from Lunel at 7.30 a.m. last Wednesday, but what should have been a quick 2-3 hours' journey to Lyon turned into 9 hours, and we eventually arived at our hotel in Cambrai around 9.30 in the evening (original plan, before 5 and in daylight - we are frequently caught driving after dark however much we try to plan to avoid it).
Most of the motorway closures were officially organised by the Préfectures, so we drove most of the way south of Lyon on routes nationales, interesting but much slower. After that we just trundled on fairly empty motorways, but continuing on Thursday we were held up again by closures even on the short stretch to Calais and the tunnel. But there was no major holdup and we arrived at our friends Elizabeth & Nigel in good time, well tucked away in rural Surrey.Despite the tedium of the Wednesday morning journey we were glad to get a different perspective and view of the northern Rhône vineyards around Crozes Hermitage whhich we have known for many years on occasional visits. Later on the town of Cambrai seemed interesting, with a splendid redbrick railway station just opposite our hotel - we resolved to exlor in the future when less pressed by travel unknowns. And the hotel itself was, as we found out on our earlier visit, very comfortable and friendly, with an excellent and welcome range of bar snacks to make up for the lack of a full meal.
We have gravitated towards the Logis de France chain over many years because it always welcomes pets, and although we left our current dog Edmond in kennels on these trips the familiar ambience still attracts us. The farmers' protests look likely to continue, and we don't know if we'll be delayed on the way home next weekend. But luckily we have plenty of time.
Our first day was delayed by official motorway closures, but more often the hold-ups are caused by long slow queues of tractors, one of which we saw heading south as we set out for Calais on Thursday. Shortly after that the authorities closed the A26 motorway for a short stretch, but we had a short journey and good alternative routes to the Tunnel. So after out overnight with friends on Thursday we drove at a leisurely pace to our home for the week in Uttoxeter, where we are very comfortably housed by Jeff and Fi who find a bit of time for us despite their busy working lives. We saw Sam, Sas and Ben for lunch on Sunday and shall see other friends and visit Wirksworth again before we leave for home at the end of the week.
Travellers' tales
By Jon North ([email protected])
We are in the UK for the second time since Christmas, this time visiting Jeff and Fi in their new home in Uttoxeter. Like the first trip to Sam and Sas in Wirksworth, over new year, we are driving which has all sorts of advantages. However, this time things are complicated by the French farmers' protests. We set out from Lunel at 7.30 a.m. last Wednesday, but what should have been a quick 2-3 hours' journey to Lyon turned into 9 hours, and we eventually arived at our hotel in Cambrai around 9.30 in the evening (original plan, before 5 and in daylight - we are frequently caught driving after dark however much we try to plan to avoid it).
Most of the motorway closures were officially organised by the Préfectures, so we drove most of the way south of Lyon on routes nationales, interesting but much slower. After that we just trundled on fairly empty motorways, but continuing on Thursday we were held up again by closures even on the short stretch to Calais and the tunnel. But there was no major holdup and we arrived at our friends Elizabeth & Nigel in good time, well tucked away in rural Surrey.Despite the tedium of the Wednesday morning journey we were glad to get a different perspective and view of the northern Rhône vineyards around Crozes Hermitage whhich we have known for many years on occasional visits. Later on the town of Cambrai seemed interesting, with a splendid redbrick railway station just opposite our hotel - we resolved to exlor in the future when less pressed by travel unknowns. And the hotel itself was, as we found out on our earlier visit, very comfortable and friendly, with an excellent and welcome range of bar snacks to make up for the lack of a full meal.
We have gravitated towards the Logis de France chain over many years because it always welcomes pets, and although we left our current dog Edmond in kennels on these trips the familiar ambience still attracts us. The farmers' protests look likely to continue, and we don't know if we'll be delayed on the way home next weekend. But luckily we have plenty of time.
Our first day was delayed by official motorway closures, but more often the hold-ups are caused by long slow queues of tractors, one of which we saw heading south as we set out for Calais on Thursday. Shortly after that the authorities closed the A26 motorway for a short stretch, but we had a short journey and good alternative routes to the Tunnel. So after out overnight with friends on Thursday we drove at a leisurely pace to our home for the week in Uttoxeter, where we are very comfortably housed by Jeff and Fi who find a bit of time for us despite their busy working lives. We saw Sam, Sas and Ben for lunch on Sunday and shall see other friends and visit Wirksworth again before we leave for home at the end of the week.
A new year with wine - a post for everyone, not just wine buffs!
By Jon North ([email protected])
Solutré, near Macon |
Some of my friends are not really interested in wine and tend to skip these blog posts. So before you do that this time I will just add a note about the fascination for me apart from the stuff in the bottle or glass. As you can see from the photos, scenery is one of the many attractions.
Châtillon-en-Diois |
Wine exploration has shaped our visits to France ever since we started regular trips here 30 years ago. If you look at the map of France, relatively small physical areas are taken up by vineyards, and you are much more likely to find yourself in logging forests or endless of cereals and grass, like the open horizons and rolling slopes of the northern plain we drove through on our way to England at the end of last year.
Beaujolais |
But we hunt out the vineyards not just for nice wine but for the interesting people and scenery we discover, get to know and love. I think of the beautiful villages just near us in Lunel or north of Montpellier around the Pic Saint Loup; or of the vineyards of the Entre Deux Mers area south of Bordeaux - the two 'seas' here are the rivers Garonne and Dordogne as the flow northwards to join together as the Gironde at Bordeaux; or of the cossetted iconic hilly country of Beaujolais and the Côte d'Or in Burgundy and the breathtaking rocky beauty of the Rhône valley, whether near the great river at Condrieu and Crozes Hermitage just south of Lyon or, one of our favourite places, Beaumes de Venise tucked under the Dentelles de Montmirail, once best known for its fortified sweet muscat wines but now among the best red wine labels.
While I always liked wine, it was meeting people who were and are involved in making it that has captured our attention. Jean-Michel and Christine Jacob have just retired from their Hauts Côtes de Beaune vineyard and J-M will doubtless now have more time for his beautiful art/sculpture, two pieces of which adorn our hallway. Jean-Philippe Servières, our best local winemaker near Lunel, would probably like to retire, having had precious little chance of a holiday over the past 20 years; and Benoit Viot of the wonderfully-named Chemin des Rêves north of Montpellier has gone from small beginnings - we bought our first wines sitting in the kitchen in Grabels - to becoming president of the prestigious appellation Pic Saint Loup.
We have got to know many other landscapes in the Languedoc, Rhône valley, the Diois (where twinning opened our interest in the Rhône Valley and beyond), or the wide variety of landscapes we have explored across the south - the wild hillls of the Corbières, coastal étangs around the Mediterranean where Picpoul de Pinet is produced, or tiny appellations with unusual grapes like Fronton north of Toulouse. We discovered Seyssel in the far north of the Rhone valley towards Geneva thanks to musician friend and mentor Stéphane Fauth (and his wife Chantal whose cooking helped to 'oil' the many music courses we shared). And we have started to discover the Loire Valley, one of the longest river courses in France which always confused me because the river flows north a long way, just a short distance from the south-flowing Saone and Rhône, before turning left and west at Orleans towards the Atlantic; we got to know various bits of the river - Sancerre, the Touraine, a stretch towards Angers, on various drives south from different channel ports and thanks to good friends Sue and Ian who have a house south of Tours.
Fronton |
2007-core nostalgia extravaganza
Quick PSA: someone on Facebook is apparently impersonating me using an account called “McMansion Hell 2.0” – If you see it, please report! Thanks!
Howdy folks! I hope if you were born between 1995 and 2001 you’re ready for some indelible pre-recession vibes because I think this entire house, including the photos have not been touched since that time.
This Wake County, NC house, built in 2007, currently boasts a price tag of 1.7 million smackaroos. Its buxom 4 bedrooms and 4.5 baths brings the total size to a completely reasonable and not at all housing-bubble-spurred 5,000 square feet.
I know everyone (at least on TikTok) thinks 2007 and goes immediately to the Tuscan theming trend that was super popular at the time (along with lots of other pseudo-euro looks, e.g. “french country” “tudor” etc). In reality, a lot of decor wasn’t particularly themed at all but more “transitional” which is to say, neither contemporary nor super traditional. This can be pulled off (in fact, it’s where the old-school Joanna Gaines excelled) but it’s usually, well, bland. Overwhelmingly neutral. Still, these interiors stir up fond memories of the last few months before mommy was on the phone with the bank crying.
I think I’ve seen these red/navy/beige rugs in literally every mid-2000s time capsule house. I want to know where they came from first and how they came to be everywhere. My mom got one from Kirkland’s Home back in the day. I guess the 2010s equivalent would be those fake distressed overdyed rugs.
I hate the kitchen bench trend. Literally the most uncomfortable seating imaginable for the house’s most sociable room. You are not at a 19th century soda fountain!!! You are a salesforce employee in Ohio!!!
You could take every window treatment in this house and create a sampler. A field guide to dust traps.
Before I demanded privacy, my parents had a completely beige spare bedroom. Truly random stuff on the walls. An oversized Monet poster they should have kept tbh. Also putting the rug on the beige carpet here is diabolical.
FYI the term “Global Village Coffeehouse” originates with the design historian Evan Collins whose work with the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute!!!!
This photo smells like a Yankee Candle.
Ok, now onto the last usable photo in the set:
No but WHY is the house a different COLOR??????? WHAT?????
Alright, I hope you enjoyed this special trip down memory lane! Happy (American) Labor Day Weekend! (Don’t forget that labor is entitled to all it creates!)
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namesake mcmansion
Howdy folks! Today’s McMansion is very special because a) we’re returning to Maryland after a long time and b) because the street this McMansion is on is the same as my name. (It was not named after me.) Hence, it is my personal McMansion, which I guess is somewhat like when people used to by the name rights to stars even though it was pretty much a scam. (Shout out btw to my patron Andros who submitted this house to be roasted live on the McMansion Hell Patreon Livestream)
As far as namesake McMansions go, this one is pretty good in the sense that it is high up there on the ol’ McMansion scale. Built in 2011, this psuedo-Georgian bad boy boasts 6 bedrooms and 9.5 baths, all totaling around 12,000 square feet. It’ll run you 2.5 million which, safe to say, is exponentially larger than its namesake’s net worth.
Now, 2011 was an anonymous year for home design, lingering in the dead period between the 2008 black hole and 2013 when the market started to actually, finally, steadily recover. As a result a lot of houses from this time basically look like 2000s McMansions but slightly less outrageous in order to quell recession-era shame.
I’m going to be so serious here and say that the crown molding in this room is a crime against architecture, a crime against what humankind is able to accomplish with mass produced millwork, and also a general affront to common sense. I hate it so much that the more I look at it the more angry I become and that’s really not healthy for me so, moving on.
Actually, aside from the fake 2010s distressed polyester rug the rest of this room is literally, basically Windows 98 themed.
I feel like the era of massive, hefty sets of coordinated furniture are over. However, we’re the one’s actually missing out by not wanting this stuff because we will never see furniture made with real wood instead of various shades of MDF or particleboard ever again.
This is a top 10 on the scale of “least logical kitchen I’ve ever seen.” It’s as though the designers engineered this kitchen so that whoever’s cooking has to take the most steps humanly possible.
Do you ever see a window configuration so obviously made up by window companies in the 1980s that you almost have to hand it to them? You’re literally letting all that warmth from the fire just disappear. But whatever I guess it’s fine since we basically just LARP fire now.
Feminism win because women’s spaces are prioritized in a shared area or feminism loss because this is basically the bathroom vanity version of women be shopping? (It’s the latter.)
I couldn’t get to all of this house because there were literally over a hundred photos in the listing but there are so many spaces in here that are basically just half-empty voids, and if not that then actually, literally unfinished. It’s giving recession. Anyway, now for the best part:
Not only is this the NBA Backrooms but it’s also just a nonsensical basketball court. Tile floors? No lines? Just free balling in the void?
Oh, well I bet the rear exterior is totally normal.
Not to be all sincere about it but much like yours truly who has waited until the literal last second to post this McMansion, this house really is the epitome of hubris all around. Except the house’s hubris is specific to this moment in time, a time when gas was like $2/gallon. It’s climate hubris. It’s a testimony to just how much energy the top 1% of income earners make compared to the rest of us. I have a single window unit. This house has four air conditioning condensers. That’s before we get to the monoculture, pesticide-dependent lawn or the three car garage or the asphalt driveway or the roof that’ll cost almost as much as the house to replace. We really did think it would all be endless. Oops.
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the motel room, or: on datedness
I.
Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven’t disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.
As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it’s wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you’re going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you’ll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google “80s hotel room” anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)
To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It’s true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.
But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn’t work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator’s job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.
We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not “core” enough.
As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their “you, sir, have won the internet” vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn’t have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that’s the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.
But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I’ve decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.
II.
I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I’d be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it’s pretty rare, unless you’re staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day’s Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.
At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world’s first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I’ve become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of “okay time to do a quick look through.” But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I’d been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It’s just old. It’s dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I’m writing about datedness, I’m writing in general using a previous era’s examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.
Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don’t necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called “liminal” spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you’re the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, “It’ll do.” We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.
However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven’t been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn’t dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They’re too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say “it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic).” You wouldn’t be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.
One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what’s here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of “molding” that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.
In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don’t like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It’s deeply annoying.)
Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser’s economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the “here is my service” type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way “design” can. It can only be discovered by accident.
When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don’t think I’ll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father’s time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It’s a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.
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texas gothic revival
Sometimes I just want to get on my hobbyhorse, which for about a year now has been the middle ages but surely will soon be something else. (Please hyperfixation gods, make it financial literacy.) Anyway, I meandered around the nation (online) in search of another opportunity to play another round of America Does Medieval. It took me a while for fortune to reward me but it finally did in the long-running McMansion Hell of Denton County, Texas.
2007 McMansions are pretty rare and it’s even rarer for them to have the original interiors. This one, clocking in at 5 beds, 6 baths, and almost 7200 square feet will set you back a reasonable $2.3 million. We complain a lot about the hegemony of gray these days, but this is hindsight bias. Longtime readers will recall that the color beige walked so gray could run, and this house is emblematic of that fact.
It’s…uncommon to see ordinary contractors try their hands at gothic arches and for all intents and purposes, I think this one did a pretty good job rendering the ineffable in common drywall. Credit where credit is due. Unfortunately the Catholic in me can’t help but feel that this is the house equivalent of those ultra trad converts on Reddit who have Templar avatars and spend their days complaining about Vatican II.
Sometimes I still get the ever-dwindling pleasure of seeing the type of room that has never before existed in human history and definitely won’t ever exist again. Certain material conditions (oil, lots of it, a media ecosystem in which historical literacy is set primarily by cartoons, adjustable rate mortgages) brought this space into the world in a way that cannot be recreated organically. Let us marvel.
Christ might need to be invoked should I choose to make a sweet potato casserole.
You can tell that ornament is fabricated because they made precisely TWO of them that are IDENTICAL. You could have fooled us into thinking a craftsman did this by hand from local Texas marble (or whatever), but alas greed got in the way of guile.
As someone who writes fiction on the weekends, I often feel the acute pain of having an imagination greater than my talent and an artistic vision detached from being able to effectively execute it. In this respect, this room speaks to me.
RIP Trump btw. Don’t know if y'all saw the news yet.
I know a lot about medieval bathing for completely normal reasons (writing fiction, winning online arguments, stoned youtube binges)
I feel like most of my forms of social adaptation as a person on the spectrum comprise of sneaking in my holy autistic interest du jour into conversations as subtly as I can manage. I’m doing it right now.
Okay, so, there were no rear exterior photos of this house because, having used every square inch of lot, the whole thing is smashed up against a fence and there is simply no way of getting that desired perspective without trespassing and that’s a mortal risk in the state of Texas. So I’ll leave you with this final room, the completely medieval in-home theater.
That’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned for next month, where we will be going down a cult compound rabbit hole in the Great Plains.
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ode to a faux grecian urn
Howdy everyone,
Today’s house, built in 2001, comes to you from, you guessed it, the Chicago suburbs. The house is a testimony to traditional craftsmanship and traditional values (having lots of money.) The cost of painting this house greige is approximately the GDP of Slovenia so the owners have decided to keep it period perfect (beige.) Anyway.
This 5 bedroom, 7.5 bathroom house clocks in at a completely reasonable 12,700 square feet. If you like hulking masses and all-tile interiors, it could be all yours for the reasonable price of $2.65 million.
The problem with having a house that is 12,700 square feet is that they have to go somewhere. At least 500 of them were devoted to this foyer. Despite the size, I consider this a rather cold and lackluster welcome. Cold feet anyone?
The theme of this house is, vaguely, “old stuff.” Kind of like if Chuck E Cheese did the sets for Spartacus. Why the dining room is on a platform is a good question. The answer: the American mind desires clearly demarcated space, which, sadly, is verboten in our culture.
The other problem with a 12,700 square foot house is that even huge furniture looks tiny in it.
Entering cheat codes in “Kitchen Building Sim 2000” because I spent my entire $70,000 budget on the island.
Of course, a second sitting room (without television) is warranted. Personally, speaking, I’m team Prince.
I wonder why rich people do this. Surely they must know it’s tacky right? That it’s giving Liberace? (Ask your parents, kids.) That it’s giving Art.com 75% off sale if you enter the code ROMANEMPIRE.
Something about the bathroom really just says “You know what, I give up. Who cares?” But this is not even the worst part of the bathroom…
Not gonna lie, this activates my flight or fight response.
If you remember Raggedy Ann you should probably schedule your first colonoscopy.
Anyways, that does it for the interior. Let’s take a nice peek at what’s out back.
I love mowing in a line. I love monomaniacal tasks that are lethal to gophers.
Alright, that does it for this edition of McMansion Hell. Back to the book mines for me. Bonus posts up on Patreon soon.
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Hello everyone! The word is out – I am writing a book!
Hello everyone! The word is out – I am writing a book!
If you ever wanted to read a book about McMansions, 5-over-1s, the ignoble toil of architects, ridiculous baubles for rich people, hostile architecture, private equity, shopping (rip), offices (rip), loud restaurants, and starchitects who behave like tech founders, this is the book for you!
Thank you all for your support throughout the years – without you this would not be possible. And don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging throughout it all, so stay tuned for this month’s post.
we’ve found it folks: mcmansion heaven
Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Come on, Kate, that’s a little kooky, but certainly it’s not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory.” Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.
The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.
It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it’s a cheap joke. But there’s something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.
And then there’s this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.
Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don’t think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.
A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.
Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they’re not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.
At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house’s most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.
And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God’s sitting.
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pre-recession, post-taste
Hello, everyone. I hope this blog can bring some well-needed laughs in really trying times. That’s why I’ve gone back into the archives of that precipitous year 2007, a year where the McMansion was sleepwalking into being a symbol of the financial calamity to follow. We return to the Chicago suburbs once more because they remain the highest concentration of houses in their original conditions. Thanks to our flipping predilection, these houses become rarer and rarer and I have to admit even I have developed a fondness for them as a result.
Our present house is ostensibly “French Provincial” in style, which is McMansion for “Chateaux designed by Carmela Soprano”. It boasts 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, and comes in at a completely reasonable 15,000 square feet. It can be yours for an equally reasonable $1.5 million.
Every 2007 McMansion needed two things: a plethora of sitting rooms and those dark wood floors. This house actually has around five or six sitting rooms (depending if you count the tiled sunroom) but for brevity’s sake, I’ll only provide two of them.
With regards to the second sitting room, I’m really not one to talk statuary here because beside me there is a bust of Dante where the sculptor made him look simultaneously sickly and lowkey hot.
Technically, if we are devising a dichotomy between sitting and not sitting (yes, I know about the song), the dining room also counts as a sitting room. The more chairs in your McMansion dining room, the more people allegedly like you enough to travel 2.5 hours in traffic to see you twice a year.
Here’s the thing about nostalgia: the world as we knew it then is never coming back. In some ways this is sad (kitchens are entirely white now and marble countertops will look terrible in about 3 years) but in other ways this is very good (guys in manhattan have switched to private equity instead of betting the farm on credit default swaps made from junk mortgages proffered to America’s most vulnerable and exploited populations.) Progress!
Okay I really don’t understand the 50 bed pillows thing. Every night my parents tossed their gazillion decorative pillows on the floor just to put them back on the bed the next morning. Like, for WHAT? Who was going in there? The Pope?
Here’s a fun one for your liminal spaces moodboards. (Speaking for myself.)
Yes, I know about skibidi toilet. And sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler. I wish I didn’t. I wish I couldn’t read. Literacy is like a mirror in which I only see the aging contours of my face.
When your kids move out every room becomes a guest room.
Anyway, let’s see what the rear of this house has to offer.
The migratory birds will not forgive them for their crimes. But also seriously, not even a garden?
Anyway, that does it for this round of McMansion Hell. Happy Halloween!
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.
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mojo dojo casa house
Howdy folks! Sorry for the delay, I was, uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, I’m back in Chicago which means this blog has returned to the Chicago suburbs. I’m sure you’ve all seen Barbie at this point so this 2019 not-so-dream house will come as a pleasant (?) surprise.
Yeah. So this $2.4 million, 7 bed, 8.5+ bath house is over 15,000 square feet and let me be frank: that square footage is not allocated in any kind of efficient or rational manner. It’s just kind of there, like a suburban Ramada Inn banquet hall. You think that by reading this you are prepared for this, but no, you are not.
Scale (especially the human one) is unfathomable to the people who built this house. They must have some kind of rare spatial reasoning problem where they perceive themselves to be the size of at least a sedan, maybe a small aircraft. Also as you can see they only know of the existence of a single color.
Ok, but if you were eating a single bowl of cereal alone where would you sit? Personally I am a head of the table type person but I understand that others might be more discreet.
It is undeniable that they put the “great” in great room. You could race bicycles in here. Do roller derby. If you gave this space to three anarchists you would have a functioning bookshop and small press in about a week.
The island bit is so funny. It’s literally so far away it’s hard to get them in the same image. It is the most functionally useless space ever. You need to walk half a mile to get from the island to the sink or stove.
Of course, every McMansion has a room just for television (if not more than one room) and yet this house fails even to execute that in a way that matters. Honestly impressive.
The rug placement here is physical comedy. Like, they know they messed up.
Bling had a weird second incarnation in the 2010s HomeGoods scene. Few talk about this.
Honestly I think they should have scrapped all of this and built a bowling alley or maybe a hockey rink. Basketball court. A space this grand is wasted on sports of the table variety.
You would also think that seeing the rear exterior of this house would help to rationalize how it’s planned but:
Not really.
Anyways, thanks for coming along for another edition of McMansion Hell. I’ll be back to regular posting schedule now that the summer is over so keep your eyes peeled for more of the greatest houses to ever exist. Be sure to check the Patreon for today’s bonus posts.
Also P.S. - I’m the architecture critic for The Nation now, so check that out, too!
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.
Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because media work is especially recession-vulnerable.
BONUS MCMANSION HELL: liminal edition
bonus mcmansion: liminal edition | Patreon
BONUS MCMANSION HELL: liminal edition
dome sweet dome
As some of you may know, I have been going to language school for the last few months in order to learn the world’s most widely spoken and useful language: Slovenian. At this point, my Slovenian is about as coherent as, well, a McMansion. In order to feel better about myself, I have sought out a McMansion that is worse than my cases and word-order. This house (in Naperville, IL, of course) does, in fact, make me feel better, but will probably make you feel worse:
This Cheescake Factory house, built in 2005, boasts 5 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms and can be yours for the entirely reasonable sum of $3.5 million dollars. Also for some reason all the photos look like they are retouched with 2012-era Instagram filters.
First of all, trying to visualize the floor plan of this house is like trying to rotate seven cubes individually in my mind’s eye. Second, if you stand right beneath the hole in the ceiling you can get the approximate sensation of being a cartoon character who has just instantaneously fallen in love.
Even if this was a relatively mundane McMansion it still would have made it into the rotation because of the creepy life-sized butler and maid. Would not want to run into them in the middle of the night.
The mural is giving 1986 Laura Ashley or perhaps maybe the background they use for Cabbage Patch Kids packaging but the floor? The floor is giving Runescape texture.
Have you ever seen so many real plants in your life? A veritable Eden.
The overwhelming desire to push one of the chairs into the haunted jacuzzi…but in reality they probably put those chairs there to keep from accidentally falling into the tub at night.
(elevator music starts playing)
This is one of the all time [adjective] rooms of McMansion Hell. I personally am in love with it, though I don’t think I understand it. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood…..,
Continuing with the baseball theme, the guy in the painting looks how I feel after it’s been raining in Ljubljana for two straight weeks. (Not ideal!!)
And finally:
We love a house that has four unused balconies and also a sporting grounds that is large enough to build a whole second McMansion on top of. Everyone should so value their health.
Thank you for tuning into another edition of McMansion Hell. Be sure to check out the Patreon for the two bonus posts (a McMansion and the Good House) which both also go out today!
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.
Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because media work is especially recession-vulnerable.
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