Skyrim or Switzerland?

Skyrim or Switzerland?

Ok, the child with glasses is a giveaway. Yes, that's right: Skyrim*! (*modded)

What you can't feel in this lens-flared photo ("this card is mostly blue") is this: the cold wind off the frigid lake, the warm sun pooling on your skin, the ferry schedule so well-implemented that we left with zero seconds of delay/advance, the multilingual chatter of tourists and locals filling the boat.


This post's theme word is incurvariid, "of or relating to a small family of minute moths." I need three incurvariid samples for my next potion; may I borrow your butteryfly net?

The Visible Man

Habits change over time, let's start with that. It is unusual of me to bail on reading a physical book, but this is partly because of the inertia --- literally --- that the book possesses. Ebooks are different. For one, they are not physically present, so there is no cluttery pile accumulating at my bedside; discarded ebooks just get pushed to the bottom of the stack. And reading an ebook requires a physical device (in my case, the fantastic Kobo mini, sadly discontinued), which is easily loaded with thousands of other books, so it is easy to put down one book and switch to another.  Plus, ebooks are plentiful in my desired reading language no matter where I am physically located; the same is not true of physical books.

But finally. The New York Public Library has most strongly enabled me to be a book-quitter. There is a huge selection of books available, free, so many that my queue is hundreds of books long, and every single one in the queue looks really interesting.

So when I start reading a book (take, for instance, The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman) and it's a little weird, I can keep reading it, through distasteful scenes and flat writing and poor characterizations. And when the interesting plot is finally, irretrievably poisoned by the continued lack of choices or actions by the narrator, and becomes a boring chore of moving my eyes across the words, I can easily bail on the book, put it down, and clease my palate with some of my bookmarked favorites, chapters from Neal Stephenson and Stanislaw Lem and Jasper Fforde.

And I never need to look back.

I didn't (at least, the last 60% of it). Skimming some reviews on goodreads suggests that even Klosterman's fans prefer his non-fiction writing to his fiction. Maybe one day I'll have worked through my giant queue and be curious enough to try his writing again. It was intriguing and technical (the story-within-a-story framing raises a lot of questions), so maybe after acquainting myself with some non-fiction I'll revisit this one.

Or maybe not.

Summary: don't bother reading this one.


This post's theme word is desultory, "marked by absence of a plan; disconnected; jumping from one thing to another," or "digressing from the main subject; random." The desultory anecdotes did not advance the plot, although they constituted the entirety of the text.

Cookie tree

It seems that cookies do grow on trees! At least, macarons do:

Yet another fantastic Parisian window-display. It seems a shame to waste so many sweets on (1) gluing them to a giant hemisphere, (2) letting them dry out while on display for weeks, and (3) ultimately discarding them as inedible lumps of colored sugar. I wonder about the logistics of taking down such a display: who does it? how long does it take? do the cookies all get composted?


This post's theme word is succuss, "to shake vigorously" (esp. a patient or homeopathic medicine). Do not succuss the macaron tree! --- the fruits will fall when they are ripe.

Further idylls

Quaint and picturesque, with vines growing over the trellised arch above the entrance. Yes, that's right:

It's the sapeuprs-pompiers!

Hip, hip, hooray! The shortest tiny little matching shorts live in this building.


This post's theme word is concupiscent, "lustful; libidinous." The defendent offered no explanation of earlier concupiscent remarks.

Reasoning about information transmission

Every so often, I am struck with the realization that other people do not think the way I think. (This recurs, so perhaps it is a rerealization?) Of course this is obvious, but it is also too difficult to simulate everyone's unknown mental process all the time, and so I slouch into the lazy thinking of assuming everyone thinks the way I do. Everyone does this. (Don't they? I don't know, but I assume so... because I do...)

Here is a simple fact: probabilities are often unintuitive. Probably. Unless you are a technical person who thinks about them all the time.

Seine view

If the weather is just right, and I take the time to walk home across the entire city, many visual delights are available. 

... and if framed correctly, the visual delights can look serene and peaceful. Notice that I cropped out: tourists, cars, buses, trains, the police, vagrants, and garbage; plus the photographic medium innately removes all sound and atmospheric pollution.

You're really getting the best of this shot.


This post's theme word is apophoret, "a gift given on New Year's Eve." This retroblog averages to be an approximately-scheduled apophoret.

The Fire Monument

Yet another real-life experience which is heavily tinged by Stephenson's words.

London very quickly became a smouldering membrane, a reeking tarpaulin flung over the hill and not smoothed out. The only features of consequence were the Fire Monument, the Bridge, the Tower, and St. Paul’s. The Bridge, as always, seemed like a Bad Idea, a city on stilts, and a very old, slumping, inflammable Tudor city at that. Not far from its northern end was the Fire Monument, of which Daniel was now getting his first clear view. It was an immense solitary column put up by Hooke but universally attributed to Wren. During Daniel’s recent movements about London he had been startled, from time to time, to spy the lantern at its top peering down at him from over the top of a building—just as he had often felt, when he was a younger man, that the living Hooke was watching him through a microscope. (The System of the World)

Here is how thoroughly The Baroque Cycle has permeated my brain: when walking across London Bridge, I thought, "hey, the Fire Monument must be nearby! let's find it!" And then I located it by using St. Paul's and the Tower, based entirely on the above quote. If Stephenson had included a fictionalized London in his works, I would have wandered around, looking for unicorns and rainbows in the real world. Compelling writing induces credibility.


This post's theme word is quire, "a quantity of 24 or 25 sheets of paper; one twentieth of a ream." May I inquire how many quires your reading notes required?

The blue Eye

The river is blue. The Eye is blue.

The color-highlighting feature of my camera is set to "blue." Reflections and lights are very pretty in this photo, which only barely captures the visual experience in person. Sensing these photons bouncing off those things, yes, but also the wind blowing on my face, the war memorial at my back, the tiredness at the end of a day of sightseeing, food satiation, and of course the balance of assorted hormones and neurotransmitters.

You know, normal life experience things. Maybe some future photographic technique (waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay beyond measly 3D) will be able to duplicate these experiences.


This post's theme word is benthic, "of or relating to the bottom of a sea or lake." They Eye's strange, eerie light draws uncanny (Lovecraftian) energy from the benthic depths via the Thames.

Architectural juxtaposition

This juxtaposition of shiny metal curves with squat stone fortress... it tickles my fancy.

Future novels set in "historical" (present day) London will have to romanticize this weird combination of architectural approaches.

On the one hand, the stone fortress has stood for longer and against a wider variety of situations, weather, and hordes. On the other hand, I imagine that the Dread Lord of the Wobbly Glass Superstructure has some pretty puissant powers (perhaps blasting lightning bolts from the roof?).


This post's theme word is procumbent, "lying face down; prone; prostrate." or "of a plant: growing along the ground without putting new roots." The Tower of London looks procumbent in the highrise-dotted skyline of the city.