A week in the Netherlands

Did you know you can get a direct flight from Seattle to Amsterdam? Being trapped in an airline seat for ten hours is my personal idea of hell, which is partly why I've only traveled to Europe once before in my life, but I do really appreciate not having to deal with layovers.

Anyway, the Netherlands is fantastic. I followed my standard travel strategy of not planning any activities ahead of time, and once again it worked out perfectly fine. I happened to get there just before the end of the ~2-month period that the Keukenhof botanical garden is open, so I got to see lots of beautiful tulips.

I stayed in Delft, an impossibly pleasant town full of canals and old spired churches and more dedicated bicycle parking than I've ever seen in my life. (Notwithstanding all the cars parked along the canals, cycling seemed to be the more popular means of getting around.)

My absolute favorite thing though: the library in Delft is open until 11pm on weeknights and serves wine. Can we please adopt this as a model for libraries everywhere?

Amsterdam, the Hague, and Leiden were all lovely as well. (Shout-out to Paco Ciao in Leiden for doing a remarkably-convincing job of disguising a restaurant entrance as a wardrobe.) I could happily spend much more time in this country.

re: qntm's technically-qualifies-as-a-novel Fine Structure

Strong on creativity, weak on cohesiveness. Several cool ideas in play here:

But the plot unfolds through a series of little stories that jump around in time and space and it’s a little too fragmented for my taste. The characters don’t have much character, and there’s an occasional feeling that the novel’s plot is being retconned over the plots of its building blocks.

To provide the true level of contrast Ching is experiencing, the world outside would have to be bigger, too, much bigger than a simple yellow Sun shining down on simple green grass. It would need to be created like a fractal, with intelligent patterns on every conceivable level, going up higher and higher into the sky, cut and carved into impossibly intricate shapes, with whole universes forming the building blocks of megaverses, themselves forming the foundations of still larger and more complex structures, with every tiniest component picked out in a unique and scintillating colour, voice, texture and emotion, and the whole thing extending upwards for hundreds and hundreds of dimensions, with no end to the wonder in sight. (p. 169)

re: grimdark macho action novella You Were Never Really Here

Emotionally-damaged hypercompetent man proves his fundamental goodness by being violent toward really bad people. Similar appeal as Taken. I have mixed feelings about this kind of story, but it is an entertaining read.

re: Dungeon Crawler Carl books 4-8

There’s no such thing as a sad ending if it’s by the side of the people who make you happy. (A Parade of Horribles, p. 441)

These books continue to be insane in the best possible way and I have yet to be disappointed by any of them. It takes a special skill to write stuff that's utterly wacky and absurd and yet still grips the reader emotionally. Dinniman's leveled up that skill pretty high. (I was so touched by that moment in book five when the protagonist assuages his talking cat's insecurity by comparing his feelings about her to her feelings about her pet velociraptor.)

Jeff Hays also continues to do an incredible job with the audiobooks. We even get a couple songs sung in the voices of Donut (book 5) and Prepotente (book 8).

re: Matt Ridley's slightly-concealed-libertarian-manifesto The Evolution of Everything

Ridley thinks we underestimate the power of bottom-up processes and overestimate the need for top-down design. He sees a connection between the difficulty many people have had in accepting that life evolved without a designer, and the tendency to believe central planning is necessary in other domains such as the economy, healthcare, and education. The book is more polemical than I was expecting; one of its main goals is to argue for libertarian political positions, such as:

• the 2008 financial crisis was largely attributable to government meddling
• government control of currency does more harm than good (he discusses Scottish banks in the 18th-19th centuries as evidence that a system where multiple competing banks issue their own currency can work well)
• education might be better supplied by the free market than the state (one interesting tidbit in this chapter is that literacy rates in the US and UK were high before the institution of public education)

I agree that we do frequently overestimate our ability to design good solutions to social problems. We tend to be overly confident in our ideologies and our understanding of the world, and when we translate our perfect-seeming ideas into grand centralized plans we magnify the impact of our errors. For the same reason, though, I think we should be hesitant to change the status quo too radically too quickly. Even if, say, the argument against central banks makes sense to you, you probably shouldn’t be pushing to immediately abolish the Fed. (Not that Ridley is necessarily doing that.) You should retain some healthy skepticism about our ability to really predict the implications of such a change, and try to make incremental, lower-stakes changes in the desired direction instead.

I also want to point out that the distinction between top-down and bottom-up approaches is somewhat fuzzy. Bottom-up biological evolution produced brains which make top-down decisions; bottom-up democratic processes invest power in leaders who build top-down bureaucracies; etc. So there’s a bit of a judgment call as to whether you view those brains/bureaucracies/etc as the solutions arrived at by the bottom-up processes or as top-down competitors to those processes.

Discussion topic: how fair do you think the following is?

Take six basic needs of a human being: food, clothing, health, education, shelter and transport. Roughly speaking, in most countries the market provides food and clothing, the state provides healthcare and education, while shelter and transport are provided by a mixture of the two – private firms with semi-monopolistic privileges supplied by government: crony capitalism, in a phrase.

Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards? … As for transport and shelter, broadly speaking the parts that the market supplies – budget airlines, house-building – have got cheaper and better, while the parts that the state supplies – infrastructure and land planning – have got more expensive and slower. (pp. 114-115)

re: monochromatic puzzle platformer Limbo

I’m on a bit of a puzzle platformer binge. Last month I reviewed Portal 2, Creaks, and Öoo; I don’t love Limbo as much as any of those, but I did enjoy it. The most memorable aspect is the quietly creepy art style.

re: dichromatic puzzle platformer ElecHead

This is an earlier game from the creator of Öoo. Every surface you—or more precisely, your head—touch gets electrified, activating any mechanisms that are contiguous with it; you have to find ways to be touching (or not touching) the right spots at the right times to make a path for yourself. It’s fun!

re: colorful non-puzzle platformer Splasher

This is a sidescroller where you spray different kinds of paint onto surfaces to change what happens when you touch them. The game was made for speedrunning, as evidenced by the dedicated speedrunning modes that are so prominent I started one by accident at one point. But though I can occasionally be sucked into time optimization on a small scale—I was obsessed with Neon White for a bit—I don’t have the patience to learn to speedrun an entire game. And this one didn’t grab me enough to really want to complete a second playthrough. But it did scratch my platformer itch for a bit.

re: Alan Wake

I think this game might work best as a travel brochure for the Pacific Northwest. I was jealous of the protagonist wandering through the lush forested mountains while I sat at home sick staring at a screen. Unfortunately I just didn’t like the gameplay. It’s basically a third-person shooter with one extra mechanic: you have to shine a flashlight on enemies for some period of time before you can kill them. I found that more tedious than fun. I was underwhelmed by the narrative as well; it's got some of the ingredients of a good horror story but fails to elicit much emotional connection to the characters or any deep sense of mystery.