I used to work at Facebook. That was both the name of the service
with all of the cat pictures and the name of the company that paid me
every two weeks. The cat picture part still has the same name, but the
parent company does not. It's called Meta now. I left well before any
of that renaming happened.
As a result, I have plenty of pictures that predate that change on my
Macs and other Apple devices. They're mostly geotagged, but something
curious has happened to them: the name of the place has shifted. It's
no longer "Facebook HQ". It's now "Meta - Headquarters". This is what
it looks like in the Apple photos app:
Given that this picture was taken in 2014, it was clearly not Meta
back then. I know, the usual "well actually" people are warming up
their keyboards right about now: "it used to be called that, and it's
the same company, so it's fine" and so on and so forth. I don't like
that, but okay, whatever, let's say we accept that for the moment
because it IS the same company with a different name. Companies
do that
all the time.
What if that picture of the ground had been taken in that same spot in
2004? Would it still make sense to call it "Meta - Headquarters"? I
hope you wouldn't say that. Back then, that space was inhabited by Sun
Microsystems, a company that very much is not the same as Facebook.
(This is well before Oracle ate them - that was 2009-2010.)
What happens in another couple of years when Meta is the next smoking
crater in the tech landscape and then some other company tries to become
the next unicorn in the mud flats of Menlo Park? Or how about a couple
of decades past then when that whole area is underwater? Will my
pictures say something like "San Francisco Bay"?
This why I would say that perhaps we need some time bounding on these
hyperlocal place names. Now, I realize this is no small thing. It's
one of those big-O blowup factors, and that's annoying for all involved.
Still, if you take the very long view on these things, something is
going to have to happen eventually. Otherwise, our grandkids will have
pictures that we took that make no sense at all.
There should also be some actual humanity applied here. Place names are
non-trivial, and many of them have captured a large amount of hateful
and just plain ignorant behavior. That's why you can't just
automatically build up a list of "this place was called this at this
time". It needs people in the loop to make thoughtful decisions about
how to handle the more interesting ones.
Case in point:
Palisades Tahoe.
I also have pictures that I took there many years ago. I am
more than fine with them being rendered with its current name. I
know it wasn't called that when I was there. Give it an asterisk if you
must, but really, even that probably isn't needed.
That's what I mean when I say that we should be careful about this.
I've been mentioning Raspberry Pis in a few of my recent posts. I keep
finding weird things in these systems. The question is: why am I
suddenly wrangling these odd little boxes? The answer involves a story
of heating and air conditioning.
First, I need to back up and tell a story about something that happened
perhaps 10 years ago. I heard a terrible noise coming from the inside
unit where the blower is. It sounded like water draining out, and I
half-expected the ceiling to just open up and flood the place. That
didn't happen, but that was the end of my hot air. From that point on,
it would no longer produce heat for the space.
I reported it to the maintenance people at that building. They actually
told me "to push the up button". You know the button on the thermostat
that makes it go from 70 to 71 to 72? The actual target temperature?
Yes. They told me to push that... and did no further investigation.
The fact that it had made a terrible noise right before stopping had no
impact on them. The fact I had been operating that system normally for
five years at that point and knew how a damn thermostat worked had no
impact on them.
I finally had to plead my case to the admin staff, and they came out
with actual HVAC technicians. I wasn't there when it happened, but I
found out later that there was an actual mechanical type problem with
the thing. In other words, it was nothing the thermostat would have
ever been able to "fix".
I could have put that thing on 90 and it would have just blown the air
around. Obviously. I knew that, but they refused to take me at face
value until I went over their heads. WTF? (I mean, I know exactly why.
But if I put it in writing then a bunch of 12 year olds are going to
attack me. So I'm going to talk around it and about 50% of the adults
in the room will know what I'm talking about. It's absolutely true.)
Jump forward to a few months ago. I have a different space in a
different building, and this time it was the air conditioner not doing
its thing. I don't want some kind of crap happening again. Now,
granted, this time it'd be a "down arrow" thing, but I'm not having
that. I wanted hard data that they could not refute.
To that end, I obtained several of those "weather station" type wireless
sensors. Normally people get them when they buy a so-called "atomic
clock" (it's a longwave radio, thank you very much) "weather station"
that shows both the inside and outside temperature and may in fact
synchronize time from a
60 kHz transmission.
You park one part (with the big display) inside, and the other part goes
outside.
The outside parts tend to break a lot, so there is a thriving
business selling replacements. I picked up a few of them and got busy.
One of them was unapologetically zip-tied to a vent. Another one was
parked right next to the system thermostat, and a third was placed
outside.
There's this program called rtl_433 which will use a cheap $20
SDR (software defined radio) USB stick to receive and decode signals. I
took that, convinced it to emit some output that wasn't entirely
terrible, and got to wrapping it for my own purposes. Then I installed
it on a pair of Raspberry Pis and put a RPC server on top.
Why multiple Pis? Well, a couple of reasons. First of all, I wanted
some diversity in my radio receivers. By putting them in different
spots, I could probably get a good decode from one even when something
kept it from reaching the other. It also lets me update, upgrade or
even reboot (!) them as long as I do it one at a time.
The Raspberry Pi systems just sit there listening to the (433 MHz)
radio, decoding whatever they can. If it looks like a sensor, then it
keeps that info in memory and remembers when it heard it. Then, if
something queries it over the network, it coughs up all of the data.
Each sensor has an "id" and "channel", plus the actual temperature and
humidity values, and finally there's an age value.
My Debianized Mac Mini runs another piece of this system. Every 15
seconds or so, it checks in with the Pis and asks them what's up. In
theory, both of them will have the same data set, but in practice, it
can be slightly different. This is fine. It knows this will happen,
and it just keeps the newest sample for all of the sensors it actually
cares about. Now you know why I have that "age" field in there!
And yes, "sensors it cares about" is important. Since this is an
unlicensed band and these things are rather popular, my radios
frequently pick up other plausible-looking transmissions from nearby
sources. They aren't consistent, but they do exist.
If we have good data that isn't too old for sensors we care about, then
it flushes those data points as rows in a Postgres database on the Mac
mini. Then it goes to sleep for another 15 seconds or so. Easy enough.
Getting to this stage quickly was important. Any temperature variations
you don't measure and log are gone forever. Any data points you don't
get off the air are gone forever. Any time you aren't polling the
"radio server" on the Pis, those samples disappear forever. The most
important thing for me was getting a long stream of uninterrupted data
so I could make my case.
Why measure both the room and the vent? That's easy. When the AC is
on, there should be a considerable drop from one to the other. An
insufficient drop means either the system is broken, or it's somehow so
incredibly hot outside that it can't bleed off any heat when it pumps
through the coils out there. That's why I have the third sensor
outside: it tells me what the temperature is right here at the building
- not at one of the airports, and not in some ideal case. It's right
here buried in the same urban "heat island" that the outside half of
the HVAC system is in. (And no, the outside sensor is not in a spot
where the outside system can influence it.)
With just this, I could show that there was no drop at all despite the
(hyperlocal) outside temperature being totally reasonable. It should
have been giving me cold air. It wasn't. It was all there in the
numbers. I guess they realized they had to take me seriously, since I
received a plan to replace the entire unit. This would involve ripping
a giant hole in the ceiling, pulling the existing unit, then putting in
a brand new unit.
Now, this happened during these "supply chain" shananigans, so this took
*months* to receive, and all the while, I was just sitting here, logging
away, busily collecting data points. I eventually got tired of looking
at raw logs and then later, running SQL queries, so I started on some
visualizations.
My first approach was to write a very simple web page that basically did
the 1995 "meta refresh" trick. It would IMG SRC a CGI program. That
CGI program just hit up the database, asked it for the last N hours,
rendered it as a graph in a PNG, and then shipped it to stdout. That
gave me a nice graphical view with all three sensors using the same
scale, and it was easy to see what was (and wasn't) happening.
That worked okay, but it was annoying. Reloading the whole page
1995-style meant it flickered as the whole thing came back in every
time. It had a fixed width and height, and it basically only worked on
my usual web browser window on my one machine. If I loaded it from
anywhere else, then it looked wrong.
It was a really crappy renderer, but it was a start. It looked like
this:
That's what the space looks like when it just "freewheels". My guess
for the periodic spikes is a defrost cycle on a nearby freezer, but I
never bothered to prove that conclusively. As for the bigger cycles,
that's just whatever happened with people coming and going, the sun
shining on the windows or not, and things of that nature.
Aside from some small improvements (like vertical bars for the hours),
that's about what I ran for a couple of months. Then, I got this weird
notion one day: what if it was rendered client-side to a canvas in
JavaScript? That would let it adapt to whatever size the page happened
to be, and it could figure out how far back to go while maintaining a
reasonable density - that is, how many seconds cook down into each
horizontal pixel?
So, when I mentioned I was doing stuff in JS a while back, that too was
not an exaggeration. I was in fact writing that, because there's really
no choice in the matter. If you want to do this kind of stuff in a
browser, it's this or nothing.
Anyway, this is what things have turned into (showing outside):
The fun part about this is utterly abusing the web server on that Mac
Mini by grabbing the corner of my browser window and whipping it
around. That thing repaints all over the place and generates bunches
of requests for freshly aggregated data at the new settings. I haven't
bothered rate-limiting or debouncing any of it since it's just me using
it, and I can generate all the requests I want.
You can't see it from this second screenshot, but I even went as far as
to do some mouseover magic so it will set the TITLE of the canvas to the
temperature value at whatever X-offset I'm over. So, if I spot some
weird peak and want to know that value, pointing at it and waiting a
moment for the tooltip will answer that question right away.
The actual replacement happened a while back, and the space is now being
managed properly yet again. I haven't stopped monitoring it, because,
eh, why not. It's still fun to look at, and besides, it could happen
again.
...
In terms of the moving parts here, it looks like this:
Two Raspberry Pis: one 3B, one 3B+, that I just had hanging around.
Stock Raspbian installs, albeit with a whole lot of "WTF is this?
Buh-bye" removals having been applied. I've tossed a whole bunch of
packages that had no business being on there.
Two RTLSDR sticks that I also had hanging around: one per Pi.
rtl_433, which is available from apt as "rtl-433". It's configured to
spit out JSON since that was the least obnoxious output I could get from
it. (It's still annoying. Ask me about numbers vs. chars for sensor
channels sometime.)
My own "thermo_server" which does the pipe/fork/dup2/exec thing to wrap
rtl_433, and then sits there parsing output and storing it in memory in
one thread. Then my existing RPC gunk serves that data up to authorized
clients. It uses jansson to chew on the JSON since the code to use that
already existed from other projects.
Over on the Mac Mini: it's a Debian box, as mentioned previously. It
has postgres and Apache. It also runs my "thermo_logger" which knows to
go poke the "thermo_server" processes over the network (with the RPC
gunk) every so often. Then it flushes usable data to the database:
INSERT INTO x ... whatever. Easy enough.
A chunk of HTML and another blob of JS that generates requests to
the server and renders the data points as a reasonable graph looking
thing. There's also a bit of CSS to make it render just so.
A CGI program unimaginatively called "data" which actually takes those
requests from the JS callout, hits up the database, and then throws it
at the requester. It too uses jansson, because JSON, because web
browsers. It's basically the one place where it makes a little bit of
sense.
...
And so, yeah, there it is: I wrote a temperature monitoring system to
keep from being treated badly by maintenance people. Funny how that
works.
We mentioned recently our work with porting automation and our aims there. We took a big step last week which I wanted to update you on. It is important to note that this is not us integrating with some mythical…
If you have followed me on mastodon you will know what is happening.
Some of you may know I purchased a former pub for my home in Wales nearly 4 years ago. Not a pub now. Settling down in Wales, as are many of my children, and grandchildren (half of which are Welsh!).
But now, two of my friends have decided they would like to actually run a pub!
There is a saying: "How to make a small fortune running a pub? Start with a large fortune and work at it until it is a small fortune".
But that does not mean it is impossible, and it seems sometimes that the whole industry is run on the edge of solvency somehow. I may be wrong, and obviously there are pub+hotel and other combinations that work well, but the way some pubs are run is, err, interesting.
I have got myself involved in helping them in a lot of ways now. It started as just "we'll sort internet", but doing more and more. I'm spending most days there helping out right now.
It will be very interesting to see if they can make it work. They are organised, and experienced in related businesses. They are hard working. They take customer service seriously. I think this can work.
Lots of little things, like a defibrillator on the pub - I'm sponsoring that (well A&A are) - one of my staff died suddenly and that scares the shit out of me, more places having these will definitely save lives. And if it saves one life it is worth every penny.
And, of course, the WiFi has IPv6.
They are going for pub + cafe, with decent coffee, and choice of milk and so on, like many other "coffee shops", but also with early opening for coffee and breakfast. Do the coffee right and it could make as much as the alcohol, who knows?
But making sure they are starting it out well from a tech side is my project. They are sorting refurbishing and redecorating, and some serious cleaning. I am sorting decent WiFi/internet, and CCTV and a few other things. Even to the extent of properly registered with ICO and proper published privacy policy. I hope I can provide input on the way some of us would like a pub run. But it is their pub, not mine.
But for now - grand opening end of next week before Abergavenny food festival (only drinks for now), and then finish the refurbishment and start food as well.
I am, however, damn impressed with the WiFi we have put in. It does not just cover the front, but the whole of the Brewery Yard car park and even out the to A40. Some opportunities for take away coffee to the market traders maybe, with the working WiFi connected credit card machine... We'll see how it goes.
Today was all about this whole idea of how we index and track data breaches. Not as HIBP, but rather as an industry; we simply don't have a canonical reference of breaches and their associated attributes. When they happened, how many people were impacted, any press on the
Hello again from the land of feed reader behavioral tests. I ran
through the list of participants a couple of days ago and wrote up my
results. This is only for those which had polled at least once in the
past seven days relative to that point.
I'm going to group some of these together, but keep in mind that some
behaviors are a function of however the user configures the program.
Also, at this point I'm mostly focusing on their steady-state behavior,
but any previously-reported goofiness at subscribe-time is still worthy
of fixing for people so inclined.
Artykul's clown fetcher is still going. They're going to make me write
a 404 generator and then a 410 generator, I just know it. Then I'm
going to start complaining about them not honoring either of those. All
unconditional, every 2-3 hours. Terrible.
feedbase-fetcher.pl/0.5 seems fine.
Broadsheet/0.1 seems fine.
com.vanniktech.rssreader, various versions has weird timing.
NextCloud-News/1.0 - all of these have broken IMS caching. There's a
fix that's been submitted but it hasn't been merged, never mind rolled
up into a release. Some old versions hammer the favicon.ico needlessly.
I can only guess at who's running what, since they don't ever bump their
version number. It's been 1.0 forever, and I assume this will continue
unabated. This makes it really hard to direct particular version-based
brokenness to an appropriate handler.
Some browser extension thing. Seems fine.
Mojolicious (Perl), seems fine.
NetNewsWire with buggy LM/ETag caching, as covered in a post a while
back. I don't think this has been changed upstream yet. Also has
terrible timing.
newsraft/0.25, which still has buggy ETag caching. It also has terrible
timing.
Bloggulus/0.3.7, seems fine.
Miniflux/2.1.4 has buggy Last-Modified caching. Miniflux/2.2.0 does
too. I thought it was squared away previously, but it's still doing
crazy stuff when I do the pathological test cases to check for
bugginess.
FreshRSS/1.24.0 has buggy Last-Modified + ETag caching. But, others
running 1.24.2 and 1.24.3 have it fixed! The author actually reached
out to let me know about this. Thanks!
Feedly/1.0 which went into a "once per day, always unconditional" thing
months ago. Meh.
Reeder, various versions. Has the minor timing issue where sometimes
it's 59 minutes, and other times it's an hour, as explained in a prior
post. Call it the "cron alone is insufficient limiting for poll
scheduling" thing, I guess?
feedparser/6.0.10, running too fast: 29/30 mins.
feedparser/6.0.2, doing the minor 59m/60m timing thing.
Yarr/1.0 with terrible timing.
Another Yarr/1.0 with the 59m/60m thing.
walrss/0.3.7, seems fine.
Emacs Elfeed 3.4.1 with some odd behaviors, like there are multiple
instances running that aren't sharing the data on the last-modified/etag
headers from the last poll. Another instance is doing the same thing.
er0k/feeds v0.2.0, seems fine.
Rapids, seems fine.
Go-http-client/1.1, seems fine, whatever this really is. Could use a
more descriptive UA, if only to not run afoul of filtering (not me, but
other places).
theoldreader.com has started doing If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match.
This warranted a straight-up "holy shit" from me when I saw it in the
list. I have no idea if this project had anything to do with it, and I
really don't care. They're doing the right thing now, and that's great.
Tiny Tiny RSS, multiple instances from various users. Not recommended.
rss2email release-3.3.1, which keeps doing unconditional requests
seemingly randomly. No idea why.
NewsBlur also randomly does unconditionals: 8 of 526 polls that way for
one instance (and other counts for other instances). Also no idea why.
Feedbin, which seems to have fixed its ETag bugginess. Yay?
Inoreader/1.0. It has the 59m/60m thing, and also launches
unconditionals roughly daily. Dumb.
Some curl-based thing (maybe even the CLI tool?) that's doing
conditional requests nicely. Has the typical (minor) 59m/60m thing.
inforss/2.3.3.0, seems fine.
haven sends 100% unconditional requests. It also happens to have the
59m/60m thing, but the complete lack of conditional requests is the
showstopper here.
ureq/2.9.1, seems fine.
Friendica/2024.08, also 100% unconditional requests.
SpaceCowboys Android RSS Reader/2.4.15 occasionally has weird timing,
and it just goes unconditional randomly. No idea what's going on here,
either. Another one is 2.6.31 and that seems fine, so I suspect there
was a bugfix release in the middle.
Netvibes, with super broken LM+ETag caching.
cry-reader v0.0, seems fine.
Another undifferentiated browser extension thing, but this one is 100%
unconditional, and wacky timing on top of that.
Blogtrottr/2.0, seems fine.
Unread RSS Reader, which is no longer unloading like mad onto the test
server, but it has settled into a 15 minute poll interval. Too fast.
Slackbot/1.0, this is a relatively new one, and it's terrible. It's
100% unconditional polls with awful timing: always less than an hour
between checks, sometimes much less. They also inexplicably send
HEADs, and receive a 405 error from me, but of course come back and do
it again a few minutes later.
The whole point of HEAD is if you want the metadata but have no interest
in the content. If you want the content but only want a fresh copy if
it's changed, that's why we have conditional requests, and again,
If-Modified-Since has been in the RFCs since *1996*.
For sites that build the feed dynamically (i.e., not mine), HEAD
represents the same amount of work: they get to build the feed, provide
the metadata, and then throw it away.
Unless you actually want the metadata, and never anything BUT the
metadata, then fine, send HEADs. Otherwise, forget it existed.
Audrey2 RSS Reader/0.7.1, seems fine.
rss2email/3.14, has the 59m/60m thing going on, otherwise it's fine.
...
I should note that if a feed reader's only problem is the
59:xx vs. 60 minute thing
then they're actually doing pretty well. There are a lot of way worse
things out there.
I'd love it if they could fix this, obviously, but that's just how I am.
It is complicated to report this as some details would be covered by ramp up rules, where I cannot provide details, but now we are in live on One Touch Switching I think I can report. Even so I will not name CPs for now. This is more about the process, and specification and the fiasco.
To be very fair the main author of the specifications is someone that I feel a lot of sympathy for, under pressure, and then under a change freeze he would not have agreed. He did his best and none of this is a dig at him or his employer. Much more a dig at the process.
Weirdly correlationIDs have turned out to be a big issue, and continue to be so.
What is a correlationID?
Basically one of the message fields in One Touch Switching is called a correlationID
The big issue is the vague specification. It is a field the sender of a message sets so they can correlate the response.
Hindsight
To be clear, in hindsight, and what I have said, is correlationIDs should be per message unique and a UUID. Simple. If the spec had said that a lot of pain and hassle would have been avoided.
Problems?
The problems are various...
It is not a defined format
It is not a defined maximum length
It is not well defined when and how it is unique, or not
TOTSCO 66
So the issue is that some CPs assumed it would be per CP per message unique, and so used it to identify (and ignore duplicates). Indeed a notice from TOTSCO suggested it is used to de-duplicate messages.
A real issue is "why duplicates" which is another issue - they have to be failing to respond in 3 seconds for that, and maybe that is what they should have fixed.
There are also a lot of cases where a duplicate is not an issue, if done right.
But TOTSCO 66 said you can de-duplicate based on per CP correlationIDs being unique per message.
TOSTCO 67
The next notice back peddled a lot, and I was instrumental in raising this I think. All because the specification was so vague. The new recommendation was two fold (a) don't de-duplicate on correlationID, and (b) don't send duplicate correlationIDs. A pragmatic approach without direct blame either side.
Indeed one idea was, if you use correlationID as a more "overall message flow" ID, append or prepend something to each message so they ends up unique.
So CPs are, indeed, doing both, yay! We have all seen a lot of work making this happen, and well done to all the CPs doing this.
To clarify we went through something like three iterations to get this sensible on our systems.
Length
Oh, did the specification say how long a correlationID could be? No. It did not. Why would you say that?
Well, maybe it did, sort of, TOTSCO link to some schema thing (swagger?!) which was updated after the frozen spec and the latest version of that says 256 characters. That is mental long, and I have no clue if 256 characters or 256 bytes (they are different in the UTF8 world of JSON). Just to say, A&A can handle any length up to mega bytes, if needed.
Turns out TOTSCO had limits on what they would handle, as this is a message envelope thing. They were ignoring, and not apparently reject cleanly, if too long. I have not tested with 256 x big unicode characters, yet!
But we have a big CP that would not handle more than 64 characters, but sorted that before 12th, well done, I won't say who. It was a very reasonable choice for them, and I understand it. But well done moving to 256 characters, or bytes, in time.
We now have another big CP that would not handle more than 50 characters. Not yet sorted, but will be soon.
Why such long correlationIDs? Well BECAUSE of TOTSCO 67 notice, CPs using a 36 character UUID and adding a timestamp. That just pushes over 50. And to be honest 50 was also a reasonable design choice.
So 256 characters, is that OK? Guess what, the tinytext type in mariadb is 255 characters, FFS! If I had to make a silly long limit I would have said 255 not 256, really.
Ping pong
One of the mistakes we made at the very start, for a day or so, was assuming correlationIDs were ping ponged over the switch process (match, order, update, trigger). I had fields in the database to do this and code to do it (they were tinytext).
Why did I assume this? Well the specification did not say, but the test cases did, they had correlationIDs on an OrderRequest following on from the MatchRequest. They looked a lot like they should ping pong over the process.
Well I worked it out, but did every small CP that is live today?
The answer is no, they have not, and at least one small CP (I feel sorry for them) very carefully followed the spec, and the examples in the test schedule, and did this, like we did.
They will not work with almost any of the other CPs now live. They have to make major changes, now, when live. Really sorry for them.
Helping?
Seriously, we all need to work together. We have a test system that can help these new small CPs, and I am happy to help. https://notsco.co.uk/
There are now 166 providers on One Touch Switching. Congratulations to all of those CPs that have put in the work to make this happen.
These are retail provides of residential, fixed location, IAS (Internet Access Service) and NBICS (Number Based Interpersonal Communications Services, aka telephone service).
If you are trying to switch from a residential, fixed location, service and your retail provider is not on the list, please do let OFCOM know. I don't see Starlink, so that is the first complaint to OFCOM today.
I suspect OFCOM will take this pretty softly, given all of the challenges, so I expect more CPs to come on line soon.
Technically, I have seen no problems yet today, but I have reported one ramp up issue which was before OTS started, 21:24 last night. Even so, it looks serious, so it will be interesting to see how quickly it is fixed. I cannot provide any details because of the ramp up rules.
Stuff not happening yet...
Some of the faster switching of broadband service (next day even) is not happening yet - OFCOM have extended the 14 day (actually 10 working day) lead time on migrating services. However, I don't think there is a reason not to switch quickly if changing to a new provider - expect that the new provide probably has to put physical infrastructure in place.
The faster switching of telephone services is not happening yet - it seems this is not something that One Touch Switching does right away (yes, that fooled me too). A new process is underway way to do this, and gradually, over time, the new zero day process will come along. For now it is still 4 or 9 working days depending on the switch type. This also means it is still possible for a number port to fail, but using One Touch Switching should reduce that risk (as it checks postcode).
Switching 07 mobile numbers are not changing, that still uses a PAC (Porting Authorisation Code).
Business services are not covered - but it looks like many CPs are allowing switching of business services if you can match the details correctly as a residential match - we are. There are, of course, a lot of business only providers that are not on the One Touch Switching system at all, as they do not need to be.
Things break
None of us are perfect, though in all frankness I believe A&A are more ready than a lot of CPs, and we have been for some time. Again, I am not allowed to go in to any detail on this due to ramp up rules.
If you have any problems switching to us, please let the sales team know right away - we are monitoring the process closely and have means to raise issues with the other provider, if necessary.
If you have any problems switching away from us, you should normally contact the new provider, but you are welcome to contact us and we will be happy to look in to it. As I say, none of us are perfect.
Do remember our telephone services are not fixed location services (they are not a landline replacement) so are not covered by One Touch Switching. The non OTS porting process, as used for business services, will need to be used to switch number away from us.
Good luck to everyone involved. It may be a fun few days!
Three months ago, the Keycloak project conducted a survey to gather insights on realm configuration tooling within our community. The number of responses overwhelmed us! With a total of 433 (!) submissions, it highlighted the diverse range of options our community uses for configuring realms.
Thank You for your valuable feedback!
Popular Tools in Use
The survey revealed a variety of tools employed by the community for realm configuration, including:
From the submissions, we observed the following distribution of tool usage among respondents:
Terraform Keycloak Provider ~51% of the votes
Keycloak-Config-CLI ~16% of the votes
Self-developed Realm Configuration Management ~7% of the votes
Keycloak JSON Realm Import/Export ~6% of the votes
Keycloak Admin CLI ~4% of the votes
These top five tools accounted for 84% of all responses.
Areas for Improvement
While each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, the survey highlighted several common challenges:
Using the Admin API can be awkward and inconsistent, for example, with references using IDs versus aliases.
Recognizing changes in the configuration, such as when new roles are added to service accounts via the Admin UI, can be challenging or impossible.
Many tools depend heavily on the Keycloak version used and are often not compatible with new releases.
Managing components that are automatically created by Keycloak, like service accounts, is challenging with existing configuration tools.
Lack of support for configuration linting, validation and code completion
What’s Next?
Based on the feedback, here are some key lessons learned and the next steps:
Tool Compatibility: We aim at improving compatibility with newer Keycloak releases to ensure seamless integration.
Admin API Enhancements: We’ll address inconsistencies and usability issues in the Admin API to streamline configuration tasks.
Ease Change Management: Enhance tools and APIs to improve the recognition and change management of realm configurations.
We are committed to addressing these areas and working closely with the community to enhance the realm configuration experience in Keycloak. Your continued feedback and support are invaluable as we move forward. Stay tuned for updates and improvements!
If you have any further questions or suggestions about this blog post, please join the related discussion on GitHub.
The phase "necessary evil" comes to mind, sadly. I'd like to just sell direct, but in practice selling via Amazon does in fact work. It is somewhat depressing that this is the case, but we are a tad stuck with it.
One thing we sell is the "Faikin" board, which is a controller for Daikin aircon. It works well and sells literally hundreds! Listed here.
Until recently I was able to edit the listing as needed, and the latest boards looks slightly different (mainly the colour of the board), so I went to edit the listing and upload new images. Simples! Or so you would think. But I get this!
So what he hell? I am not trying to edit the "brand", indeed I cannot edit the brand, it is "locked".
Now, brands in Amazon are hard work. It look a long time to get "AJK" on the "brand registry", even though I have the UK registered trademark on this (here). It was seriously hard work, and the product listing was made with brand "AJK". In fact I had to make a new listing having sold a few initially under grand "Generic" as Amazon policy is you cannot change the brand on a listing, which is damn annoying in itself.
But did you notice?
Yes, the brand is now "greenoak"!
Given Amazon policy is you cannot change brand, how the hell is it "greenoak".
So now, to show you how Amazon work, the unedited ticket on this (long, and boring)... OK not all, as it seems they truncate it on their help pages, which is a pain. But you get a flavour for dealing with Amazon...
Hello from Amazon Brand Registry Support,
We understand that you would like to update brand name for ASIN: B0D56W182P to "AJK".
Please be informed that, we cannot proceed with your request as it is against Amazon policies and guidelines. Brand name change requests beyond the minor fixes are considered rebranding and we are not authorized to make this change for your ASIN.
Kindly do understand that multiple sellers can list/sell the same ASIN: B0D56W182P. if you make a brand update on this ASIN, it is possible that you may be reported by another seller due to a listing policy violation, which could have a negative impact on your account health.
Brand differences and packaging differences after a product is rebranded may cause customer orders to be returned and may affect your performance metrics. To avoid this unexpected result, we are not allowed to change the Amazon Product Code (ASIN) brand name.
Therefore, we are unable to update your Brand name, it would be better to create a new ASIN instead of updating the brand name of the existing ASIN.
For more information, go to "Amazon Brand Name Policy": https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/help/hub/reference/G2N3GKE5SGSHWYRZ
If the intended brand is not part of Amazon Brand Registry, we recommend that you complete registration via "Enroll a new brand" link on the Brand Registry landing page: https://brandregistry.amazon.co.uk/
To help us continually improve, we ask that you take a moment to complete our survey below to tell us about your experience with this specific interaction.
Were you satisfied with the support provided?
Thank you!
To view your case details, please click https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/gp/case-dashboard/view-case.html/ref=sc_cd_lobby_vc?caseID=10120297812
Please note: This e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. If you require additional support, please contact us at https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/gp/contact-us/contact-amazon-form.html
Thank you for selling with Amazon.
Hello from Amazon Brand Registry Support, We understand that you would like to update brand name for ASIN: B0D56W182P to "AJK". Firstly, we are unable to process this brand name change request because the brand account and/or the account for the user you wish to add have an unhealthy status. We require all relevant accounts across all marketplaces to have a healthy status to add a role to a brand. Secondly, we cannot make the suggested brand change to ASIN B0D56W182P due to the following reason: - Requests to update an ASIN brand name attribute from "Generic" are not supported. - In this case brand name change from "Generic" to an abusive brand is also considered as re-branding. As informed earlier that, if you choose to rebrand a product you must create a new ASIN rather than update an existing ASIN. This is true even if the product does not change materially after the brand update. Rebranding and packaging differences on products can cause customer order returns and can potentially hurt your metrics. To prevent this unwanted outcome, we don’t allow the brand name to be changed for an ASIN. For more information, go to "Amazon Brand Name Policy": https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G2N3GKE5SGSHWYRZ Register products to your brand: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G6DU75NSM86VXKZC If the intended brand is not part of Amazon Brand Registry, we recommend that you complete registration via "Enroll a new brand" link on the Brand Registry landing page: https://brandregistry.amazon.com/ To help us continually improve, we ask that you take a moment to complete our survey below to tell us about your experience with this specific interaction.
I have no idea what you mean by the brand being "unhealthy" - please elaborate - other products are still brand AJK. We are selling hundreds a month, what is "unhealthy"?
I am NOT rebranding the product!
The product always was, and remains AJK.
This is not a change from Generic!
You can see that so why say that?
he packaging and brand HAS NOT CHANGED since the product was first listed.
It was listed as AJK, and is still branded as such.
All of your arguments about brand changes make sense so WHY HAVE YOU CHANGED THE BRAND? CHANGE IT BACK! YOU (AMAZON) HAVE CHANGED THE BRAND TO greenoak FOR SOME REASON, CHANGE IT BACK!
The brand AJK is part of the brand registry.
PLEASE TRANSFER THIS TICKET TO SOMEONE THAT CAN READ!
Hello from Amazon Brand Registry Support, Thank you for reaching out regarding the brand name update request for ASIN from "Generic" to "AJK." Upon reviewing the case thoroughly, it appears that the ASIN is currently listed as a non-branded product, hence the brand name being displayed as "Generic." I would like to inform you that requests to update the brand name attribute from "Generic" are not supported due to potential violations of listing policies, specifically regarding the use of a brand's Intellectual Property in generic product listings. In such cases, we advise sellers to create a new ASIN for the product with the desired brand name rather than attempting to update an existing ASIN. This ensures compliance with our policies and maintains the integrity of the Amazon marketplace. We highly appreciate your understanding and co-operation in this regard. Have a nice day. To help us continually improve, we ask that you take a moment to complete our survey below to tell us about your experience with this specific interaction. Were you satisfied with the support provided?
PLEASE ESCALATE THIS CASE TO SOMEONE THAT CAN READ!
The brand is not "Generic"
The brand is listed as "greenoak"
The words "Generic" and "greenoak" are not the same.
The listing was created with the brand: AJK
The product has, as you can see from images, the "AJK" registered trademark logo.
The product has always been brand: AJK
YOU (AMAZON) HAVE CHANGED THE BRAND FROM AJK TO greenoak
CHANGE IT BACK!
Hello from Amazon Brand Registry Support, Thank you for contacting us. I am Aleena, and I am glad to assist you. I went through the details of this case and understand that you are concerned about updating the Brand name to the ASIN: B0D56W182P. Please be informed that we are de-escalating your case and addressing your concern in detail. We cannot proceed with your request of updating the Brand name as if you choose to rebrand a product, you must create a new ASIN rather than update an existing ASIN. This is true even if the product does not change materially after the brand update. Rebranding and packaging differences on products can cause customer order returns and can potentially hurt your metrics. To prevent this unwanted outcome, we don’t allow the brand name to be changed for an ASIN. For more information, go to “Amazon Brand Name Policy”: https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/help/hub/reference/G2N3GKE5SGSHWYRZ If the intended brand is not part of Amazon Brand Registry, we recommend that you complete registration via “Enrol a new brand” link on the Brand Registry landing page: https://brandregistry.amazon.co.uk/ To help us continually improve, we ask that you take a moment to complete our survey below to tell us about your experience with this specific interaction.
AGAIN ESCALATE TO SOMEONE THAT CAN READ REALLY PLEASE THIS IS GETTING SILLY!!!!
PLEASE ESCALATE TO SOMEONE THAT CAN READ
You say I am not the registered brand owner for the grand greenoak.
You are correct. That is not the point!
This product is branded AJK - look at the image
This product listing was created with brand AJK
I am the registered owner for the brand AJK
You say it is Amazon policy that the brand cannot be changed on a product
SO HOW DID THE BRAND GET CHANGED FROM AJK TO greenoak ?
Just change the brand back to AJK
As per Amazon policy IT SHOULD NOT HAVE CHANGED TO greenoak. I am unable to edit the listing because of this.
Hello from Amazon Brand Registry Support,
My name is Deblina. As per your mail, I understand your concern regarding updating the brand name of ASIN: B0C2ZYXNYQ. Please know that I was unable to approve your requested change since we have not received sufficient proof that supports this request. - Manufacturer's or Publisher's (for books) website link clearly showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available. - Manufacturer's catalog (Product User Manual), either scanned image of the physical catalog or PDF version showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available. - High-resolution product pictures, clearly showing the suggested changes, along with a visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.). - A high-resolution photo of the item in its original packaging showing the product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.) code and the attribute or attributes that you need to change We request you to take this extra step and provide us with all the information needed so that, we can ensure that you get the correct resolution for your query. Once we will receive the details, we will investigate further and will get back to you.
Please confirm...
1. Was B0C2ZYXNYQ created with brand: AJK ?
2. Does the main product image for B0C2ZYXNYQ include the registered trademark "AJK" logo on it?
3. Has the brand been recently changed to "greenoak", against Amazon policy saying brand cannnot be changed?
From this you can tell I have full authority to say that this item is brand: AJK, as it was originally created in the listing.
Hello from Amazon Selling Partner Support,
As we requested previously, in order to address your concerns, we will need some additional information.
Please respond to this message to provide the details requested below:
- Manufacturer's or Publisher's (for books) website link clearly showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available.
- Manufacturer's catalog (Product User Manual), either scanned image of the physical catalog or PDF version showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available.
- High-resolution product pictures, clearly showing the suggested changes, along with a visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.).
- A high-resolution photo of the item in its original packaging showing the product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.) code and the attribute or attributes that you need to change
We request you to take this extra step and provide us with all the information needed so that, we can ensure that you get the correct resolution for your query.
Once we will receive the details, we will investigate further and will get back to you.
----
WAS THIS PRODUCT LISTING CREATED WITH BRAND: AJK
YES OR NO?
Hello from Amazon Selling Partner Support,
We are currently unable to provide you with an accurate response directly. We need to try and submit a system review to you. At the same time, we need you to provide one of the following valid forms of documentation before processing your request:
- A link to the manufacturer's or publisher's (for book products) website that clearly shows the proposed changes and visible product codes, such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., if any. This is the only valid form of proof for requests relating to product images.
- High-resolution product images that clearly show proposed changes and visible product codes such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.
- A high-resolution photograph of the unopened product, showing the product ID such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., and one or more attributes that need to be changed.
Note that for requests relating to product images, the only acceptable form of evidence is the manufacturer's or publisher's (for book products) website URL.
If your product is a GTIN exempt product, please provide an image showing the model/part number, etc., or a URL to the manufacturer's website.
Have a nice day!
----
It is, after all, a very very simple question.
Was the product listing (B0C2ZYXNYQ) created as brand: AJK
Yes or no?
Let me know when you can provide an accurate response.
----
Hello from Amazon Brand Registry Support,
I went through the details of this case and understand that you want to update the brand name for ASIN - B0C2ZYXNYQ and whether the product listing (B0C2ZYXNYQ) created as brand: AJK
I am happy to help you with this.
Please note that we are unable to answer this question. Either way, before processing your request, we require you to provide one of the following valid forms of documentation:
- A link to the manufacturer's or publisher's (for book products) website that clearly shows the proposed changes and visible product codes, such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., if any. This is the only valid form of proof for requests relating to product images.
- High-resolution product images that clearly show proposed changes and visible product codes such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.
- A high-resolution photograph of the unopened product, showing the product ID such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., and one or more attributes that need to be changed.
Note that for requests relating to product images, the only acceptable form of evidence is the manufacturer's or publisher's (for book products) website URL.
If your product is a GTIN exempt product, please provide an image showing the model/part number, etc., or a URL to the manufacturer's website.
We look forward to hearing from you.
----
Please pass this to someone that CAN answer the question then?
Was the product listing (B0C2ZYXNYQ) created as brand: AJK
It is not a hard question.
I'll wait for you to find someone that can answer it.
Our investigation team will review the information and take action if there is any violation of our listing policies or intellectual property policies.
If you believe a listing is infringing your intellectual property such as authenticity, trademark, copyright, or patent rights, submit your concern through the Brand Registry or Report infringement page:
https://www.amazon.com/report/infringement
Our investigation team will review the information and take action if there is any violation of our listing policies.
For more information regarding Amazon’s policies related to listings, go to these resources:
To help us continually improve, we ask that you take a moment to complete our survey below to tell us about your experience with this specific interaction.
---
Was the product listing (B0C2ZYXNYQ) created as brand: AJK
JUST ANSWER THE QUESTION!!!!!!
WHY ARE YOU INCAPABALE OFD ANSWERING THE QUESTION?
TRANSFER THIS CASE TO SOMEONE THAT CAN ANSWER THE QUESTION NOW!!!
JUST SAY, YES, OR NO!!!
You changed the brand from AJK to greenoak, so YOU show me the proof that was provided to make that change?
- A link to the manufacturer's or publisher's (for book products) website that clearly shows the proposed changes and visible product codes, such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., if any. This is the only valid form of proof for requests relating to product images.
- High-resolution product images that clearly show proposed changes and visible product codes such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.
- A high-resolution photograph of the unopened product, showing the product ID such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., and one or more attributes that need to be changed.
---
Dear Selling Partner ,
My name is Ewelina, and I'll be your contact as we work towards resolving your issue.
I just checked your ASIN B0C2ZYXNYQ and confirmed that the right brand AJK is already related to it.
Could you please double check and let me know?
---
It now shows KppeX as brand
And I could not edit the listing when listed as Greeoak, as it thinks I am trying to change brand back to AJK when in fact I cannot even edit that field.
Actually it has got worse, I now get "You need approval to list this product" when I try to edit *MY PRODUCT*!!!!
---
Dear Seller,
thank you for your answer.
I just updated the brand once to make sure the Detail Page and your Seller Central show the right brand. Please allow up to 24h for the changes to become live.
Once the brand is correct in all the places, the "approval" message will be gone.
Please let me know in 24h if the changes are visible from your side.
--
You are still listing *MY* product as someone else's brand (KppeX), see attached screenshot.
You are still refusing to let me edit *MY* product listing, see attached screenshot.
Please provide evidence for change of brand of *MY* product from AJK to greenoak.
Please provide evidence for change of brand of *MY* product from greenoak to KppoX
Such as
- A link to the manufacturer's or publisher's (for book products) website that clearly shows the proposed changes and visible product codes, such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., if any. This is the only valid form of proof for requests relating to product images.
- High-resolution product images that clearly show proposed changes and visible product codes such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.
- A high-resolution photograph of the unopened product, showing the product ID such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., and one or more attributes that need to be changed.
If you have no evidence, as manufacturer, I cannot appove or accept either of these brand changes, and so the brand needs to revert to AJK.
If someone else is selling *my* products under another brand, with my trademarked brand logo, I have to seriously consider legal action for trademark infingement.
In light of this please provide full details of the contact details for the legal representative for Greenoak and KppeX.
Thank you
--
Hello from Amazon.co.uk,
My name is Andrea from Amazon Selling Partner Support and I am reaching out to you regarding your request to update the brand name for Asin B0C2ZYXNYQ to "AJK".
We do not see the proof provided for the changes requested. Before we can process your request, we need you to provide one of these valid forms of documentation:
- Manufacturer's or Publisher's (for books) website URL clearly showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available.
- Manufacturer's catalog (Product User Manual), either scanned image of the physical catalog or PDF version showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available.
- High-resolution product pictures, clearly showing the suggested changes, along with a visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.).
- A high-resolution photo of the item in its original packaging showing the product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.) code and the attribute or attributes that you need to change
Could you also specify if you registered the brand "AJK" on Amazon Brand Registry?
--
You changed the brand, not me.
Please provide evidence for change of brand of *MY* product from AJK to greenoak.
Please provide evidence for change of brand of *MY* product from greenoak to KppoX
Such as
- A link to the manufacturer's or publisher's (for book products) website that clearly shows the proposed changes and visible product codes, such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., if any. This is the only valid form of proof for requests relating to product images.
- High-resolution product images that clearly show proposed changes and visible product codes such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.
- A high-resolution photograph of the unopened product, showing the product ID such as UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc., and one or more attributes that need to be changed.
If you have no evidence, as manufacturer, I cannot appove or accept either of these brand changes, and so the brand needs to revert to AJK.
--
Hello from Amazon.co.uk,
This is Andrea from Amazon Selling Partner Support and I am reaching out to you regarding your request to update the brand name for Asin B0C2ZYXNYQ to "AJK".
Please note that we cannot proceed for the changes requested if you do not provide the required proof.
Before we can process your request, we need you to provide one of these valid forms of documentation:
- Manufacturer's or Publisher's (for books) website URL clearly showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available.
- Manufacturer's catalog (Product User Manual), either scanned image of the physical catalog or PDF version showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available.
- High-resolution product pictures, clearly showing the suggested changes, along with a visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.).
- A high-resolution photo of the item in its original packaging showing the product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.) code and the attribute or attributes that you need to change
Could you also specify if you registered the brand "AJK" on Amazon Brand Registry?
--
You are still misssng the points
You (Amazon) changed the brand!
I CANNOT ACCEPT THAT BRAND CHANGE WITHOUT PROOF FROM AMAZON.
Please provide a copy of the proof you used to change the brand from AJK to KppeX, such as.
- Manufacturer's or Publisher's (for books) website URL clearly showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available.
- Manufacturer's catalog (Product User Manual), either scanned image of the physical catalog or PDF version showing the suggested changes, along with visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.), if available.
- High-resolution product pictures, clearly showing the suggested changes, along with a visible product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.).
- A high-resolution photo of the item in its original packaging showing the product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.) code and the attribute or attributes that you need to change
If you have no proof, revert the brand back to AJK.
--
Hello from Amazon.co.uk,
This is Andrea from Amazon Selling Partner Support.
I understand your frustration, but please note that the proof is required from our internal department, in charge of brand stamping.
If no proof is provided they are not going to update the brand and I have no other way to help you.
Please provide the required images showing the brand name and the product identifier (UPC, EAN, ISBN, etc.).
If you do not cooperate you will only delay the resolution of the issue.
---
13:34
05/09/2024
But *YOU* changed the brand, not me!
If, as you say, proof is required to change the brand then:
GIVE ME THE PROOF
If you have no proof, as manufacturer I cannot accept the change of brand from AJK, and it needs to changed back.
Hello from Amazon.co.uk,
This is Andrea from Amazon Selling Partner Support and I am reaching out to you regarding your request to update the brand name for Asin B0C2ZYXNYQ.
Thank you for taking my call earlier.
I confirm you that I contacted our internal team and asked them to change the brand name back to to "AJK".
I will be back to you with a response in due course.
We will be updating our Managed A-Z Termination rates and codes on September 11th 2024. As usual, these changes are colour coded in our full rate files available through the portal as below. Where your account has custom rates, these…
The 20 most-commented-on tech support columns from On Call's first 500 instalments
On Call To celebrate the recent 500th appearance of On-Call, the column that features your tales of tech support torture, The Register has trawled through the archives to find the 20 columns that generated the most comments.…
Churns out apps, but testing needed to iron out performance woes
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So I put butter on my toast before jam, only a little bit (not as much as if I'm just having buttered toast) to soak into the bread a bit. Then I put the jam on, my wife thinks I'm a heathen for it. What's the general consensus here, butter or no?
I live on a street with unallocated on-street parking, everyone has to parallel park either side of the road and it's pot luck if you get one directly outside your house. Having said that, I can probably do so about 70% of the time, so not too bad. My neighbour a few doors up has a campervan and whenever she takes it out for the weekend or a holiday, she puts 3 cones out to reserve the space directly outside her home so she can load and unload her van easily. Not just enough space to park, but also extra space to unload comfortably - the space she reserves is easily two cars long! She leaves these cones in place for multiple days/nights at a time while the rest of us squeeze onto nearby streets. Everyone thinks it's really unfair, but no-one wants to confront her directly about it.
If everyone did this, the street would be chaos. What can I do, or is it easier to rise above?
I got back late the other night after a camping trip, no space outside my house but someone (actually not me!) had moved 1 of the cones. I parked tightly in, leaving 2 cones there and space for her van to park. Obviously she came back the next evening and has been complaining on the street WhatsApp, shaming my car, and I have an angry note on my windshield. (She was able to park her van though as she's in there now!)
I appreciate she may have accessibility issues that aren't visible, but as other residents have done she could get a disabled bay put in by the council if that's the case. Also this isn't an occasional thing, she's been doing it all summer long as she goes away to festivals.
What's the best way to approach this that won't result in my car being damaged or making a tremendous enemy on the street? She's lived here the longest so obviously feels like she can do what she wants. She once leaned through my open window and grabbed my steering wheel when I was trying to parallel park, so she's a bit of a character...
Ps. I'm moving my car in an hour so wish me luck!!
Saw an ad in the cinema in Watford last week that made this claim in the ad, but it didn’t specify what the preference was over. My suggestion to my wife was that 70% of people prefer Pepsi Max to legionnaires disease. She hit back with chronic depression. Our attempts to outdo each other kind of ruined the movie vibe if I’m honest.
I work in a call centre and some prat left a review saying I sound like I’m there only because I have to be. Well obviously who the fuck wants to work in a call centre for a living
Oliver Andrich's detailed notes on adopting uv. Oliver has some pretty specific requirements:
I need to have various Python versions installed locally to test my work and my personal projects. Ranging from Python 3.8 to 3.13. [...] I also require decent dependency management in my projects that goes beyond manually editing a pyproject.toml file. Likewise, I am way too accustomed to poetry add .... And I run a number of Python-based tools --- djhtml, poetry, ipython, llm, mkdocs, pre-commit, tox, ...
He's braver than I am!
I started by removing all Python installations, pyenv, pipx and Homebrew from my machine. Rendering me unable to do my work.
Here's a neat trick: first install a specific Python version with uv like this:
uv python install 3.11
Then create an alias to run it like this:
alias python3.11 'uv run --python=3.11 python3'
And install standalone tools with optional extra dependencies like this (a replacement for pipx and pipx inject):
Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos (here’s a 2022 Rolling Stone profile if you’re unfamiliar), this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company is a compelling read.
It’s a snapshot of what it takes to run a massive scale viral YouTube operation in the 2020s, as well as a detailed description of a very specific company culture evolved to fulfill that mission.
It starts in the most on-brand MrBeast way possible:
I genuinely believe if you attently read and understand the knowledge here you will be much better set up for success. So, if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000.
Everything is focused very specifically on YouTube as a format:
Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
The MrBeast definition of A, B and C-team players is one I haven’t heard before:
A-Players are obsessive, learn from mistakes, coachable, intelligent, don’t make excuses, believe in Youtube, see the value of this company, and are the best in the goddamn world at their job. B-Players are new people that need to be trained into A-Players, and C-Players are just average employees. […] They arn’t obsessive and learning. C-Players are poisonous and should be transitioned to a different company IMMEDIATELY. (It’s okay we give everyone severance, they’ll be fine).
The key characteristic outlined here, if you read between the hustle-culture lines, is learning. Employees who constantly learn are valued. Employees who don’t are not.
There’s a lot of stuff in there about YouTube virality, starting with the Click Thru Rate (CTR) for the all-important video thumbnails:
This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.
The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
MrBeast videos have a strictly defined formula, outlined in detail on pages 6-10.
The first minute captures the viewer’s attention and demonstrates that their expectations from the thumbnail will be met. Losing 21 million viewers in the first minute after 60 million initial clicks is considered a reasonably good result! Minutes 1-3, 3-6 and 6-end all have their own clearly defined responsibilities as well.
Ideally, a video will feature something they call the “wow factor”:
An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video. We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days (video) and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
Chapter 2 (pages 10-24) is about creating content. This is crammed with insights into what it takes to produce surprising, spectacular and very expensive content for YouTube.
A lot of this is about coordination and intense management of your dependencies:
I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” […] Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date.
It also introduces the concept of “critical components”:
Critical components are the things that are essential to your video. If I want to put 100 people on an island and give it away to one of them, then securing an island is a critical component. It doesn’t matter how well planned the challenges on the island are, how good the weather is, etc. Without that island there is no video.
[…]
Critical Components can come from literally anywhere and once something you’re working on is labeled as such, you treat it like your baby. WITHOUT WHAT YOU’RE WORKING ON WE DO NOT HAVE A VIDEO! Protect it at all costs, check in on it 10x a day, obsess over it, make a backup, if it requires shipping pay someone to pick it up and drive it, don’t trust standard shipping, and speak up the second anything goes wrong. The literal second. Never coin flip a Critical Component (that means you’re coinfliping the video aka a million plus dollars)
There’s a bunch of stuff about communication, with a strong bias towards “higher forms of communication”: in-person beats a phone call beats a text message beats an email.
Unsurprisingly for this organization, video is a highly valued tool for documenting work:
Which is more important, that one person has a good mental grip of something or that their entire team of 10 people have a good mental grip on something? Obviously the team. And the easiest way to bring your team up to the same page is to freaken video everything and store it where they can constantly reference it. A lot of problems can be solved if we just video sets and ask for videos when ordering things.
I enjoyed this note:
Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it.
And this bit about the value of consultants:
Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world’s largest slice of cake lol. He’s already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. […] In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you.
Here’s a darker note from the section “Random things you should know”:
Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more
And to finish, this note on budgeting:
I want money spent to be shown on camera ideally. If you’re spending over $10,000 on something and it won’t be shown on camera, seriously think about it.
I’m always interested in finding management advice from unexpected sources. For example, I love The Eleven Laws of Showrunning as a case study in managing and successfully delegating for a large, creative project.
I don’t think this MrBeast document has as many lessons directly relevant to my own work, but as an honest peek under the hood of a weirdly shaped and absurdly ambitious enterprise it’s legitimately fascinating.
Jamie Brandon in 2021, talking about the importance of optimizing for the speed at which you can work as a developer:
Being 10x faster also changes the kinds of projects that are worth doing.
Last year I spent something like 100 hours writing a text editor. […] If I was 10x slower it would have been 20-50 weeks. Suddenly that doesn't seem like such a good deal any more - what a waste of a year!
It’s not just about speed of writing code:
When I think about speed I think about the whole process - researching, planning, designing, arguing, coding, testing, debugging, documenting etc.
Often when I try to convince someone to get faster at one of those steps, they'll argue that the others are more important so it's not worthwhile trying to be faster. Eg choosing the right idea is more important than coding the wrong idea really quickly.
But that's totally conditional on the speed of everything else! If you could code 10x as fast then you could try out 10 different ideas in the time it would previously have taken to try out 1 idea. Or you could just try out 1 idea, but have 90% of your previous coding time available as extra idea time.
Jamie’s model here helps explain the effect I described in AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects. Prompting an LLM to write portions of my code for me gives me that 5-10x boost in the time I spend typing code into a computer, which has a big effect on my ambitions despite being only about 10% of the activities I perform relevant to building software.
I also increasingly lean on LLMs as assistants in the research phase - exploring library options, building experimental prototypes - and for activities like writing tests and even a little bit of documentation.
[… OpenAI’s o1] could work its way to a correct (and well-written) solution if provided a lot of hints and prodding, but did not generate the key conceptual ideas on its own, and did make some non-trivial mistakes. The experience seemed roughly on par with trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student. However, this was an improvement over previous models, whose capability was closer to an actually incompetent graduate student.
It's a bit sad and confusing that LLMs ("Large Language Models") have little to do with language; It's just historical. They are highly general purpose technology for statistical modeling of token streams. A better name would be Autoregressive Transformers or something.
They don't care if the tokens happen to represent little text chunks. It could just as well be little image patches, audio chunks, action choices, molecules, or whatever. If you can reduce your problem to that of modeling token streams (for any arbitrary vocabulary of some set of discrete tokens), you can "throw an LLM at it".
Neat, concise tutorial by Eli Bendersky on compiling Go applications that can then be loaded into a browser using WebAssembly and integrated with JavaScript. Go functions can be exported to JavaScript like this:
js.Global().Set("calcHarmonic", jsCalcHarmonic)
And Go code can even access the DOM using a pattern like this:
Believe it or not, the name Strawberry does not come from the “How many r’s are in strawberry” meme. We just chose a random word. As far as we know it was a complete coincidence.
There is superstition about creativity, and for that matter, about thinking in every sense, and it's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something - play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems - there was a chorus of critics to say, but that's not thinking.
OpenAI released two major new preview models today: o1-preview and o1-mini (that mini one is not a preview) - previously rumored as having the codename "strawberry". There's a lot to understand about these models - they're not as simple as the next step up from GPT-4o, instead introducing some major trade-offs in terms of cost and performance in exchange for improved "reasoning" capabilities.
We've developed a new series of AI models designed to spend more time thinking before they respond.
One way to think about these new models is as a specialized extension of the chain of thought prompting pattern - the "think step by step" trick that we've been exploring as a a community for a couple of years now, first introduced in the paper Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners in May 2022.
Our large-scale reinforcement learning algorithm teaches the model how to think productively using its chain of thought in a highly data-efficient training process. We have found that the performance of o1 consistently improves with more reinforcement learning (train-time compute) and with more time spent thinking (test-time compute). The constraints on scaling this approach differ substantially from those of LLM pretraining, and we are continuing to investigate them.
[...]
Through reinforcement learning, o1 learns to hone its chain of thought and refine the strategies it uses. It learns to recognize and correct its mistakes. It learns to break down tricky steps into simpler ones. It learns to try a different approach when the current one isn’t working. This process dramatically improves the model’s ability to reason.
Effectively, this means the models can better handle significantly more complicated prompts where a good result requires backtracking and "thinking" beyond just next token prediction.
I don't really like the term "reasoning" because I don't think it has a robust definition in the context of LLMs, but OpenAI have committed to using it here and I think it does an adequate job of conveying the problem these new models are trying to solve.
Low-level details from the API documentation
Some of the most interesting details about the new models and their trade-offs can be found in their API documentation:
For applications that need image inputs, function calling, or consistently fast response times, the GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini models will continue to be the right choice. However, if you're aiming to develop applications that demand deep reasoning and can accommodate longer response times, the o1 models could be an excellent choice.
Some key points I picked up from the docs:
API access to the new o1-preview and o1-mini models is currently reserved for tier 5 accounts - you’ll need to have spent at least $1,000 on API credits.
No system prompt support - the models use the existing chat completion API but you can only send user and assistant messages.
No streaming support, tool usage, batch calls or image inputs either.
“Depending on the amount of reasoning required by the model to solve the problem, these requests can take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes.”
Most interestingly is the introduction of “reasoning tokens” - tokens that are not visible in the API response but are still billed and counted as output tokens. These tokens are where the new magic happens.
Thanks to the importance of reasoning tokens - OpenAI suggests allocating a budget of around 25,000 of these for prompts that benefit from the new models - the output token allowance has been increased dramatically - to 32,768 for o1-preview and 65,536 for the supposedly smaller o1-mini! These are an increase from the gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini models which both currently have a 16,384 output token limit.
One last interesting tip from that API documentation:
Limit additional context in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): When providing additional context or documents, include only the most relevant information to prevent the model from overcomplicating its response.
This is a big change from how RAG is usually implemented, where the advice is often to cram as many potentially relevant documents as possible into the prompt.
Hidden reasoning tokens
A frustrating detail is that those reasoning tokens remain invisible in the API - you get billed for them, but you don't get to see what they were. OpenAI explain why in Hiding the Chains of Thought:
Assuming it is faithful and legible, the hidden chain of thought allows us to "read the mind" of the model and understand its thought process. For example, in the future we may wish to monitor the chain of thought for signs of manipulating the user. However, for this to work the model must have freedom to express its thoughts in unaltered form, so we cannot train any policy compliance or user preferences onto the chain of thought. We also do not want to make an unaligned chain of thought directly visible to users.
Therefore, after weighing multiple factors including user experience, competitive advantage, and the option to pursue the chain of thought monitoring, we have decided not to show the raw chains of thought to users.
So two key reasons here: one is around safety and policy compliance: they want the model to be able to reason about how it's obeying those policy rules without exposing intermediary steps that might include information that violates those policies. The second is what they call competitive advantage - which I interpret as wanting to avoid other models being able to train against the reasoning work that they have invested in.
I'm not at all happy about this policy decision. As someone who develops against LLMs interpretability and transparency are everything to me - the idea that I can run a complex prompt and have key details of how that prompt was evaluated hidden from me feels like a big step backwards.
Examples
OpenAI provide some initial examples in the Chain of Thought section of their announcement, covering things like generating Bash scripts, solving crossword puzzles and calculating the pH of a moderately complex solution of chemicals.
These examples show that the ChatGPT UI version of these models does expose details of the chain of thought... but it doesn't show the raw reasoning tokens, instead using a separate mechanism to summarize the steps into a more human-readable form.
OpenAI also have two new cookbooks with more sophisticated examples, which I found a little hard to follow:
Using reasoning for data validation shows a multiple step process for generating example data in an 11 column CSV and then validating that in various different ways.
Using reasoning for routine generation showing o1-preview code to transform knowledge base articles into a set of routines that an LLM can comprehend and follow.
I asked on Twitter for examples of prompts that people had found which failed on GPT-4o but worked on o1-preview. A couple of my favourites:
How many words are in your response to this prompt?by Matthew Berman - the model thinks for ten seconds across five visible turns before answering "There are seven words in this sentence."
Explain this joke: “Two cows are standing in a field, one cow asks the other: “what do you think about the mad cow disease that’s going around?”. The other one says: “who cares, I’m a helicopter!”by Fabian Stelzer - the explanation makes sense, apparently other models have failed here.
Great examples are still a bit thin on the ground though. Here's a relevant note from OpenAI researcher Jason Wei, who worked on creating these new models:
Results on AIME and GPQA are really strong, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to something that a user can feel. Even as someone working in science, it’s not easy to find the slice of prompts where GPT-4o fails, o1 does well, and I can grade the answer. But when you do find such prompts, o1 feels totally magical. We all need to find harder prompts.
Ethan Mollick has been previewing the models for a few weeks, and published his initial impressions. His crossword example is particularly interesting for the visible reasoning steps, which include notes like:
I noticed a mismatch between the first letters of 1 Across and 1 Down. Considering "CONS" instead of "LIES" for 1 Across to ensure alignment.
What's new in all of this
It's going to take a while for the community to shake out the best practices for when and where these models should be applied. I expect to continue mostly using GPT-4o (and Claude 3.5 Sonnet), but it's going to be really interesting to see us collectively expand our mental model of what kind of tasks can be solved using LLMs given this new class of model.
I expect we'll see other AI labs, including the open model weights community, start to replicate some of these results with their own versions of models that are specifically trained to apply this style of chain-of-thought reasoning.
Mistral finally have a multi-modal (image + text) vision LLM!
I linked to their tweet, but there’s not much to see there - in now classic Mistral style they released the new model with an otherwise unlabeled link to a torrent download. A more useful link is mistral-community/pixtral-12b-240910 on Hugging Face, a 25GB “Unofficial Mistral Community” copy of the weights.
Pixtral was announced at Mistral’s AI Summit event in San Francisco today. It has 128,000 token context, is Apache 2.0 licensed and handles 1024x1024 pixel images. They claim it’s particularly good for OCR and information extraction. It’s not available on their La Platforme hosted API yet, but that’s coming soon.
A few more details can be found in the release notes for mistral-common 1.4.0. That’s their open source library of code for working with the models - it doesn’t actually run inference, but it includes the all-important tokenizer, which now includes three new special tokens: [IMG], [IMG_BREAK] and [IMG_END].
I ran the video through MacWhisper to get a transcript, then spent some time editing out my own favourite quotes, trying to focus on things I haven't written about previously on this blog.
There's something wholesome about having a little corner of the internet just for you.
It feels a little bit subversive as well in this day and age, with all of these giant walled platforms and you're like, "Yeah, no, I've got domain name and I'm running a web app.”
It used to be that 10, 15 years ago, everyone's intro to web development was building your own blog system. I don't think people do that anymore.
That's really sad because it's such a good project - you get to learn databases and HTML and URL design and SEO and all of these different skills.
As an experienced software engineer, I can get great code from LLMs because I've got that expertise in what kind of questions to ask. I can spot when it makes mistakes very quickly. I know how to test the things it's giving me.
Occasionally I'll ask it legal questions - I'll paste in terms of service and ask, "Is there anything in here that looks a bit dodgy?"
I know for a fact that this is a terrible idea because I have no legal knowledge! I'm sort of like play acting with it and nodding along, but I would never make a life altering decision based on legal advice from LLM that I got, because I'm not a lawyer.
If I was a lawyer, I'd use them all the time because I'd be able to fall back on my actual expertise to make sure that I'm using them responsibly.
It's like taking a brand new computer user and dumping them in a Linux machine with a terminal prompt and say, "There you go, figure it out."
It's an absolute joke that we've got this incredibly sophisticated software and we've given it a command line interface and launched it to a hundred million people.
Benefits for people with English as a second language
For people who don't speak English or have English as a second language, this stuff is incredible.
We live in a society where having really good spoken and written English puts you at a huge advantage.
The street light outside your house is broken and you need to write a letter to the council to get it fixed? That used to be a significant barrier.
It's not anymore. ChatGPT will write a formal letter to the council complaining about a broken street light that is absolutely flawless.
And you can prompt it in any language. I'm so excited about that.
Interestingly, it sort of breaks aspects of society as well - because we've been using written English skills as a filter for so many different things.
If you want to get into university, you have to write formal letters and all of that kind of stuff, which used to keep people out.
Now it doesn't anymore, which I think is thrilling…. but at the same time, if you've got institutions that are designed around the idea that you can evaluate everyone and filter them based on written essays, and now you can't, we've got to redesign those institutions.
That's going to take a while. What does that even look like? It's so disruptive to society in all of these different ways.
As a professional programmer, there's an aspect where you ask, OK, does this mean that our jobs are all gonna dry up?
I don't think the jobs dry up. I think more companies start commissioning custom software because the cost of developing custom software goes down, which I think increases the demand for engineers who know what they're doing.
But I'm not an economist. Maybe this is the death knell for six figure programmer salaries and we're gonna end up working for peanuts?
Every now and then you hear a story of a company who got software built for them, and it turns out it was the boss's cousin, who's like a 15-year-old who's good with computers, and they built software, and it's garbage.
Maybe we've just given everyone in the world the overconfident 15-year-old cousin who's gonna claim to be able to build something, and build them something that maybe kind of works.
And maybe society's okay with that?
This is why I don't feel threatened as a senior engineer, because I know that if you sit down somebody who doesn't know how to program with an LLM, and you sit me with an LLM, and ask us to build the same thing, I will build better software than they will.
Hopefully market forces come into play, and the demand is there for software that actually works, and is fast and reliable.
And so people who can build software that's fast and reliable, often with LLM assistance, used responsibly, benefit from that.
For me, prompt engineering is about figuring out things like - for a SQL query - we need to send the full schema and we need to send these three example responses.
That's engineering. It's complicated.
The hardest part of prompt engineering is evaluating. Figuring out, of these two prompts, which one is better?
I still don't have a great way of doing that myself.
The people who are doing the most sophisticated development on top of LLMs are all about evals. They've got really sophisticated ways of evaluating their prompts.
We talked about the risk of learned helplessness, and letting our skills atrophy by outsourting so much of our work to LLMs.
The other day I reported a bug against GitHub Actions complaining that the windows-latest version of Python couldn't load SQLite extensions.
Then after I'd filed the bug, I realized that I'd got Claude to write my test code and it had hallucinated the wrong SQLite code for loading an extension!
I had to close that bug and say, no, sorry, this was my fault.
That was a bit embarrassing. I should know better than most people that you have to check everything these things do, and it had caught me out. Python and SQLite are my bread and butter. I really should have caught that one!
But my counter to this is that I feel like my overall capabilities are expanding so quickly. I can get so much more stuff done that I'm willing to pay with a little bit of my soul.
I'm willing to accept a little bit of atrophying in some of my abilities in exchange for, honestly, a two to five X productivity boost on the time that I spend typing code into a computer.
That's like 10% of my job, so it's not like I'm two to five times more productive overall. But it's still a material improvement.
It's making me more ambitious. I'm writing software I would never have even dared to write before. So I think that's worth the risk.
I feel like artificial intelligence has all of these science fiction ideas around it. People will get into heated debates about whether this is artificial intelligence at all.
I've been thinking about it in terms of imitation intelligence, because everything these models do is effectively imitating something that they saw in their training data.
And that actually really helps you form a mental model of what they can do and why they're useful. It means that you can think, "Okay, if the training data has shown it how to do this thing, it can probably help me with this thing."
If you want to cure cancer, the training data doesn't know how to cure cancer. It's not gonna come up with a novel cure for cancer just out of nothing.
The weird intern
I've used the weird intern analogy a few times before. Here's the version Ronak and Guang extracted as the trailer for our episode:
I call it my weird intern. I'll say to my wife, Natalie, sometimes, "Hey, so I got my weird intern to do this." And that works, right?
It's a good mental model for these things as well, because it's like having an intern who has read all of the documentation and memorized the documentation for every programming language, and is a wild conspiracy theorist, and sometimes comes up with absurd ideas, and they're massively overconfident.
It's the intern that always believes that they're right. But it's an intern who you can, I hate to say it, you can kind of bully them.
You can be like, "Do it again, do that again." "No, that's wrong." And you don't have to feel guilty about it, which is great!
Or one of my favorite prompts is you just say, "Do better." And it works. It's the craziest thing. It'll write some code, you say, "Do better." And it goes, "Oh, I'm sorry, I should..."
And then it will churn out better code, which is so stupid that that's how this technology works. But it's kind of fun.
Telling the AI to "make it better" after getting a result is just a folk method of getting an LLM to do Chain of Thought, which is why it works so well.
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?").
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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
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
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
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?
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
The Olympic cycling road races took place at the weekend - Evenepoel was a worthy winner of the men's race, and the women's race past the same splendid Paris lanscape was a really tight affair where once again favourites were a bit too busy looking at one another and the American Kristen Faulkner simply rode away from them to win nicely. Elsewhere we learn more of the strange arts of hammer throwing and ping pong, and the always disappointing flops of the high jump, but celebrated the excellent win of Novak Djokovic, the last survivor of the old guard against the inevitable rise of the new generation in tennis - a first Thinese women champion and the impressive Alcaraz as the men's runner-up. In the Olympics we have enjoyed some good moments including a world record pole vault and an uexcpected Botswanan spring victory - the end of the track eveents this weekend will be followed by the Women's cycle Tour - we still have not worked out how to follow the Vuelta on tv.
Meanwhile in the real world I read: 'now should be the 'silly season', that goofy time of year when the news is usually filled with trivial stories because everyone's on vacation and there's not much serious stuff happening. But this year's silly season is insisting on being taken seriously, with a global market crash and the Middle East on the brink of war. In the UK, it's even grimmer, as racist attacks against asylum-seeker facilities have spread across cities, fuelled by online disinformation. "The worst wave of far-right violence in the UK post-war," wrote anti-extremism organisation HOPE not to hate.' We find ourselves in a quiet if hot corner of the south of France, but the turmoil is never far away.
This blog began years ago with bulletins on my health, starting with a knee replacement which seems to be holding up. The random pains I now have include arthritis (a bit in the othe rknee but I'll not have a further operation) tendinitis (which also bugs Mary at times) in one shoulder, muscular aches which the French oddly call courbature, otherwise raideur, and a bit of gout in foot joints, evident to my doctor who spots uric acid in the blood tests and counsels mildly against drinking too much. All this is more or less tolerable wiht regular paracetamol plus some codeine and occasional ibuprofen which has to be prescribed here but is freely available over pharmacy counters in the UK so brought by visitors when needed. All in all, with my daily exercise bike I cope well enough. I am often reminded of the Sackler scandal and the widespread dependence on opoids
As I write, I have just been to the dermatologist. A small spot on the top of one ear turned out to be pre-cancerous and is now being analysed - for the moment I have a dressing and stitches, and much less discomfort - I'll be able to sleep facing either way now. Dermato appointments here are like hen's teeth, and I had to write a letter in my best French to get an appointment before November, but it is done. Lab results in September when the holidays are over. Of course sod's law says that medical difficulties usually happen at weekends or during the summer holidays.
in Marc & Flo's garden in Congénies
Summer heat here. We keep daily temperature records, and are surprised to find that this year has been hotter than the last 2. It has also been humid - here we have a seesaw between drier, (slightly) cooler northerly winds - Mistral and Tramontane - and the entrées maritimes, southerly winds usually laden with moisture and sometimes with Sahara sand! Humidity obviously make it feel even more hotter, and our daytime maxima have been in the mid-30s since the middle of July while recent night temps have not been below 20° Our house is relatively cool and we stay indoors a lot. But the fires in the countryside have increased again, and sadly they are often caused by cigarette ends thrown from car windows
We have come to like the French postal services. Deliveries to the gate and its post box, not to the door, which avoids the dog bites post people in the UK suffer (not that we have biting dogs...). But as in the UK (years ago someone found sacks of undelivered letters to Jim'll Fixit in a bin in Hampstead, grim memories of J Savile but lots of disappointed kids hoping for replies to their dreams) a recent story tells of a French postman who took 13,000 letters home at the end of his shifts. The accused is set to appear in court in Vienne in January 2025, after the ‘mountain’ of undelivered post was discovered in his garage. The man now faces a fine of up to €45,000, and three years in jail.the accused had previously been a delivery driver for the Services-Courrier-Colis (parcel delivery) branch in the town of Bourgoin-Jallieu, Ironically this crime toook place not far from the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, a 19th century postman who buuilt a fantastic palace from stones he collected on his rounds - it is one of our favourite places to visit, in the north of the Drôme département.
As previously noted, our dear dog Edmond is nearing the end of his long life - 15 now, which is good going for a small dog. He has been anaesthetised previously for removal of fluid because of oedoema caused umtimately by a weakening heart, but that makes further interventions unadvisable and we keep him cheerful with titbits fed by hand - we are in constant touch with the escellent vets here. The hot weather certainly does not help. But he finds cool spots on the front doorstep and still seems alert when he is not sleeping! As long as he is in good spirits and will eat something we shall continue to enjoy his company.
The 2 tortoises however are inn good health and eating lots of lettuce! Mary says the older one senses her arrival by vibrations in the ground and races over to get his latest meal!
The Tour de France is in its 3rd and final week - this year exceptionally (because of the Olympics) not finishing in Paris. We have followed the cyclists for years, and although we miss the British commentators we are enjoying the French ones - it is after all a French event. We are getting used to Tadej Pogacar outpacing his rivals up steep mountains - his current nearest rival, the Dane Jonas Vingegaard, is never far behind, but this year I don't thing he will get in front.
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.
Yesterday too the Tour back into the Alps,with magnificent landscapes and a very confused field of breakaway groups. These grand tour races can be confusing since overall winners are calculated by cumulative time, and those who are already well ahead as the race unfolds can ride in halfway down the day's arrivals but still be in the lead. Yesterday there were a number of group battles ahead of the leaders, and the day's stage was well won by the Ecuadorean Richard Carapaz, who has had a long career in the peleton and was with Geraint Thomas in his heyday a few years ago.
Today's stage
A good friend wondered recently why we chosse such a hot place to live. I think, despite sometimes high temperatures, what I really love is the light, and the skies. Since I'm often awake early I can experience light without too much heat. This summer, to be fair, is not nearly as hot as the past 2, though they say there will be afternoons in the mid-30s this week. We are fortunate in any case to have a house that keeps relatively cool even on hot days without the need to air conditioning, and the nights are pleasantly warm, not often stifling. The only really cool place in the house is the wine store, whose cooling is highly efficient (and produces quantities of mineral-free water excellent for plants and for the ironing!
We have just enjoyed a short visit from our son Ed, his partner Karen, our granddaughter Isla and her boyfriend Ben who coped splendidly with new people (he'd just met Ed and Karen for the first time as they travelled over). They were all pllunged in at the deep end with a wine tasting meal in Luc's lovely garden near Aigues Mortes, and a good time was had by all I think
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.
Our French language groups continue to be important weekly markers in our lives, enhanced in summer by meeting outside in people's gardens.
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!
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 just lost another tree - a dead pine. Above is the garden a few years ago (Evie, our Norwich terrier, in shot), below M. Beaumann gradually demolishing the tree.
After the event - piles of wood neatly stacked up with more logs to follow when the trunks is split and sawn in a week or two. Plenty of light but lots of trees and bamboo still around for shade and interest, especially when the bamboo sways in the wind.
We have also had the pleasure of , a long weekend visit from Jeff and Fi - others of the family will follow over the summer.
The two tortoises seem to be in good shape and get through a lot of lettuce!
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 heroeson 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!
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!
Lots of my Facebook posts are links to photos published daily in the Guardian, plus th odd cartoon that takes my fancy. Also photos from French places we know well - the area around the Pic Saint Loup, other parts of our local Languedoc, and the Drôme where our old twin town Die is located, for example.
A night shot of the Pic Saint Loup with boar passing by by an excellent local photographer, Régis Domergue
Although we have limited opportunity to watch sport on tv (Mary andn I are both gravitating more to radio and podcasts these days - for her it makes knitting easier!) we follow football and cycling keenly at least by results and reports, and I am fascinated to see that Liverpool have appointed another monosyllabic manager, Mr Slot (Arne), to replace the excellent Klopp (Jürgen).
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.
Sagas have been on my mind in several ways since Easter. But first, exciting times in the tortoise world. We were given a new (to us) young one a few weeks ago, and he had been living in a cage inside until the weather warmed. It has now done so and today the larger tortoise emerged from its hibernation in the enclosure in the garden. I thought its was a lump of mud at first bat, as you can see, it has scrubbed up nicely and the younger one has joined it in the paddock!
The first saga has been of the literary kind, the Forsytes which have occupied our dvd viewing and my re-reading for the first part of the year. My name, Jon, was chosen by my dad (who was emotionally attached to the books) because of the young man Jon, the youngest Jolyon of the family. I think my father was rather muddled because he also professed an admiration for the 'man of property' epitomised by Soames who was on the 'other side' of the family. Never mind, the story was worth reading again, and the two tv productions are both good in theier different ways. But the third part of the 9 volumes, going up almost to Galsworthy's death in the early 1930s, were never dramatised as far as I know and I like them even better than the Victorian and Edwardian ones - a much more nuanced examination of love and marriage, with a dramatic view of mental illness thrown in.
Two less welcome 'sagas' lately have been to do with roof and health, both happily resolved. You'll recall perhaps that the roof was repaired last year by a firm which promised excellence and, as we thought, delivered it. It turned out that what they did not do was the issue - first neglecting to tell us of very old insulation which we've now had replaced, and secondly failing to fix any but the end tile in a whole ridge. Of course we could have no idea that there were problems - in the second case the rattling of tiles in the wind (after a long period of fairly calm weather) told us sometehing was amiss; and luckily our regular house and garden person Monsieur Beaumann was able to sort both. It turns out that he has long been a roof specialist - if only we had known...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Our all-too-brief stay with Sam and family is over halfway through as I write - lovely and we shall miss them but the weather began - let's say - sub-optimal (grey and wet, though not cold). But new year's day dawned with blue sky and sunshine.
Before we left home we indulged in Dickens DVDs, 2 sets of Little Dorritt, one excellent, the older dismal (I once liked this version...), and then a surprisingly good Martin Chuzzlewit (Tom Wilkinson who played an excellent Pecksniff has just died). The casts of all three are mostly outstanding, but the earlier Little Dorritt despite iconic actors like Alec Guinness and Derek Jacobi seemed wooden and stilted. Not helped by a weird 2-part presentation which separated Amy's view from Arthur Clennam's. Claire Foy's heroine is heaps better than Sarah Pickering, who seems to have done nothing else in film - Dickens writes a low-key character but not that low key.
I was encouraged by an Eng Lit friend to read most of Dickens on train journeys commuting to London, and still love the books - Mary came to them after she met me, and I remember buying a job-lot on £1 paperback classics to round out our library. Thinking over the whole series, the theme of financial insecurity and ruin, together with the vital importance of inheritance, is a strong common thread. Dickens' father was in debt and spent months in the Marshalsea, so CD knew of what he wrote. Few punches pulled either - the suicide of Merdle with a penknife in Little Dorritt is memorable in book and on film. But other books like Great Expectations - the title gives the game away - Bleak House with its fog of law-courts, A Christmas Carol of course (we have just seen a DVD with the splendid Michael Hordern hamming it up), Our mutual friend with its heaps of valuable dust, all have money and greed at their centres.
In between whiles I have caught up with Ken Follett's latest Kingsbridge novel, this one skipping centuries forward to the Napoleonic era, and yet another fictional rerunning of the battle of Waterloo. The moments where a character tells another rather artificially the name of such and such a farmhouse or Quatrre Bras crossroads does jar slightly, but Follett like Bernard Cornwell has done his research, and Follett is respected enough to write about cathedral construction in the rebuilding of Notre Dame Paris just as Cornwell has written a decent factual account of Waterloo alongside the romantic version. In my more idiotic moments I wonder how Sharpe, and a Follett hero, acting as adcs to Wellington might have bumped into one another!
We are having a great, relaxed family time here, and trying to live day by day before we drive back. Having heard some of the awful horrors and knife-edge adventures of Sam & Sas's family holiday (they did ultimately have a good time with close friends) across the world we feel glad to have chosen more local, staid journeys, and in our own car. It does of course strike us that the distances and complexities of air travel are inevitable when people fall in love with others from New Zealand or have great friends in the USA. These things tend to conflict with environmental considerations. But good plans tend to involve meeting family and friends in France, in spacious well-equipped gîtes as we did with Judi last summer. Sam and I have been discussing areas of France to meet in, and in any case we plan to visit friends in Normandy in the summer.
This is to wish all our friends and family a hapy and healthy 2024.
I'm writing this in Wirksworth where we're staying with family over the new year. We spent a quiet Christmas at home before we left Edmond in our reliable kennels and drove to England. We arrived on Thursday evening.
Musicians in Lunel last week
We'd decided to drive, and sharing turn and turn about that woekd well through the 1,000 km of France, on Eurotunnel and up the M20, but the M25 was a crawling nightmare. Once on the M40 we were fine again apart from rain squalls - the storms had passed or were further west and north - the M25 delay meant that we drove the familiar last miles in the dark, not as hoped or planned. But we arrived safely at Sam's by 1800 and found Ed, Isla and Karen already installed in their nearby Airbnb. On reflection the journey was a success - I think we shall be happy to drive that way again.
The Lunel sky we left behind
When Jeff and Fi arrived a little later we were delighted - our family was together; we all met up again yesterday for brunch and a mountain of presents. Sadly Sas and Ben had bad colds and could not join us - fingers crossed that they will be better soon.
Mary with Ed and dog Maisie, Jeff, Fi, Isla, Heather and Karen
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
Hi everyone: I’ve written a long deep-dive on the present state of the McMansion, from farmhouse chic to imminent environmental collapse. If you’ve been seeing an inordinate number of big ugly houses pop up in your neighborhood, you are not alone!
In my latest column for The Nation, I defend single stair buildings against their detractors - I think single stair is wonderful! - But I also don’t think it’s some kind of panacea for the housing crisis.
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