Wis[s]e Words – Page 4 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

I’ll miss you Amsterdam Noord

Published on October 19, 2023Leave a comment

Have an already nostalgic trip through the Amsterdam Noord of roughly a decade ago when its hipsterfication was just getting into full swing. Soundtrack by Harry Slinger and friends, one of Amsterdam Noord’s more famous sons.

In 2003 II was still living in student accommodation in Amstelveen, just over the border of Amsterdam. A very nice, cheap flat but too small for two people and when Sandra decided she wanted to move out of England to come live with me, the hunt was on for a bigger, cheap apartment we could rent. What ended up happening was that we semi-legally rented the living space attached to the office of a local political party that shall remain anonymous. This was not sustainable, especially after said party moved their offices into the centre of Amsterdam, away from Noord. Renting a new flat was impossible, so instead we ended up buying the cheapest house we could afford on my shitty salary back then. In 2005 therefore we moved from the west side of Amsterdam Noord, over the canal to the east side, to the Vogelbuurt, just off the Meeuwenlaan.

The new house was ex-social housing, built just after the First World War, intended as housing for the workers of the factories had been established there not long before. When we bought the house, many of these factories and workspaces were still there, just across the road from us. Amsterdam Noord, across the IJ away from the rest of the city, was seen as both not quite Amsterdam and one of its worst parts. Lots of cheap housing, not that much to do and for anything really interesting you have to take the ferry into the city proper. The people living there were a mixture of proper Amsterdammers who had been born and been living there ever since, various generations of migrants looking for cheap housing (and sometimes unofficially banned from other parts of the city) and people like us, only able to afford the housing there even if it wasn’t our first choice.

Eighteen years later and what was once industrial wasteland is now a hipster paradise. There are three different microbrew brewpubs in crawling distance of our house, house prices have literally tripled since we bought ours and Noord is hot. The old Noord is still there, but it is slowly being smothered under the influence of money and bourgeois tastes, gentrified.

I wish I could honestly say that this is the reason I’m moving out, but I’d be lying. The real reason is that having worked from home for the last three years and plan to continue doing so, my parents are not getting any younger and I could really do with a little bit more room in my house. All of which means I will be moving back to my birthplace in less than a month’s time, 500 metres from where my parents still live.

Today I set my signature to sell my house. The end of an era. Eighteen years I’ve lived here in Noord and I will miss it, but not enough to not move away.

“Our collaboration wasn’t a matter of compromise so much as collision”

Published on October 11, 2023Leave a comment

Bill Watterson and John Kascht talk about their working process on The Mysteries, a genuine collaborative process in which nothing was planned and each decision was taken unanimously: “we didn’t know what we wanted but we knew what we didn’t want once we saw it“.

Nothing better than hearing two passionate people talking about how they worked together and managed to create something despite of or maybe because of the huge differences in their prefered way of working.

Just utterly boring — Toaru Ossan no VRMMO Katsudouki — First Impressions

Published on October 10, 2023Leave a comment

Even out of context this is a terrible, cliched “joke” but in context it doesn’t even make sense:

Showing a slender girl: make sure you don't say words like flat or smoot or cutting board around her

Because this is a player in a virtual reality MMO game! She designed this character herself! Why would she be bothered by the fact she doesn’t have breasts when she choose not to? (Heck, why assume she’s actually the same gender as her character?)

It’s the perfect example of how lazy this series is and how little it and its original creator ever thought about its videogame setting. I’ve read the manga version of this until I got bored of it and never ever got the sense that this was indeed a game you could play. Let alone have fun playing it. Playing a VRMMO casually with a focus on crafting rather than combat is not inherently a bad idea for a series, but you have to have some energy and thought behind it to make it worthwhile. Reading a manga where every other chapter is the protagonist inventing another new crafting method is one thing. As an anime series it’s just dull.

In nothing of what Toaru Ossan no VRMMO Katsudouki does is there any hint that the author thought about what it would be like to play a game this way. Why would our hero be the only one to play this way? Why would anybody else care that he does, or even know how he plays? Why is this world so underpopulated in the first place? It all feels ripped off from other, better stories. If you want a series about virtual reality gaming with some actual impact, go watch Shangri-La Frontier instead.

The oncoming enshittification of Discogs

Published on October 7, 2023Leave a comment

Natalie Weiner writes about the fears that record catalog site Discogs is starting to enshittify itself.

Underlying the sellers’ complaints is a kind of dismay, the feeling that what had previously been a safe haven for nerds to buy and sell $2 records is being threatened — that one more corner of the internet that wasn’t yet a glossy behemoth designed to subsume and capitalize on your personal information was about to collapse.

If you’re serious about music, especially buying vinyl, Discogs is essential. It has the largest catalogue of actually existing records in the world, created over several decades by the users itself. It’s arguably the place to buy obscure records, often cheaper than on Ebay or Amazon. But with it starting to up its fees and other moves, it may be preparing for an IPO or being sold. Even if this does not happen, it’s already in the process of enshittifying its platform, making it worse for users and sellers both.

For me, I mainly use it to get information on music and albums and it’s always my first stop for that sort of information, so it’ll be vexing to see it gone.

How the Tories abuse ethnic minority people as PR shields

Published on October 7, 2023Leave a comment

I hate to link to the notoriously transphobic Guardian, but occassionally they do have articles you cannot ignore. in this case it’s a short article about ex-employee Preeti Kathrecha suing the Equality and Human Rights Commission for unfair dismissal and race discrimination. In the process, she dropped this gem about the controversial inquiry into antisemitism in the Labour party:

She also claimed that she was asked to sign off the executive summary of the inquiry into antisemitism in the Labour party, without being allowed access to the underlying evidence, because the EHRC wanted the signoff from a BAME employee. She refused to do so, describing the request as “upsetting, disrespectful and humiliating”.

Which fits to a t the way the Tories use ethnical minorities as poster children for their most cruel policies. Rishi Sunak, chosen as PM to clean up the mess that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss left behind, tightening the austerity screws again. Suella Braverman, spouting National Front rhetoric about migrants, but if criticised has the press holloring about how you dare to expect a daughter of migrants not to be racist. Sunak again, spouting transphobia in his conference speech. A predictable pattern of using the brownest faces in the party to shield far right policies from scrutiny.

That it also occurred with that EHRC report into Labour antisemitism is telling. The report itself barely found any evidence of antisemitism in the party, certainly no systemic antisemitism. Nor did it find evidence that Corbyn and his allies were antisemitic. But it was certainly publicised as vindicating the ongoing smear campaign against him and Labour. Having a BAME employee sign off on it would’ve strengthened that impression.