(b)logophile

My iNaturalist highlights of 2025

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0200

This year I was much less active on iNaturalist: only 59 observations. But there were still a few good ones among them! (This post has some decent photos too.)

Tri-horned Treehoppers in my cousin's garden in NZ.

A globular springtail, which is by far the tiniest thing I've ever photographed in anything even approximating focus.

Pygopleurus vulpes was back (that's a bumblebee scarab beetle, a most startling combination of scarab antennae and bumblebee-like fluff).

An Agreeable Caterpillar Hunter, the delightfully named Calosoma sycophanta.

Julodis ehrenbergii, a rather large jewel beetle that I've been wanting to see for several years and that was in absolute swarms in the fields outside our house this year.

Spoonwings, owlflies, antlions and snakeflies all made their regular appearances:

Spoonwing

Owlfly

Antlion

Snakefly

Some intriguing beetle eggs, apparently from tribe Clytrini.

When we first moved to Triadi, there were amazing numbers of oil beetles, of at least two species (a blue-black and a green-violet). We had so many I didn’t need to search for them: I would find them climbing the wall of the house. Then the last two years: nothing. So I was very glad this year to spot one on the road:

Meloe autumnalis, apparently.

And right at the end of the year:

A wonderfully wrinkly lily weevil, Brachycerus aegyptiacus.

That’s for the wildlife observations. Photos I’m pleased with as photography I keep on Flickr. It’s been a while since that got updated too. And if you’re interested how I get these close-up shots, I wrote about my macro setup a few years ago.

My 2025 reading

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Here’s my reading list from 2025, lightly annotated. Look for bold for titles I particularly enjoyed (while noting that my enjoyment is not necessarily a recommendation!). These are not in chronological order but grouped thematically.

First the non-fiction:

Gone Bush, Paul Kilgour. A chatty memoir of a life spent tramping the back country of New Zealand. Paul is an old friend so I’m biased, but I enjoyed this very much.
A Memoir of My Former Self, Hilary Mantel. Lots of little gems in here, but the whole is quite sad.
On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz. I didn’t enjoy this as much as I expected to, but it was pleasant enough. (Once I figured out how to edit the e-book formatting, because some part of the non-standard software sequence I use to get ebooks onto my reader removed all margins. Strictly speaking nothing is actually hidden when you’re reading that way, but it really absolutely definitely will not do.)
Blue Machine, Helen Czerski. On the ocean, particularly its larger systems and patterns and structures. Lots of truly surprisingly detail, like a 94-metre-deep hole in the ocean surface, or Ramisyllus the worm with multiple independently mobile anuses.
Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer. This is a rich brew, but well worth it. I had no idea just how chaotic that period was.
The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper, Roland Allen. This was particularly nice on how the availability of notebooks may have contributed to the artistic explosion of Renaissance Italy, by giving painters and sculptors the ability to capture quick sketches in the field to be used later as reference material.
Once Upon a Prime (not finished), Sarah Hart. This was light but plenty fun, on connections between mathematics and literature. I think I didn’t finish it because it got repossessed by its owner.
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, Marvin Harris. Somewhat old-fashioned anthropology, but lots of interesting ideas nonetheless.
The Inklings, Humphrey Carpenter. On the discussion circle of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. I came away more impressed with how deeply they felt the importance of doing what they were doing right, but with a much lower opinion of what they were actually doing, compared to how I went in.
The Religion Construction Kit, Mark Rosenfelder. I don’t remember much from this. Rosenfelders “construction kits” are written as material for worldbuilding or conlanging, and they’re lighter on detail than it turns out I was looking for: lots of lists of possibilities (with the motivation that you probably aren’t aware of all the possibilities that exist) but not much about where any particular possibility comes from in our world or how it works.
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Robert Wright. This more or less convinced me that it would be useful to at least try some meditation practise. I didn’t though.
Sea People, Christina Thompson. On what we know about Polynesian voyaging, and (just as interesting) on how we know it.
Beyond Weird, Philip Ball. This was my big one for 2025, and might yet get a blog post in 2026 trying to express why. I read it twice, because my first time through was too quick and superficial. It’s surveying our current understanding of quantum theory, which (it turns out) is much advanced since last I checked in (late 90’s, with books written in the mid 80’s).
Quantum, Manjit Kumar. Following up on Beyond Weird (which is mostly about the theory and only incidentally about the history), this one tells the story of the development of quantum theory chronologically and with a focus on the personalities and “movements” involved, particularly focusing on Einstein and Bohr. It left me with increased respect for Einstein’s physical intuition, a fair bit of frustration that Bohr’s movement captured so much of the conceptual terrain, unresolved confusion as to whether Einstein was in the end “morally right” in his broad position or not, and a deepened appreciation of just what a weirdo that guy was.

I’ve been reading to our boys in the evenings before they sleep. I didn’t always record these books in my reading list, so I’m not sure if these are all from this year, but these were the ones we’ve done so far:

Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls (content warning for animal death)
Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson (content warning for human death)
The BFG, Roald Dahl (content warning for farting (humourous))
The Pushcart War, Jean Merrill (content warning for anticapitalism (positive))
A Green and Ancient Light, Frederic S. Durbin. This isn’t written as a children’s book, but I read it to them and they enjoyed it. It’s a beautiful, slow, lyrical story.

A bunch of extremely low-effort SF while I was flying around the world, then jetlagged, then flying back around the world, and (predictably enough) jetlagged again:

The Corporation Wars, Ken MacLeod
- The Corporation Wars: Insurgence
- The Corporation Wars: Emergence
Agent Cormac, Neal Asher
- Polity Agent
- Line War
Spatterjay, Neal Asher
- The Voyage of the Sable Keech
- Orbus
Rise of the Jain, Neal Asher
- The Soldier
- The Warship
- The Human

I paid to become a Worldcon member to get the Hugo voter’s packet, and somewhat regretted it. I had already read quite a few of the books and stories included, and from the ones I hadn’t I didn’t particularly enjoy very many.

Absolution, Jeff Vandermeer (recommended only if you’ve read the first three: it’s a worthwhile reinforcing of the story’s foundations)
Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie. These are good shorts, even if you’re not already an Ancillary fan. I think the voter’s packet only had the title story (?) but I enjoyed the rest as well.
Someone you can build a nest in, John Wiswell
Navigational Entanglements, Aliette de Bodard
What Feasts at Night, T Kingfisher
A Sorceress Comes to Call, T Kingfisher
The Stormlight Archive, Brandon Sanderson
- The Way of Kings
- Words of Radiance (not finished: I forced myself through the first one, started the second, and then quickly realised there was no particular reason I needed to do this to myself)

Miscellaneous fiction:

The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez. I bet reviews use the word “dazzling”. This is mythmaking; this is entertwined narrative strands; a significant part of the plot is related as a description of a dance performance. Dazzling. File it with The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall, and please tell me what else you have filed on that shelf because I want to read them too.
Spook Country, William Gibson
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers series. I was pretty lukewarm on the first book in this series: I enjoyed the throwback to New Weird styling but felt like the plot was awkwardly predictable by reasoning about authorial decision-making. I haven’t re-read it, but I’ve grown more enthusiastic about the setting even as the New Weird style has fallen away and the predictability has, if anything, increased. Lowering standards, perhaps.
- House of Open Wounds
- Days of Shattered Faith
The Man From St Petersburg, Ken Follett.
The Fractured Europe Sequence, Dave Hutchinson. A re-read, and I continue to enjoy these an awful lot. They’re spy stuff in the tradition of I guess Le Carré (which makes me think I should read some Le Carré), with some pure-sf mcguffins mixed in (which is in fact something of a spoiler for the first book, as it seems entirely naturalistic for at least its first half). The “fractured Europe” has broken into a cacophony of tiny statelets, all with their own currencies and border controls and intelligence services all interfering with each other, and much of the spy shenanigans are needed simply for moving people or post from one side or Europe to the other. Besides all the intrigue and tension, these are frequently extremely funny books. They’re staying on my occasional-reread shelf.
- Europe in Autumn
- Europe at Midnight
- Europe in Winter
- Europe at Dawn
Exordia, Seth Dickinson. I mostly could get into this, despite not being particularly into the grimdark bit, via a decent amount of interest in the metaphysics he’s aiming for. He lost me completely at the end, though, with two decisions: firstly to go all in on some mildly kinky sex that seemed entirely unnecessary, and secondly to abruptly zoom the scale out in a way that seemed to entirely trivialise those metaphysics (at the same time signalling very clearly his intent to use this as a shared setting for future work).
The Book of Love, Kelly Link. I very much enjoy Link’s short work. Less so the novel, sadly.
The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft. Enjoyably unhinged.
Firefall, Peter Watts (this is Blindsight and Echopraxia published in one volume). I said I don’t like grimdark, and then I go and reread Peter Watts. Is it credible if I say I read Watts for his ideas? (I don’t read him for his ideas, but I do find the ideas fascinating. The afterwords where he traces the ideas of the books back to real research topics are great.)
The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber. I do have a soft spot for SF that engages directly with religious thought, but I have to admit that there are some default modes for such SF that are pretty old and tired by this point. To my (perhaps naive) eye this one steers clear of the obvious rocks, but I can’t say in the end that I understood what the author intended.
The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry
The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley
The Dragon’s Path, Daniel Abraham. I enjoyed this enough, I guess, but I just wasn’t committed enough to the story or characters to carry on into the next one.
The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells. I finally broke down and read these; I did not become a fan. To some extent they group thematically with the Hugo nominees that I’m not so enthusiastic about: trauma and neurodivergence and found family and monster-with-a-soft-heart. I’m a big hypocrite though, because I’m right now enjoying Witch King (by the same author, as it happens) which is all of those things as well. Oh well.
- All Systems Red
- Artificial Condition
- Rogue Protocol
- Exit Strategy
- Network Effect
- Fugitive Telemetry
- System Collapse
Machineries of Empire, Yoon Ha Lee. Oh look, there’s trauma and neurodivergence and monstrousness again, only this time I like it! Can’t expect consistency it appears. But what I enjoy about this series is the sheer audacity of the setting: an evil space empire in which choosing to observe a particular calendar can alter the laws of physics in ways the author is free to make as magical as they like, so long as they also mention some mathematical terminology in the process. That is a trick that slowly wears off though: I enjoyed this reread less than I have in the past, and I probably won’t return to it.
- Ninefox Gambit
- Raven Stratagem
- Revenant Gun
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik
The City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty
Dreamships, Melissa Scott
The Men Return and others, Jack Vance
Commonweal, Graydon Saunders. These are interesting. They describe an extreme society that I’m pretty sure is based on real ideas (Soviet collectivisation and central economic planning maybe?) but I’m also pretty sure the author wants you to read it as a not inherently terrible idea. Only, pulling the other way, he justifies lots of the extremes by some extremely extreme worldbuilding (his society is embedded in a multi-millenia history of misrule by sorceror, and the extremes are justified in contrast to that history), and he’s in-world ambivalent about how extreme is the right amount of extreme to go. And finally, following the Steven Brust Cool Stuff Theory of Writing, it’s pretty clear that what Graydon Saunders finds cool is (a) successful economic planning and (b) artillery engagements. I’m glad I read these; I can’t in conscience recommend them to a general audience; and I’m still entirely bemused as to what the author thinks he’s up to.
- The March North
- A Succession of Bad Days
- Safely You Deliver
- Under One Banner
- A Mist of Grit and Splinters
The Locked Tomb, Tamsyn Muir. A re-read prompted by wondering when the fourth (and final) volume will arrive. These are still fun; a bit less so now that I really understand what’s going on. If “lesbian necromancers in space” sounds fun to you (and yes they are as overwrought as that suggests), give them a try.
- Gideon the Ninth
- Harrow the Ninth
- Nona the Ninth

2025 in review

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Long time since I put anything here. Shrug Let’s try again. What’s happened this year in the de-Jager-Grigoriadou household and in the de Jager head?

2025 in travel

Over the 2024/2025 transition we were in New Zealand. The boys had an absolute blast, as you’d expect, with their Kiwi cousins. We decompressed from the trip with an extended-family gathering at Hopewell Lodge in the Marlborough Sounds (delightful): lots of fun in kayaks and SUPs, and I took a slightly too ambitious rowing trip that ended up lasting three hours and left me aching all over but very proud of myself. I took a short trip myself up to Whanganui to visit my highschool best friend and his family, and the rest of our time was spent in Golden Bay luxuriating in family closeness and peace and quiet.

This year we resolved to see a bit more of the beautiful country we live in. In March we spent a long weekend at the Prespa lakes. We didn’t get on the water but did take a long walk along the island of Agios Achilleios, enjoying the ruins and the cows and the cows in the ruins, and also visited a partially restored water-driven mill. I was struck by the huge stacks of cane poles in the fields by the road, and wrongly assumed that these were a local speciality: it turns out the local speciality is beans, and the poles are imported in enormous quantities to support them. Having learned this we followed a personal tip to a family bean business, and brought home about 10kg of beans of various kinds.

In April we visited the Netherlands, as surprise drop-ins at a party organised by my PhD office-mate. Thanks to Dim’s generosity we had a place to stay in Amsterdam. The boys were extremely enthusiastic about biking around town (their enthusiasm didn’t wane even in the rain, which surprised me). We played board games with Marieke & Niels & family (this theme will come back later), and drove up to Wieringerwerf for the party with Michael & Julie & family at a campsite on the Ijsselmeer. The boys were deep in a backrooms phase and made awkwardly spooky videos of the genuinely spooky atmosphere, where the land and the sea are both all horizon, huge wind turbines lurk in the distance in all directions, and what should be a beach is instead a mixture of evenly-graded crushed rock and some kind of plastic-rubber sealant.

June had me in Amsterdam for work, and I continued on by train to London to stay with Robert & Lena. (I also attended a conference and caught up briefly with Ola & Stephen, but I was both ill and entirely social-battery-short-circuited by that point, so that part of the trip was less successful.) Besides the great joy of conversation not inside a rectangular frame, the highlight of the trip was my introduction to the Victoria & Albert Museum. We also visited the Natural History Museum (in its spectacular building) and the British Museum (where I particularly enjoyed the Assyrian winged-lion gateway guards, with their repeating-motif beard patterns and their leg structure that makes no sense unless seen as a relief sculpture that happens to be wrapped around both sides of a three-dimensional base). But the V&A was where I fell in love, to the point where I expect to make another visit to London someday just to spend more time there. I particularly enjoyed the exhibition of British studio pottery (now closed), and brought home the enormous “visual catalogue” to preserve a little of the experience. (That wasn’t the only book I bought on the trip; in fact I came home with 12kg of new books, although I’m not responsible for quite all of them. That’s more new baggage, by weight, than what I left with originally.)

We had some summer holiday time in July in Katerini (with Olga’s brother and his family visiting from Sweden), then spent fully half of August in the university campsite at Poseidi on Chalkidiki. For various reasons this holiday wasn’t very restful (more on this below) but at least we got some time at the beach.

Rounding out the travel for the year (except for a work trip I took in December, which barely counts as I spent all five days either at the office or at the hotel next to the office), at the end of August the boys and I joined a party of around 30 climbing Mt Olympus. The boys were absolute champions about it, walking without complaint and carrying their share of the baggage, and we made it comfortably to the highest refuge (2760m) over two short walking days. On the second day M(12) and I joined the group going up the Louki (“the drainpipe”) to the peak Mytikas, but we decided halfway up that it was too challenging for us and came back down to the refuge. The third day was walking out again, and we returned to Katerini very tired (and in my case anticipating several days of muscle ache) but very proud of ourselves.

2025 in life changes

This school year (starting September) Olga started working reduced hours: in exchange for slightly reduced pay she gets enormously reduced stress, and is very happy with the adjustment. I’ve been through two changes in how my tax status and employment is structured over the past two years, with the final arrangement also giving me somewhat reduced income and somewhat reduced stress; I’m less enthusiastic about my change than Olga is about hers, but it was more or less forced on us by changes in employment law and I’m making the best of it I can.

One of the consequences of these changes is that we could no longer justify the cost of keeping the boys at Olga’s school (where her status as a teacher gets us a discount, but not a large one). So both boys are now in Greek state schools: Y(10) is at our local school in Triadi, and M(12) to our great relief scored highly enough in the entrance exam for the Thessaloniki Music School and is attending there. (There is only one music school serving the whole Thessaloniki area, so although the exam is not difficult there is no room whatsoever for error: the lowest grade that got admitted this year was 97.5%.)

Both boys are delighted with their new schools. M(12) enjoys the mixing of age levels (on the bus and in his chosen performance group, which also happens to be run by a friend of ours) and the constant background of music spilling over from adjacent rooms into his lessons. Y(10) enjoys our daily walks to school (and so do I – we’re both proud that after missing just one day early in the term we’ve kept an unbroken streak of walking every day it was physically possible, for the rest of the year) and having friends close enough that he can visit them casually during the week. We made this change as a deliberate experiment, with the backup plan (if this wasn’t successful) of leaving the country; we’re both very relieved that has turned out not to be necessary!

2025 in music

In August, while at the campground in Poseidi, we got the news that Patrick Riddett had passed away. Pat was a huge influence on me musically and an absolutely delightful man, kind and funny and an excellent musician with a nose for lovely tunes. Playing with him was always a highlight of our Golden Bay visits, and I’m glad I got another couple of busking sessions in with him at the Takaka Saturday market this last trip. We would swap tunes occasionally by mail: I have a couple that I won’t be able to share with him, and I know I didn’t get to hear anything like all the gems that he had filed away. I miss him.

In more cheerful musical news: Y(10) continues with piano, and is now playing pieces that he remembers from hearing M(12) playing in past years. M(12) is taking piano lessons this year from a jazz pianist (Philippos Kostavelis) and guitar from Thanos Gountanos: both are really excellent musicians and he’s getting a lot from lessons with them. Lately he’s been bringing home guitar pieces that we can play together (the Django Reinhardt piece Minor Swing and Dave Brubeck’s Take Five were recent hits) which is wonderful fun. And with Olga’s reduced hours we again occasionally have time to sit together and make music, which is a joy we’ve been missing for the last year or two.

The Irish sessions continue monthly, although my enthusiasm is somewhat on the wane. I would really like to tackle some of those tunes with an elevated level of musicianship (more mindful arrangements, especially of harmony and countermelody parts), but I don’t see much chance of that in the session format we have.

Early in the year I followed a course given by Dimitris Tasoudis, where we played modern music with an interesting mixture of composition, improvisation, and something more like free-variation-within-constraints. The course is paused while he finishes a PhD, but I hope we get back to it later this year.

2025 in health

Olga started the summer holiday in proper summer style: with pneumonia. That took a good three weeks to clear, and her recovery took even longer. And there was more to come.

Patrick’s passing wasn’t the only bad news we got at the campground. Olga went for a routine yearly checkup, found a cyst that needed removal, and ended up spending the second half of her summer holiday chasing gynecologists, surgeons, and hospital administration. She had the cyst removed in September and is now fully recovered, except for the damage to our wallet from the insurance refusing to cover the surgery (but not telling us this in advance, so that we went ahead on the assumption that they would). We have the luxury that this isn’t a financial disaster for us but it was a nasty shock.

I spent that same month on antibiotics for a prostate infection. Apparently the prostate is particularly hard to get medicine to, so the course ran for a full four weeks and utterly destroyed the, ahem, regular functioning of my digestive system: four months later it’s not back to its previous state, which may mean it never will be. In more positive news, a month on antibiotics meant a month with absolutely no alcohol, and I found that comfortable enough that I’ve cut back my consumption to much less than before the summer. I’m not 100% teetotal but I’m defaulting to not drinking, which is a significant change for the better.

2025 in boardgames

That’s not a category I would have predicted to be significant, but here we are. In 2024 we became family fans of the modern-classic boardgame Settlers of Catan: we played it in Katerini with the extended family, and we took it to the campground and played it sweating in the August heat. In 2025 we visited Marieke & Niels in Amsterdam, and got the benefit of their extensive boardgame knoweldge. As a result, 2025’s summer included Senjutsu (a great hit with the boys) and Root (a great hit with me, and a slightly lesser hit with the boys). Olga and I have rediscovered the fabulous game Tantrix, at which (unlike dominos) we are roughly evenly matched. And Amanita Design (creators of many video games that we’ve collectively enjoyed: Samorost, Botanicula, Machinarium, and Creaks) this year released a boardgame Pilgrims: Curious Adventures which has quickly become a family favourite.

2025 in creativity

Olga has taken up pottery, and is producing (besides the awkward, lumpy stuff which all pottery students have to go through) some genuinely beautiful pieces and also some pleasantly characterful ones.

Both boys continue to draw in sporadic flurries of intense creativity. They’re also both sometimes using their iPad cameras and the built-in photo-editing tools to make odd artworks, mostly either creepy or hilarious. They’ve got some solid animation skills which occasionally get turned to storytelling, mostly with lego figures and much hilarity.

I’ve produced almost nothing of note this year. A very small piece of woodworking (a portable railing for the boys to use their toy skateboards on) and some unfinished programming projects are about all. I’ve taken a few macro photos, but nothing particularly of note as photography.

2025 in beetles

This year felt like a much slower year for iNaturalist observations, and the statistics agree. But there were a few jolly good ones: I’ll make a separate post for those.

2025 in books

I read around 80 books this year (I’ll be making an overview post about those at some point). Many of them were simply turn-my-brain-off comfort (re)reading, but a few had a bit more substance to them. Some standouts:

Inventing the Renaissance (Ada Palmer) and The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper (Roland Allen) gave both historical/cultural knowledge and an unbundance of quirky detail. I also enjoyed Sea People (Christina Thompson), on what we know about the Polynesian voyaging tradition and, equally interestingly, how we know it; and Blue Machine (Helen Czerski), about the ocean.
Gone Bush (Paul Kilgour) is a memoir of a lifetime of tramping in New Zealand’s back country. It’s written by a friend so I’m biased, but I enjoyed it very much.
I’ve become a solid fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers series, despite only a lukewarm appreciation for the first in the series: as long as he keeps writing these I expect I’ll keep reading them.
I read to the boys in the evenings, and this year I particularly enjoyed The Pushcart War (Jean Merrill) and A Green and Ancient Light (Frederic S. Durbin).
The Spear Cuts Through Water (Simon Jimenez), a fantasy novel largely told in the form of dance, and just as odd as that makes it sound.
Saving the best for last: Beyond Weird (Philip Ball), which summarises our current knowledge about quantum physics. This one should get its own post at some point, but for now let me say that it was a profound joy to engage my intellect with this subject again (the last time being, gulp, more than 25 years ago): I read it twice and I’m not done with it yet.

2025 in programming

This was the year I experimented properly with LLM tools and techniques, and the year I got convinced that this is what my professional expertise needs to turn into. I’ve used agentive tools (Claude Code, amp, and the copilot integration in VS Code) to do programming work that I could not have done otherwise, whether because of lack of specific knowledge, lack of time, or the return-on-effort ratio not being high enough for me to get over the first initial exploration of a possibility. At the same time I’m deeply concerned about the effects both long-term and short-term on the industry I work in, and about the massive potential for misuse of these technologies.

2025 in tools

I’m now using, and enjoying, Obsidian quite heavily. I still don’t have a good handle on my to-read article list and simple bookmarks, but I’m fairly happy with how I’m doing more contentful note-taking.

I decided to stop buying cheap mechanical pencils and being irritated when they stop working, and now own a GraphGear 1000. Which gets almost no use, just like the cheap ones didn’t, but at least when the “almost” of “almost no” strikes I know it’ll still be functional and will feel nice in my hand.

2025 in anxiety

Yeah, the Western world is not looking so great at the moment, is it? 2025 was a bad year, I’m afraid 2026 may not be much better.

2023 in review

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0200

It’s been a year. Featuring a lot of music (but never enough), growing boys at home, a new car, one trip up a mountain and one around the world. No partridge, no pear tree.

In May I reworked this site and resurrected its blog, so the simplest way to survey the year is to look at its archive. Watching the post frequency gives a fairly accurate picture of the year: an optimistic and energetic start, then summer breaks the cadence, and then titles like “weak notes” and “weaker notes” start appearing. In September I caught covid and damaged my ribs, and my recovery from that double whammy took months and months and months (arguably I’m still not back to full strength).

Some high points along the way:

The year began with a family trip to New Zealand: very little sightseeing and very much people-seeing, which is how we like it. And we brought home quite frankly ridiculous amounts of beautiful handcrafts.
Early in the year we had a visit from some dear friends from Amsterdam, which was delightful.
In May, as I mentioned, I got this blog running again.
Also in May we adopted a kitten, Ares, who I found yowling in an olive tree. We loved him very much, but one day he abruptly stopped being around. We don’t know if a dog got him, or a car, or poison, or what. But at least while he was with us he had a good life, comfortable and with lots of cuddles.
In June the winners of the European Statistics Competition were announced, and the students that Olga mentored took the first prize in the age 14-16 category.
Portitsa Festival was a wonderful week of music.
In September Manu and I climbed Mt Olympus. This was however also the trip where I damaged my ribs and the following week I came down with covid: the high points are harder to find after that.

Doing

The boys are getting more serious about music: both are enthusiastically playing piano, and Manu is making good progress on guitar as well. We’ve discovered the benefits of headphones, both for focused practising and for listening to whatever the latest enthusiasm is on constant repeat without driving everyone else up the wall.

This year I, too, got more serious about Irish music, learning tunes for a monthly session and by the end of the year also playing regular gigs with a small band. I’m playing mandola, and eyeing sidelong the possibilities of Irish bouzouki and tenor banjo.

We have a new car, which is convenient for two reasons: it’s much more pleasant to drive than the old one (both because it’s smaller and because car technology has moved on a bit in the last fifteen years), but since we kept both we’re now also able to move independently, when Olga has an evening appointment and the boys need taking to athletics and I’ve got a band practise.

Speaking of which: they’re reaching the age where we spend incredible amounts of time driving them all over the place. We overdid it slightly for Manu and have had to cut back a little, but they’re still doing music lessons, athletics, and ping pong: it’s a lot of running around! Their time at home is roughly evenly split between football and lego.

Reading

I read around 70 books this year. Not many of them made a particular impression, which is slightly alarming.

Babel by R.F. Kuang has a particularly brilliant literalised metaphor.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is brutal and ridiculously over-the-top, but the footnotes relentlessly remind you that reality is uncomfortably close to the satire.
Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy was plenty fun.
The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner is exuberant and joyful and was just what I needed when I had to spend a lot of time in bed.
Menewood by Nicola Griffith is a fine sequel to Hild.
Most recently The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow was fascinating about early human history.

I did a lot of comfortable (re)reading: old favourites like Blindsight and Echopraxia (Peter Watts) and Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb whose challenges I know back-to-front, and authors who choose not to challenge as much, like Naomi Novik, Ann Leckie, Nick Harkaway. I enjoy them! But there’s no The Blazing World or Rats and Gargoyles or Too Like the Lightning among them. Perhaps I should re-read The Gone-Away World.

Listening

Standout discovery of this year is Hazelius Hedin, in particular the album Sunnan and in particular the track Krivo Polska.

Second standout discovery is Turn Signal by Eric Harland, from the album Voyager: live by night. When Marijn and Anna first played this for me we reached the transition-moment when the cross-rhythms kick off and I swore, loudly and enthusiastically: I’ve stopped swearing at it but honestly the effect is still much the same, it’s only that I know to expect it.

Also much enjoyed this year: Ale Carr (Swedish, cittern), Louis Bingham (English, fretted-string multi-instrumentalist), Tijn Berends (Dutch, Irish bouzouki and harmonica). Wayward Jane is a recent discovery.

Making

Not much this year. A few photographs. Perhaps more next year?

Month Notes

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Covid recovery has proceeded to “pretty much ok, but I need to make time for a nap every day”. Which honestly isn’t so bad, I could get used to this.

The boys have started so many after-school activities we’ve had to juggle their schedules to avoid them overlapping: athletics, ping-pong, piano, guitar, and a course in stop-motion animation.

With all the running around I’ve managed to make a tiny bit of progress on the secret project (which is still secret) and also fit in regular Irish practise, for our first gig later this month.

Reading: Nick Harkaway, Ted Chiang.

Writing: a little joke about music notation and a more careful post about the movie Arrival.

Thinking: I’ve spent a lot of time with the research paper that introduced the notion of “deliberate practise” as a prequisite for mastering a skill. It’s a classic academic exercise and not obviously directly relevant to my life (they were interested in what sets apart the truly expert practitioners of a skill, at say national or international levls) but I did manage to get quite a bit out. Perhaps that will be another post here, when I realise I’ve done nothing worth recording in a week notes for another week.

Story of Your Arrival

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0200

For quite literally years I’ve been fascinated by the changes the film Arrival makes to the plot of Story of Your Life, the Ted Chiang story it’s based on. I’m going to thoroughly spoil both (which should be fine since they came out in 1998 and 2016) because I finally found the angle to explain that fascination. Here we go, buckle up.

Both plots concern first contact with aliens, and a linguist, Louise, who learns to communicate with them. Their language is based on a perception of spacetime very different to ours: they perceive entire spacetime histories, which as we perceive it corresponds to memories of the future being available in the present. Learning this language modifies Louise’s consciousness, giving her the same acausal view of the universe.

But the story and the film disagree on the metaphysics of this perceptual shift, and we see that disagreement in two major differences in plot: a personal tragedy that Louise remembers from her future, and the political resolution of the tension caused by first contact. It’s the metaphysics I find fascinating, but to understand them we need to study the plot differences.

First the political. In the film Louise uses her atemporal perspective to avert catastrophe, convincing a politician to choose peace by giving him a personal message based on a future memory. In the story, instead, her atemporal perspective makes her aware of the impending resolution of the contact situation (the aliens leave as abruptly and inexplicably as they arrived), but she tells no one and takes no action. This alteration makes perfect sense for a film: it increases the tension, it gives the protagonist something to protag. But it establishes as canon that information from the future can have an impact on the present.

And that means the film cannot take the story’s approach to Louise’s personal tragedy. In the story, her daughter dies in a climbing accident that Louise knew (by future memory) was coming, and that she could have prevented simply by telling her daughter not to go on that particular trip. In Chiang’s metaphysics the atemporal perspective brings with it a compulsion to act to bring about the future memory, which overwhelms any motivation Louise might have had to make future-informed choices in the present. Obviously that’s not going to fly in the film’s version, when she’s done exactly that in the political sphere, so the daughter’s death is rewritten as the result of an incurable disease: equally foreseen, but no longer avoidable. Instead it is framed explicitly as her choice to have a child, in full foreknowledge of the grief to come from losing that child.

So there’s the enormous gaping chasm between the themes of film and story. The film is about the choice to love-and-lose, made more pointed by the clear knowledge of when and how the loss will occur, but also more intense by the clear knowledge of how much love will come in the meantime. We might say it’s about external determinism: how events in the world will happen, whether we want them to or not, and how we have little influence to bring to bear on them, but also how we must still choose how we will engage with them. Which is a grand theme, all power to them, although it seems a bit unnecessary to bring in aliens and whacko causality: it’s an equally fraught choice to have a child in poverty, or in time of war, or in the face of climate catastrophe, for instance.

The story, on the other hand, is about internal determinism. Its theme is that we do not make choices. Once Louise knows her daughter died in a climbing accident, she also knows she didn’t warn her off: she no longer has the capacity to choose to warn her off, even though the moment at which she might do so is still in the future.

This is a much trickier concept than the films, and I’m not really surprised they softened it for the screenplay: not just because their version allows the political tension and protagonism, but also because it’s very hard to convey what’s really intended here. I have enormous respect for Chiang for coming up with the idea, and his attempt is quite heroic, but it’s also at root quite incoherent.

Louise narrates her periods of atemporal perception as feeling “like the carefully bland exchanges of spies who meet in public, but never break cover”. From the perspective of the narration, then, what she experiences at that moment is unlike what she would have experienced without the atemporal perception; but what she does is constrained to match what she would have done if perceiving and remembering only her past. Unless Chiang is a mind/body dualist, that makes no kind of sense!

And I mean, these causal loops are pretty tricky anyway. In the movie’s metaphysics, where choices can be made based on atemporal perception, could Louise have a future-memory of simply letting her child die in a climbing accident? Seems unlikely. But what future-memory should she have instead? If she warns her off, there’s no future in which she died, so the warning wouldn’t be based on anything: that’s incoherent. Chiang’s metaphor of Fermat’s principle of least time suggests that there should be a “most coherent” history-line, which I suppose might include Louise coincidentally suggesting an alternative, or (more tragically) might have her trying to warn her daughter but failing to convince her to stay home. Chiang’s version, though, goes all the way to Louise behaving exactly as she would have if she had no memory of the future at all: I can’t see any way to make that consistent with the narration saying that her internal experience of events in the moment is affected by her atemporal perception.

That’s where I think the movie’s version of how things work might actually be more appropriate than Chiang’s. Sure, remembering the future is probably inconsistent with the phenomenology of “choosing”; maybe even the phenomenology is, as Chiang suggests, “a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would” (I’m sceptical about obligation, but let’s run with it); still it seems like what she will do (and knows she will do, and feels obligated etc) should be influenced by what she knows, which can include other information from the future. The weirdness of Chiang’s setup is his insistence that what she knows she will do also must be precisely what she would have done without foreknowledge.

Much though I respect Chiang, I think he missed a trick here. He almost showed us what an atemporal perspective could look like, and he argues convincingly that it’s incompatible with the experience of free will, but he messed up the details trying to make Louise’s history coherent from both perspectives at the same time. If he had allowed her actions to look prescient to an outside observer, I think he would have had to work harder for his tragedy but he could still have had it, Cassandra-style.

But then the film, which perhaps gets this retroactive causality thing slightly better, chose instead to avoid the question entirely by making the tragedy unavoidable. And in the process both trivialised the matter (from “free will is an illusion” to ”it’s worth choosing love even when it brings pain”) and made it, quite frankly, a bit unclear why they bothered with the sci-fi setting. On the other hand the heptapod scenes are utterly gorgeous, so I really shouldn’t complain.

In short: the story is a brilliant concept, the film is an excellent cinematic treatment of it, and neither of them gets it right. But if you put together some pieces from each, you can just about see the shape of what “getting it right” might have been. Which, honestly, is pretty impressive for something so bonkers. Hats off to them all.

Ambiguity

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0200

I learned from Kara Goldfinch about Braille music notation, which sounds really neat. But one thing about it is particularly hilarious: the note we call C is written, in Braille music notation, “D”. So I trawled wikipedia and my own (sometimes painful) music experience for a few more of those.

Firstly, let’s clear up what’s going on with the Braille transposition. Wikipedia explains: it’s based on solfège so the D of course stands for “do”. And what would logically follow after D? Well in this case: “defghij”. That’s, honestly, at least as logical as starting at C and going CDEFG… AB. 🤷

And I mean, reading that article on solfège helps me understand why they didn’t go with the rest of the solfège note initials. Because some people use “ti” and others use “si”, and the Elizabethan version of the system (which actually turns up in King Lear!) only used four syllables (mi, fa, sol, la) and repeated three of them for the remaining notes. I say “remaining notes” but of course Elizabethan mi was not modern mi, that would be la. 🤷

Speaking of “si”: I live in Greece and play music with Greeks who use solfège, but I trained on ABC. So when a Greek says “si” I hear “C” and I play the wrong note. 🤷

Ten years ago I lived in the Netherlands, and played music with folks who also used ABC, but in Dutch. When someone says “E” in Dutch, I hear “A”, and again I play the wrong note. 🤷

My mandola is tuned CGDA (as is standard), but which way? As the bottom string in pitch is at the top of the instrument in playing position, I have no good answer. This sounds like a joke, but there genuinely are musicians who list their strings “bottom to top” and mean descending pitch order, by ascending position of the pick. “Lowest first?” “Yes.” 🤷

Weaker notes

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0300

This week we started regular practises for the Irish band. Not much else of note. I’m still very easily tired and have been taking naps at odd moments in the day. Couple of tunes and a bit of reading.

Two new tunes:

The lovely Vals efter Lasse i Lyby. I link this particular version because the Swedish mandolinist pronounces the name properly, and the vowel of “Lyby” is rather wonderful. I first encountered it in the rendition by Ale Carr & Esko Järvelä.
The Gator Strut which I learned many years ago but have pretty much forgotten in the meantime. My big mando is in D not C, so it’s not quite a mandocello per se, but it still has a pretty good swampy sound on the low strings.

I finished Stella Maris and was somewhat unimpressed. I know just a little about the philosophy-of-mathematics subject matter, but that little is enough to spot places where he’s mixing up levels of analysis in ways that wouldn’t really make sense to someone with the abilities the character is supposed to have. It’s similar to the problem of writing a character who is a great poet, if you yourself are not a great poet: if you have to actually show any of their poetry, you’re a bit stuck. Add this to the fact that he apparently finally felt himself ready to write a female character, after 50 years or whatever it is, and then made her utterly extremely exceptional in just about every way you could think of, and several that probably wouldn’t occur to you, and it starts looking rather convenient that he died before having to answer any criticism about this one.

It did maybe possibly give me the insight I needed to understand the anti-novel structure of The Passenger, although I have to say I’m profoundly unimpressed with all the possibilities I’ve come up with so far.

Weak notes

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0300

Theme of this week is “recovery”. I’m through the covid but still easily tired. I’ve figured out I need to sleep sitting up to avoid my ribs murdering me, and with that adjustment they’re slowly improving.

With the boys we’ve been rebuilding out lego technic models (42120 Rescue Hovercraft and 42117 Racing Plane). We built the b-models of both and I think they’ve finally clicked on why it’s useful to keep the set’s pieces together.

Reading: I read Menewood, the just-published sequel to Hild. I absolutely loved Hild, and I’ve been waiting enthusiastically for Menewood: I wasn’t disappointed. It’s similarly immersive, beautiful, and engaging. The perspective moves out of Hild’s head occasionally, which gives us little glimpses of just how extraordinary she is in the eyes of the people around her. (And if it seems a wish-fulfillment fantasy to put so much strength and cleverness and charisma in a woman not yet twenty years old, an after-note on the historical record reminds us that Hild’s achievements were chronicled fifty years after her death, and that more than a millenium after she lived she is still venerated as a saint.)

New tune: Beare Island

New YouTube discovery: Clickspring machining and clockmaking.

Month notes

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0300

It’s been a whole month, including some events of note. Some short notes, about events both notable and not: a mountain, some music, my reading, and more.

The Big One

Manu and I did a trip up Mt Olympus, along with a bunch of old friends and new ones. We started at Gortsia (1100m) on Saturday afternoon, and tramped for 3 hours to reach the refuge Petrostrouga (1930m) for our first night. Sunday morning we took 4 hours to reach the refuge Apostolidis (2760m). This leg we passed along a ridge called “The Neck” with spectacular but also rather frightening slopes on either side. Between these slopes and the long walks, by the time we reached the refuge Manu and I had decided we weren’t up for the final ascent to the highest peak Mitikas, and we stayed indoors while the more adventurous members of the party donned helmets and set off. We did however take a stroll up to an easier peak nearby, Profitis Ilias, at 2803m. On Monday we came all the way down by the same route (much more confidently along The Neck’s ridgeline this time) and took ourselves, weary but triumphant, home.

However the trip did not all go entirely according to plan. In fact I injured myself, bruising my ribs in what I’m calling “a risky untethered descent” (to be more precise: getting down off my bunk bed in a hurry in the middle of the night). In the week following I’ve had covid (whether related to the trip or not I cannot tell), and the ribs have made the relatively mild coughing much less pleasant.

To be honest though, if that’s the price I have to pay to get high on hills, I’m willing. It was grand to be up in that spectacular country, and delightful to share it with Manu and to have him so enthusiastic for the wildlife and the beauty up there.

Music

We advertised our Irish session and got some drop-in visitors: two Australians, each of them with a few more clues than most of the rest of us have put together. Then the next weekend we played a gig at the Spiti Tou Filaka (an open-air venue in Angelochori). I wasn’t delighted with our performance, but it wasn’t embarrassing. Lots of friends out in support. I’ve been listening to Mike McGoldrick (wicked fast) and I’ve ordered the new CD of Tijn Berends on bouzouki.

New tunes:

The Green Cake by Jonathan Berkahn (thanks Naomi)
Da Lounge Bar by Annlaug Børsheim
Pull the Knife and Stick It Again

There’s also a music-adjacent secret project which I’m not saying anything about just at the moment.

Reading

Pretentious high culture: I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and it slightly wrecked me. Firstly because it’s an incredibly sad novel, full of defeat and failure and overwhelm, but also because I finished it completely unable to understand what he was trying to achieve. I’ve got Stella Maris waiting for me in hopes that may help me see what he was trying for, but I don’t quite dare enter that emotional landscape just yet. It reminds me a lot of my reaction to M John Harrison: an odd combination of respect, dislike, and bafflement. Only with Harrison I think I understand the kind of argument he’s making, even if the argument itself is too clever for me to follow; similarly with the other work of McCarthy’s that I know and love, I may not understand what he’s trying to say but I can at least guess at what he’s talking about. Here the formal structure is so odd it’s very clearly intending something, but I can’t figure out a something that fits the content in any coherent way.

Joyful, exhuberant low culture: in recovery from The Passenger and from covid, I’ve hurtled through the six books of Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series. They’re pretty short (most took me only 4 or 5 hours of reading time) and very compellingly written. I particularly enjoyed the setting, which is Mediterranean-inspired (although not historical), and of course the larger-than-life figures with their larger-than-life problems and larger-than-life solutions.

Thinking

Making Hard Things Easy by Julia Evans (@b0rk@social.jvns.ca)
Why Git is hard by Nick Fagerlund (@nfagerlund@mastodon.social) whose short review of the Queen’s Thief series sent me that way
for work: design systems and server-driven UI
also for work: Conway’s law