Here’s what we watched for Horror Movie Month in 2024, at least according to my notes!

October 1: Raw (2016)

Girl goes to college, finally lets loose by becoming a cannibal. This movie was French and you’d know it even if you watched it dubbed. It was okay. It was worth my time.

October 2: Tragedy Girls (2017)

Two high school girls who are interested in death try to make more of it happen. It was a horror-comedy, and it was fun. Brianna Hildebrand, who you may remember as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, was in it.

October 4: V/H/S/Beyond (2024)

Honestly, apart from the 2025 one, most of the V/H/S movies are about the same to me: mixed bags, but usually not quite worth the whole watch. This one was that too. It had its moments.

October 5: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)

Honestly, I’d watch just for “Want to see a French-Canadian horror movie?”

A young woman in a family of vampires really doesn’t want to go hunt for blood, but her parents have reluctantly become insistent. She decides she’ll look for somebody who’d be willing to donate.

It was good, and sort of a horror-comedy. It didn’t feel like every other movie, which was good.

October 6: Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls (2023)

I liked this the least of everybody in my household, I think. It was sometimes pretty funny, but the main character got on my nerves. I got the impression he is a YouTube character with some following, maybe? Like Ernest P. Worrell or other over the top “originally in small doses” characters, he was just too much here.

That said, we still make references to the guy’s catch phrase, so it stuck with us.

October 6: Cuckoo (2024)

This was one of the big hits of “general horror movies of 2024”, so I was glad we got to watch it. I liked it! It wasn’t perfect, but it did well at being one of those “Why can’t everybody else see how messed up this lovely place really is?” movies.

October 7: Let the Wrong One In (2021)

This movie was really stupid and I liked it. First off, there was a character named Deco, which made me think of The Commitments, which won points. Also, Anthony Stewart Head.

Basically it’s sort of a slapstick farcical vampire movie set in Ireland. Honestly, “What if [some successful movie] but the protagonists were idiots?” is a pretty good formula.

October 8: The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

Still a classic.

Sure, it’s kind of a mess here and there, but it’s got a great cast and it just goes for it. I read recently that there was talk about casting other people (other than Jack Nicholson) as Daryl Van Horne, which seems like it could only have been worse. One name mentioned was Bill Murray. What?! This was a nearly perfect vehicle for Jack Nicholson doing comedy, and Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer were a lot of fun, too.

The cherry scene!

October 9: Courtney Gets Possessed (2023)

I barely remember this one. I think it was funny enough? Demonic hijinks at a bachelorette party.

October 10: There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)

Two parents, their two kids, and an adult friend take a camping trip. The kids wander off in the woods and when they come back, they are… off. Things keep getting worse.

This was good. It wasn’t great, but it was good. You want to yell, “Wake up, people, your kids are busted!”

October 12: 6:45 (2021)

It took me a while to remember this one. It was okay. A couple take a ill-advised holiday to an island town, which leads to a deadly time loop. It was okay, but there are many better movies to watch instead. (Look, maybe it’s better than I remember, but given I barely remember it…)

October 13: Oddity (2024)

I didn’t remember this until reading the synopsis, but it was quite good. So maybe my “it’s bad because I don’t remember it” take above is wrong!

A woman is murdered at her secluded fixer-upper in the countryside. Later, her twin sister shows up and is really weird. What’s going on? You should just watch it, probably. Not a comedy.

October 14: Mr. Crocket (2024)

This is sort of like “what if there was a haunted video tape that showed you a cutesy TV show for kids, but also it was evil?” I wanted to like it, but it was just ugly. It wasn’t fun or funny, just dark. It wasn’t darkly funny, although maybe that was the goal.

October 15: Evil Dead Ⅱ (1987)

I think we watched this because Marty hadn’t seen it. Look, it’s fine. It’s a lot better than the first version. I think it’s just not exactly my bag. (I really like Bruce Campbell, though!)

October 16: Cube (2021)

I really liked Cube! This is not that movie, though, it’s a 2021 remake from Japan. Don’t bother. It is worse in every way. Maybe it’s okay, but it’s not significantly different, so go with the original.

October 18: Zombie Town (2023)

A reclusive movie director releases one more movie, and it turns everybody in town into zombies. Kids fight back.

This kind of movie could’ve been fun, but it wasn’t. It had two of the Kids in the Hall in it! What a waste.

October 19: The Finale (2023)

Oh yeah, this one.

Murders start happening at a summer theater camp. Everybody has a motive. Who did it?

Well, look, I think this was maybe better than the related Stage Fright, but it was bad. It was way too long. It was sometimes nonsensical. I do not recommend it.

October 19: Invitation to Hell (1984)

This gets huge points from me for “picked a weird premise and didn’t back down.” Wes Craven directs. A family moves to a new planned town where the father has taken a great new job. Everybody is obsessed with the local country club and its manager. Like, weirdly obsessed. What the heck is going on in town? Also, Robert Urich and Susan Lucci? Wild.

Not great, but I am glad I watched it.

October 20: Corporate Animals (2019)

A bunch of coworkers on a team-building exercise end up trapped in a cave. Demi Moore?! We had fun. It was stupid in a good way. The company specialized in edible cutlery, which paid off a few ways.

October 20: Stranger in Our House (1978)

Wes Craven again, this time with Linda Blair. It wasn’t great, sadly, and the concept has been done a bunch of times. Orphaned kid moves in with other family, and only one family member realizes that maybe this is a bad idea. It was… fine.

October 24: Little Evil (2017)

Adam Scott becomes the step-dad to the Antichrist and really tries to make things work. This was not amazing, but it was much better than I expected. I don’t mind having watched it, but I wouldn’t watch it again.

Good job casting the really creepy kid, though!

October 25: Deer Camp ‘86 (2022)

A bunch of guys go hunting and get into trouble. I remember nothing.

October 26: The Day of the Beast (1995)

A priest figures out how to predict the exact birth of the Antichrist, and enlists the help of a headbanger and a TV occultist to save the world. Was this a comedy on purpose? I just don’t know. It was weird, and unpredictable, and so I liked it.

October 27: The Strangers (2008)

What a lousy movie to end on. It’s a boring, tedious home invasion movie. I see it was 86 minutes long, but I remember it feeling much longer. Also, I think they remade it into a three part movie? I can’t imagine.

I just didn’t care about anyone or anything in this movie.

So, here’s what I read, not in order, and some brief notes.

Greg Egan

Last year, I read five Greg Egan books. This year, just two. First, I read The Book of All Skies, which I enjoyed. It’s the story of a group of people investigating the frontiers of their very weirdly-shaped world. As with many Egan books, there’s a lot of very weird math and physics under the hood, but it wasn’t critical to think too hard about them, and I think that made the story more enjoyable for me. In this book, they would’ve gotten in the way. That said, when I finished the book I went and read a bunch of Egan’s notes on the underlying ideas, which were interesting (insofar as I understood them).

Later, I read Schild’s Ladder, which was roughly the opposite. That is, it was one of the most physics-heavy Egan books I’ve read. More than once, I wanted to take photos of the page because it was a wall of thick jargon. I did not enjoy the book. At the beginning, I said, “Oh, this is going to be Egan’s take on Cat’s Cradle!” That would’ve been very interesting, especially because Egan and Vonnegut are so, so different. Or: maybe it was that, but I didn’t care to think about the comparison by the end. It reminded me of Vinge, too, but not in a way that excited me. Anyway, look, I’ve read a lot of Egan, and I will read more. This just didn’t hit home.

Effectiveness

“Effectiveness” is my shelf (or label or tag or whatever they call it now) in Goodreads for books on productivity and management. I have a lot of books in that queue, but I only make slow progress, for many reasons.

My favorite of the ones I read this year, by a long way, was Radical Candor. This is one of those books that I’d read about many times. It sounded not bad, but not amazing. But, of course, I’d only been seeing the shadows on the wall. It was great, and I hope I will go back to it in the future to try to puzzle out more ways to do better at my job. It really resonated with me, and I’ve brought it up over and over when talking to other managers, this year.

I also read Laziness Does Not Exist, which I didn’t love. It was okay. I feel the author would probably just give me a knowing “don’t you hear yourself??” look, but I kept wanting to say, “Yes, don’t work yourself sick, but honestly you are going too far.” I think the issue is that an indictment of a society-wide problem requires a massive-scaled critique. But “the Laziness Lie has you in its grip!”, over and over, was too much for me. (It was also funny that I finished this book just today, December 31st, and it had text saying “Don’t get worked up trying to meet your Goodreads goals”!)

Finally, as I wanted to get a bit more handle on some of my team’s rituals, I read Liftoff: Start and Sustain Agile Teams. I found it totally unremarkable, so I have no remarks.

Boss Fight Books

Boos Fight Books publishes short books about influential or otherwise important video games. The books are written by people who found the books to be important to them.

The first one I read was Animal Crossing by Kelsey Lewin. I’ve played all the main Animal Crossing games and have enjoyed them all. (Well, no, the iOS one was awful.) This book, at a pleasing 2⁸ pages, talked about the origin of the game, its weird launch history starting with the Nintendo64 DD, how it changed over time, and how the author enjoyed it (or didn’t) over time. I enjoyed the book, and felt like I’d read more like this – but it was also clear that a lot of the book was about the author’s life, which wasn’t really what I wanted. So, it wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

PaRappa the Rapper and ZZT books, which were similarly a mix of “I am very interested!” and “I am not particularly interested”. I knew what I was getting into, though, so I had no complaint for the authors. I just sort of wish there were more books about these games, focused more exclusively on the history and technology behind them.

I was surprised by how few of my peers remembered ZZT. I remember it being both impressive and influential. I was also surprised to learn how programmable its world builder was, and that ZZT (the game)’s author was that Tim Sweeney. (The book’s author was Anna Anthropy, which was one of the reasons I wanted to read this book.)

Finally, I read the book on Spelunky. I almost didn’t, but then I saw that the author was Derek Yu, also the primary creator of Spelunky itself! This book was by far closest to what I’d want from these books, if I was in charge. I got a copy for my nephews, too, who I introduced to the game a few years ago.

Stephen King

I read three Stephen King books this year, all story collections. I’ve been trying to catch up on reading all his story collections, and I’m very nearly done, now.

First, Four Past Midnight, from 1990. It contains four novellas, all of which I liked okay. I read it in part because I’d been doing some idle research into King’s repeated setting of Castle Rock, and saw that The Sun Dog (a story in this collection) was in some ways tied up with Needful Things.

After that, I read Hearts in Atlantis. This was a frustrating experience, because I kept thinking that maybe I’d read it already, twenty years ago, but I couldn’t be sure. This was extra frustrating because it seemed to me like one of King’s best books. Structurally and textually, it was excellent. I would recommend this to somebody who wasn’t sure they wanted to read Stephen King.

Finally, You Like It Darker. This is a collection of short stories published just last year. It was good! I enjoyed just about all of it, maybe most especially the final three stories. One of these was a sequel to Cujo, which I definitely did not expect to be reading!

Technical Books

This year, I’ve become the full-time lead of Fastmail’s Cyrus team. A big part of my team’s work is maintaining the open source Cyrus IMAP server. It’s written in C. My C is miserable, and was probably at its best in 1992. I need to get better. I read two C books this year: Effective C and Understanding and Using C Pointers. I think both were fine, but it’s hard to say. I’m not writing much C, day to day, so probably some of what I learned has already faded away. Still, I thought they were both clear and explained a bunch of topics that I hadn’t understood or only barely understood. Hard to judge, but definitely not bad. I can imagine going back to them later, when doing real work.

I already read tmux 3, a book about tmux. I like tmux quite a lot, and this isn’t the first little book I’ve read about it. It’s hard for me to say what I thought of it. I think it was a bit of a mish-mash for me. I was coming to it with a pretty long history with tmux, so lots of things were old hat and not worth my time. But as with many complex tools, even among the fundamentals there were lots of things I didn’t know. Here’s my biggest praise for the book: After I read it, I went back to a few sections I’d flagged and worked through my .tmux.conf, making improvements based on what the book taught me.

Slough House

Okay, so my biggest category of books was the Slough House series by Mick Herron. A full third of the books I read this year were these books.

Here are the titles:

• Dead Lions
• Real Tigers
• Standing by the Wall
• Spook Street
• Nobody Walks
• London Rules
• Joe Country
• Slough House
• Bad Actors
• The Secret Hours
• Reconstruction
• Clown Town

Look, they’re all very good. That’s why I read them! The only notable exception, I think, is Reconstruction. It’s fine. It’s just the least Slough House-y book, really tied in only by one character, and structured very differently from the rest. I’d almost recommend skipping it. It was a bit of a bummer that it was the last one I read for months. The last one I read, Clown Town, was only released this year, and I read it roughly immediately. (Thanks, Gloria, for giving me a surprise copy!)

Other Fiction

I read Thorns by Robert Silverberg, which was a 1967 nominee for the Nebula and Hugo. I can’t remember why I read it. I think it got onto my reminders list ages ago, and then it was on deep discount. I would’ve done better to just not read it. In 1967, it may have been interesting, but it didn’t age well.

I read How Long ‘til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin, whose massively successful Broken Earth series I enjoyed a few years ago. This is a short story collection, and I’m a sucker for a good short story collection. And this was good. I’m told that LeVar Burton read two of these stories on his podcast LeVar Burton Reads, and I look forward to listening to them.

A few years ago, I finally read A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vinge. It was excellent, with a sprawling scope, a complex and coherent setting, and a whole mess of interesting ideas that all slotted together. Mark Dominus told me that the sequel, A Deepness in the Sky, was even better, but “very lonesome”. I agree! Vinge’s ability to spin so many plates, each one interesting on its own, and then to land them all into one neat pile was impressive and satisfying.

I read Ship Breaker and its sequel, The Drowned Cities, by Paolo Bacigalupi. They were okay, but I didn’t bother with the third book. Bacigalupi’s sci-fi work for adults is very good, and I’ve re-read a bunch of it. (I don’t think I re-read Pump 6 in its entirety this year, but I re-read a bunch of it.) The Ship Breaker books are young adult fiction, and all I could see on the page was all the depth and nuance missing compared to his other work. It probably would’ve been better when I was twelve. Given that it’s a book for that audience, who am I to complain?

I read Dungeon Crawler Carl because Bryan was reading it and said it sounded fun. It was fun, but I think too long for me. Everything about it was just a bit much. That could’ve been fun for two short books or so, but it was the first book in a seven book series, with books topping six hundred pages. I tapped out, and will probably read a summary some day.

Finally, I read Virtual Unrealities, a sci-fi story collection by the great Alfred Bester. I think I picked it up because I wanted to read Fondly Farenheit, which was good. I read it in the first week of January, so it’s been a while and I don’t remember it terribly well. My recollection was that I thought it was okay, but on the whole not anywhere near as good as The Demolished Man or The Stars My Destination. That’s the problem with writing massive, incredible successes, I guess!

Other Nonfiction

The Society of the Spectacle is the longest 150 page book I’ve ever read. According to Goodreads, I spent almost nine years reading it. It’s a lot, but it’s very good, and I think I will re-read parts of it again, probably several times. It’s one of the key texts of Situationism, a movement in post-WWII European socialism. The book is made up of 221 numbered paragraphs, which construct and explain the concept of “the spectacle”, a 20th (and, I’d say, 21st) conception of the problems of capitalism and, to an extent, imagined solutions. It’s short, but each paragraph deserves a good long think. You can’t just sit down and read the book in an afternoon the way you could a 150 page book about Animal Crossing.

For a long time, I have wanted to read more detailed writing on the Noble Eightfold Path, so I finally did. I read The Noble Eightfold Path: Way to the End of Suffering by Bhikku Bodhi. I’m glad I did, but it’s not easy to recommend generally. First, you need to be interested in Buddhism in general. Then, you need to have read enough about it (I think) that you want to read what is almost a technical manual about some of the core tenets. It’s a bit like reading a catechism, in which serious religious, metaphysical, and practical questions are answered in great and careful detail for the dedicated lay reader. I wish it had been a bit more focused on description and less on instruction. That is: I wanted to read analysis of and relationship between the eight practices, rather than a book intended to convince me of their importance. Still, this got close and I’m glad I read it.

What’s next?

I have no idea! Well, not much of an idea. Goodreads reminds me that I’m currently reading books about Eiffel, Rust, and WebAssembly. I received a few books for Christmas, and of course I already have a huge backlog of owned and unread books. There are just a few Egan novels I haven’t read yet. Lots of books remain on my “effectiveness” shelf. We’ll see where the year takes me.

One thing is seeming increasingly likely, though. I’ve read Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun three (I think) times, now. These books get better as you re-read them and try to work out the many mysteries within them. Last time I read them, I thought, “When I read these again, it will be with a notebook for taking notes.” I think this is the year. I might also finally listen to ReReading Wolfe an epic-length podcast that goes through the books chapter-by-chapter, just for people who are re-reading the books, so spoilers a-plenty. I’ve been thinking about trying to find old hardback copies of the books to mark up, but it seems like most of them are quite expensive!

At any rate, maybe in a year I’ll write another blog post like this one. If I do, I hope it will be able to mention at least 36 books I’ve read in 2026.

Here’s what we watched for Horror Movie Month this year!

October 1: Heart Eyes (2025)

This is “what if a rom-com was also a slasher?” It was a bit uneven, and didn’t quite nail either part – understandable, but still, you hope for excellence, right? It was novel and fun enough that I’m glad to have watched it. It’s from Josh Ruben, who did some other stuff I also liked.

October 2: The Borderlands (2012)

Hey, this was surprisingly decent. Vatican-sponsored ghost hunters are investigating a haunting. Is it bunk or not? There was nothing particularly special about this movie, except that it was well done. Good cast, good pacing. It’s nice to find a new competent, enjoyable, unexpected movie like this!

October 3: Departing Seniors (2023)

There’s a murderer at a high school, and somebody can see the murders coming in visions. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t terrible, but it was retreading old material, and there were lots of little problems. Why was the school always so empty? If it’s nearly graduation day, why are people wearing big coats?

Watch It’s a Wonderful Knife instead, maybe.

October 5: V/H/S/Halloween

I think this was my favorite V/H/S movie so far. They’re all sort of uneven messes, but this one had the most fun I can remember. I especially enjoyed the weird framing story about the soft drink focus group. Also, Fun Size was fun and weird. More like this one, please, V/H/S people!

October 5: Bring Her Back (2025)

I saw this as “best new horror of 2025” a bunch of places. It was a very well made movie, well written, well-acted. It was a good film. It was also just so grim, for much of it. It was a movie full of desperation. Also, it had “people in authority do bad things to kids”, which I don’t like watching. Still, I’m glad I saw it, and yeah, it was good, but I think we usually are looking for something more fun in Horror Movie Month.

October 6: Presence (2024)

Remember in The Menu, how the chef is making this extremely high-technique food that is hard to criticize for any lack of technical merit, but which sparks no joy? That’s this movie. It’s a well-made haunted house movie, but I didn’t care about what happened to anybody in it.

October 7: Ick (2024)

This movie reminded me of Detention (2011) and that’s a good thing. Brandon Routh plays a guy who was a high school football star and is now sort of washed up. There’s a weird black fungus that grows all over everything, and has been there for decades, and nobody cares. It’s just there. Then, one day, things change. It was weird and fun and unexpected. It wasn’t as good as Detention, but I liked it a lot.

October 8: Somnium (2024)

Big change in gears here from the previous movie. This was a slow-paced, moody movie about a would-be actor in LA who gets a job at some kind of weird dream therapy place. It looks right out of an early 80s Cronenberg movie. She walks around the place at three in the morning, surrounded by sleeping people in wood-paneled rooms. I liked it! I also liked that it was very happy to have a simple moral.

October 9: The Collector (2009)

This was pitched as “Would you like to see a movie that’s kind of like Saw but has been mostly forgotten?” It wasn’t as smart as the original Saw trilogy, and went on way too long. It’s sort of “Home Alone, with adults, and lots of blood.”

October 10: Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project (2025)

This little indie movie was a mess, but I had fun. There’s a guy who wants to make an indie horror movie, and is not a skilled filmmaker. His crew have a lot of heart, but are sort of hopeless. They send a guy in a bigfoot costume out into the woods in hunting season. Also, the set might be haunted? I enjoyed it.

October 11: I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

This could’ve been a lot worse. If you have any fond memories of the original, go for it. Otherwise, eh.

October 11: [REC]⁴ Apocalypse

Gloria and I had seen the previous REC movies, but I don’t think we’d seen this one. It was good! With Satanic zombies back on the mainland, a bunch of people are aboard a ship trying to study the problem. So: people in an enclosed space, at sea, with a zombie out break. You can imagine the rest, mostly. It brought back the newscaster from the first two movies, which was fun. (The original REC is definitely worth watching!)

October 13: How to Kill Monsters (2024)

A police station is taken over by monsters and demons and the riff raff inside have to save themselves. There’s a fun framing device where the movie starts at the end of a horrible bloodbath and then you’re sort of figuring out how it all fits together. Like a bunch of other movies on this list, it was enjoyable, but not great.

October 14: Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer (2024)

Every year we end up with one or two movies that we thought were going to be sort of horror-y, or maybe just creepy thrillers, but don’t work out that way. This was one, this year, and no regrets! Steve Buscemi plays a retired serial killer who approaches a struggling writer to pitch a collaboration on memoirs. But after a little bit of farce, he’s roped into pretending to be a marriage councelor for the writer and his wife. Really weird, and who doesn’t want to see more Steve Buscemi?

October 17: Vicious (2025)

Polygon suggested this would be a great pick if you liked Weapons. It wasn’t. I guess I was supposed to feel sympathy and horror for the protagonist, but I didn’t care. It was not compelling or scary.

October 18: Dark Match (2024)

Another “flawed but worth it” entry! A group of near-nobodies in the local professional wrestling circuit book a high-paying gig at a private party in the woods. Could it be that the private party is actually a horrible, horrible place to end up? Yes, it could.

Special note: I kept thinking, “Who is this actor?” Turns out he played Bill in GTA V, and I recognized his face from his likeness in a video game. Woah!

October 19: Together

This was another “best of the year” candidate, said the Internet. It wasn’t my favorite, but it was good. It had some serious ideas, and was nicely creepy, but also had a great sense of humor. It’s hard for me to explain much without saying too much. There’s a couple with a long-term relationship. They move to the sticks for a fresh start. Things get weird. Great pacing in this one, I thought, too.

October 20: Here for Blood (2022)

This was definitely one of the best movies we watched! It reminded us of McG’s The Babysitter (2017), and in a good way. There’s a busy young woman who is a bunch of college classes and maybe a couple jobs, one of which is babysitting. She needs to cram, so her boyfriend agrees to take one of her babysitting jobs. Meanwhile, somebody has planned to stage a home invasion while she’s babysitting. They expect the petit woman, not her massive mixed martial artist boyfriend. It’s a trip!

October 21: Minutes Past Midnight (2016)

I don’t remember it well at this point. It was an anthology. I remember that some of it was terrible. On the other hand, there was one lovely and funny bit with Arthur Darvill as a serial killer who falls in love.

October 22: Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

Not good, per se, but I think I’ll still recommend it. It’s a rip off of Five Nights at Freddy’s, where Nic Cage is conscripted to spend a night cleaning an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese style place. The animatronics are out to get him. He fights back. Also, there are dying teenagers.

This movie is all about Nicholas Cage, who has zero lines and punctuates his night of cleaning and demonocide by drinking soda and playing pinball. Unhinged.

October 23: Cherry Falls (2000)

This got on my radar as “the most underappreciated slasher of the post-Scream boom”. Yeah, I could buy that. It wasn’t great but it was definitely fun and quirky. Also, my household likes Brittany Murphy. The premise: a serial killer is at work in the town of Cherry Falls. Their schtick? They only kill virgins. (The sherrif comes to this conclusion incredibly quickly with a shockingly small amount of evidence. But he is right.)

The town’s teenagers are urged to lose their virginity as quickly as possible.

If this movie had been made 15 years earlier, it would’ve featured a staggering amount of nudity. In 2000, though, it would have none. I wonder just when that changed!

October 24: Scared Shitless (2024)

A plumber enlists the help of his germaphobic son to go clean and fix some toilets. Little did they know that these toilets… are haunted! It was short and stupid and fun, and I am glad we watched it.

October 25: Death of a Unicorn

I don’t know why this wasn’t good. It felt like they overworked the dough. Everything was there for greatness, but it didn’t pan out. Dude hits a unicorn with his car. The unicorn’s parents come back for revenge. At one point, Richard E. Grant eats a piece of unicorn meat. Anthony Carrigan is in it and, as always, is great.

October 26: Grafted (2024)

Kind of a mess. A young woman with a skin disorder is trying to find a new skin graft technique so she can fit in. But she accidentally kills a few people and it gets worse. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. Some good Kiwi accents in it, though!

October 28: Boys from County Hell (2020)

This one had been sitting in our Shudder queue for ages! It was worth the wait. In a village in Ireland, there’s a cairn that attracts a very modest number of tourists. The claim is that it’s the grave of an Irish vampire whose story inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. The level to which anybody believes this is unclear. Meanwhile, the cairn has to be knocked down to make way for a new motorway. Could this free the evil lurking beneath? Yes.

This was another case of “an unexceptional premise made really well”. The pacing, the casting, the sense of humor, all worked well to make a really enjoyable little movie.

October 29: Good Boy (2025)

Was this whole movie a metaphor? I’m not sure.

There’s a guy who is either sick or suicidal or haunted, and he skips town to go stay at his dead uncle’s house, which even the casual observer can tell is a really bad idea. His sister tells him so, but he’s a jerk and won’t listen. He does take his dog, though. His dog is also worried about him, and the movie is entirely from the perspective of the dog – it’s not all in the dog’s point of view, but we’re following the dog, so we have to work things out from what the dog can see.

The dog was great. The movie was only okay.

Ghosted

Oops, this is a later addition! Sometimes we fill in some days with TV. In the past, this was often when we’d watch American Horror Story. This year, we watched about half of Ghosted, a 2017 show starring Adam Scott and Craig Robinson as an odd couple of kinda-losers who get recruited into a secret government agency that pursues X-files. How had I never heard of this before? And, in fact, nearly nobody I’ve talked to has.

Gloria and I liked it, but it was pretty uneven. The structure of the show takes a hard left turn partway through, and it’s worse for sure.

That’s it!

We watched some other things not reflected here. Most notably, we started watching “It: Welcome to Derry”, which was fine.

I think it was a decent year, and I’ll have to see if I can remember enough about 2024’s movies to write those up too…

Let’s be clear: This was all on me! I don’t need the Australian office to stock all my favorite hardware for the 7% of the year I spend there. On the other hand, I did feel like I wanted to plan ahead for next time. I keep a bag of stuff in the Melbourne office to make the trip easier. This is mostly cables, adapters, and toiletries. It’s much nicer to have my favorite Merkur safety razor waiting for me than to spend two weeks using disposables. My plan was to put a keyboard and mouse in that bag. Maybe a little USB hub. Simple, right? Well…

I’m fussy about my keyboards. I’m not a keyboard wonk, I think. I know just a little bit about mechanical keyboards, and I know what I like. Mostly, what I like is full size (with numeric keypad) keyboards, in the traditional layout, with clicky switches. When I started thinking about taking a keyboard to Australia, I owned three mechanical keyboards. All Ducky brand, all with Cherry MX blue switches. Surely, I could just go order one of these, right? Well, it didn’t seem like it. They were backordered everywhere I looked. The most likely-seeming one was the Ducky One 3, which looked about right. I almost just ordered it, but then I remembered: a lot of keyboards are now configurable via software. That sounded interesting, so I did some more digging.

The short version is that there’s an open-source firmware for keyboards called QMK, and lots of keyboards use it. It lets you remap keys, program macros, and do that sort of thing. A coworker asked, “Why is that better than just updating your settings in macOS?” The answer is, basically: If you tell your keyboard that its caps lock key should act like a control key, it will do that on every computer you attach it to, with no configuration required. The longer form answer is that you can do all sorts of weird stuff that macOS would never allow.

Ducky doesn’t support QMK (or other reprogramming) on most of their keyboards. The one I did find with QMK is the “Ducky One X ‘Inductive Keyboard’”. They bill it as “the world’s first inductive keyboard”. I don’t really understand what an inductive switch is. I looked into it a little. I do know that it’s not a clicky blue switch, though, and I know that it costs a lot more than my usual keyboards. Pass.

Now I was sort of in open territory where I didn’t want to be: picking a new kind of keyboard. This was agony. I was trying to remember what other models I’d used. I looked into one in the US office (where most of the keyboards are mechanical, with brown switches), and was reminded how much I dislike clamped-in stabilizer bars. (More on that later, maybe.) Figuring out just what I wanted seemed like it was going to be a pain. Also, the news kept telling me about massive impending tariffs, which were surely going to punish me for delaying on ordering hardware from abroad.

Keyboard 1

Eventually, I found myself looking at Keychron. I knew of them only because a few years ago I bought a four-pack of Keychron C1 mechanical keyboards for the office for $50. In my mind, they were some sort of Johnny-come-lately cheap-o brand. On the other hand, their site had an enormous variety of keyboards, and I couldn’t find anything online that backed my view. I decided to order a K10 Max QMK, which ticked a couple key boxes: it’s programmable with QMK and it’s wired (but also works over Bluetooth or with its own transceiver)

The problem was that it didn’t have a blue switch option. Red, Brown, or (I’m not kidding) Super Banana. Reds and browns, I knew, were no good for me. Super banana, I was not sure, but I didn’t want to commit to something I might not like. The good news is that the K10 is hot-swappable. That means that after you pull the keycap off of the switch, you can pull the switch out, too, and replace it. I gather that some gamers put different switches in for different keys. I don’t really know why, but it’s something like “I want a really low activation force for my movement keys but a really quick reset for my trigger keys”. I didn’t care enough to look into it. My goal was to put in one hundred blue switches and dump all the originals into a box.

I ordered the K10 along with a tube of 110 Cherry MX blue switches. When it arrived, I played around for a bit, but quickly got to work pulling off all the keycaps and pulling out all the switches. This was easy, although the switch-pulling tool that came with the keyboard was a bit rough on my fingers. With all the (red) switches pulled, it was time to put in the blues. Inserting is not as simple as pulling, sadly. At the bottom of each switch are two stiff wires that slide into receivers in the keyboard. The upper part of the switch has two little arms that snap into place when the switch is seated. If the wires aren’t perfectly lined up, or aren’t straight, they will buckle or bend, and then the switch won’t form a circuit with the PCB.

This means that for each switch you insert, you first need to look carefuly at the leads to make sure that they’re straight and whole. It’s a little slow-down, but not so bad.

I put on some music and got to work. Pretty soon, I’d replaced all the switches and put the keycaps back on. I opened the Keychron Launcher to begin phase two. The Keychron Launcher is a web interface for managing the keyboard’s settings. It amazes me, because it uses a web API called WebHID, which gives your browser access to your HID devices per se. I had to use Chrome, but when I did, let let me flash my keyboard’s firmware and update its keymap. It also had a key tester that let me test every single key. When one or two didn’t work, I pulled the switches and replaced them with spares. Pretty soon, the whole keyboard worked and had a mapping I liked. I was delighted. Sure, it was expensive, but it has a great weight, it has the switches I like, and I could keep tweaking the keyboard layout until I was perfectly happy.

Keyboard 2

It was good enough that I went right ahead and ordered another one, that one for my office. In the week since my first order, the price had gone up $20 — almost certainly tariff-related. This was just the first problem.

I ordered that second keyboard on April 6th, and I had it in my hands on the 10th. I stuck around a little late after work to swap out the switches. Pretty soon I had a keyboard that worked great… except for eleven keys, as seen here.

Many of the keys worked if I replaced my aftermarket blue switches with the original reds that were included, so my first theory was that I had quite a lot of busted blue switches. I know the failure rate on switches is high, so I went with that theory and ordered more. Unfortunately, when they arrived, it didn’t help. The reds still worked and the blues didn’t. Except, sometimes the reds didn’t. Mostly it was centered around one part of the board, and if I pressed hard, they would start or stop working. I called on my friend Jesse, established member of the keyboard-industrial complex. He worked with me for a while, prompting me to do stuff I never would’ve done, like close circuits with a wire lead. Eventually, he was having me send close-up photos of the printed circuit board that all the keys slot into. He said, “Oh, look at those sockets! They’re at a bit too much of an angle, you’re not going to get good connections with those at all, they need re-soldering correctly.”

Here’s a photo from around that time. Is it a bad socket? I’m not sure, I had a hard time seeing it, but Jesse seemed convinced, and I believe him. But this might be an unrelated photo. My point is, this is what I was stuck thinking about!

Friends, I did not spent $190 on a pre-assembled keyboard just to be stripping things down to the PCB and re-soldering them! I’m not that kind of computer nerd! Frustrated, I wrote in to Keychron, who said they’d send me another PCB. Not as good as another keyboard, but I could do this. Eventually, the package came. I carefully disassembled my keyboard: I removed the keycaps, then the switches, then the top case, then the plate, then then PCB. I attached the new PCB, put on the top case, and put in the switches. I was not bold enough to put on all the keycaps, though. I fired up the Keychron Launcher and entered key test mode. Almost perfect. Everything worked except for one key that I’d hardly need: t.

Probably I could key in a whole paragraph, using only such glyphs as remained available. I mean, I had a double dozen symbols under my fingers, plus one! Only one member of our language’s ABCs was missing. Sadly, my keyboard was here for work, and my job is hardly one focused on producing source code lipogram. If I was gonna use my new device, I would need all 101 keys working.

I took the keyboard apart again to see how things looked. They didn’t look good.

Look at this a little while and you’ll see one of those black shapes isn’t in line with the others. It’s not just bent, it’s totally disconnected. It had fallen off the PCB and was sitting under it inside the keyboard. That’s the socket, and it’s how the keyswitch connects to the circuit so that, when pressed, the switch closes the circuit. If the socket falls off, the key absolutely will not work.

“What do I do now?” I asked Jesse.

“You solder it,” he said. “Good luck.”

Fortunately, I had a soldering iron, never used. I got in the 2023 Bag of Crap from Jesse’s company. He reported its original price as $2.60. After trying to use it, I’m sorry to say that it was closer to $0 in value. Mine did not heat up at all when plugged in. It probably could’ve been used as an awl, but what I needed was a very hot metal point, and I didn’t want to heat it up on coals. I moaned and wailed in the office, and my coworker Kurt said he’d bring in a proper soldering iron for me to use. I was still pretty frustrated at being in this position, but if it was going to get my keyboard working, fine.

He brought in a soldering iron and magnifiers, and I got to work. Five or six times, on three or four distinct days, I tried to solder that socket back on. I couldn’t get it done. On one hand, it’d been decades since I last soldered anything. On the other hand, I felt sort of incompetent.

I emailed Keychron again: Look, I said, the new PCB is at least as bad off as the old one. I tried hard to not ask you for more, because I’m sure the tariffs are a problem, but at this point I think I’ve done enough. Can you just ship me a new complete keyboard so I am not forced to perform work on yet another replacement part?

“No problem,” they said. “We’ll send you a new printed circuit board.”

Steam came from my ears, and Kurt pitied me. “Let’s fix that,” he said.

Kurt sat down and methodically performed about a dozen steps, including the three that I’d performed, plus another nine that probably made any part of the job actually work. With the piece soldered on, I reassembled they keyboard and 99% of the switches worked. I took a deep breath, pressed down on the remainder, and then they all worked. I screwed everything together and put on the keycaps. Everything was going great…

…until the very, very last keycap. Remember at the very beginning, I said I like to get a keyboard with a ten-key numeric keypad? I really do, and I use it! The last key I was putting on was the keypad’s “Enter” key, at the far bottom right. They keycap went on, but it didn’t bounce up when pressed. It stayed down. They Keychron keyboard had the screwed-in stabilizers like I like, but the stabilizers on this key were now partly stuck in place. They’d move if pushed or pulled, but it took more force than the spring in the keyswitch. Here’s a demonstration:

I asked Jesse, but he didn’t have any advice that avoided disassembling the dang thing again. I really, really wanted to avoid that. I’d had this thing for two months, and I just wanted to have it in place and working. I searched the internet, I wiggled at the crossbar of the stabilizer, but nothing helped.

Here’s the thing about stabilizers: the wider or longer the key, the more important the stabilizer is, and the closer to the edge you his the key, the more important the stabilizer is. The keypad’s enter key is pretty short, at 2u, and I’d mostly hit it toward the middle, anyway. I didn’t need a stabilizer! Taking the stabilizer out would be a keyboard-disassembling task. On the other hand, I could mangle the keycap so that it wouldn’t snap onto the stabilizer, and would only connect to the switch. I got a spare keypad enter key, I got a pair of pliers, and I fixed that keyboard.

Now I have working, clicky, programmable, lovely keyboards on my desks at work and at home. I’m pleased with them. On the other hand, this was a stupid amount of work, given the cost of the things. I think I’d be happy to buy another Keychron, and certainly I’d like my next keyboard (if I ever have to buy another) to be programmable with something like QMX. On the other hand, I only wanted hot-swappable keys for the sake of getting blues. I think my next keyboard will have to come preassembled with blue switches, preferably soldered right on by somebody else.

After this was all over, I took Kurt out for some beers as thanks, which came with the bonus of getting me the pleasure of his company for a couple hours. Next time, I’ll also do that without all the soldering.

Monday

Monday, I was on my own again for most of the day. This is not a complaint. Breno and Barbara were incredibly generous with their time! Also, even though I usually enjoy touring around with people, it can be good to wander alone, with no worry about whether you’re bring a frightful bore to your companion. I had a handful of things on my potential agenda for the day, but I only ended up visiting two of them: Parque Lage and the Botanical Garden.

Many, many times, I had to remind myself that Parque Lage is not Portguese for “Lake Park”. It’s named after Henrique Lage. I don’t know much about him, but he seems to have been a very wealth industrialist in the early 20th century, so I’m okay not knowing more, I think. Now, the land around his mansion is a large public park with lots of tree cover and plenty of interesting features. When I was there, I don’t think the building was open for visiting — or at least I couldn’t find an open entrance. Instead, I walked around the grounds, looked at ponds, hiked through overgrown paths, and took a lot of photos.

I was there for a good two hours, just walking and looking around. It’s a little odd that I don’t have more to say, but I think it’s all in the photos. Once in a while I sat down and read a chapter or two of a book. I took a photo for an older couple walking together. At one point, I accidentally walked the wrong way, left the path, wandered through the woods for a while, and found a surprise view of the city through the trees:

What else is there to say? If I lived nearby, I’d go there often to sit and read and make take a little lunch with me.

Afterward, I had meant to walk a little south to the lagoon and walk south along it to the city’s botanical garden. I forgot, though, and just walked straight down R. Jardim Botânico, which was sort of a boring walk. It wasn’t bad, and I did some people watching, but mostly it was uninteresting. Eventually, though, I came to the garden, which was not uninteresting. I spent four hours walking through the gardens, only partly because I had such a hard time navigating them.

If I ran the botanical garden, I’d be pushing Apple and Google to add a bunch more detail to their maps, because the paper map they handed out did not cut it. I had a hard time finding almost everything, but in the end it all worked out. I’ll try to summarize some of the best things I saw:

There was a “biblical garden”, full of plants mentioned in the Bible. The plaque for each one provided a chapter and verse for where to find them.

There was a primitive hut among a bunch of trees, and all I could think of was the botanical gardens in The Shadow of the Torturer, where the narrator encountered a similar (also seemingly South American) hut.

There was an orchid house with many kinds of orchid in bloom.

There was a garden of only medicinal plants, including notes on what cultures used them, and for what purposes.

There was a big section of cacti, with a surprising amount of diversity.

There were the obligatory Japanese garden and rose garden.

Also, there were monkeys.

Probably there are people who know how to write compelling, detailed, informative notes on a visit to a place like this. I’m not one of them, though. I’ll say this: I enjoyed the place enough that I spent four hours there and might have stayed longer if I didn’t have anywhere to be. Oh, and if the food was better. I had a pretty mediocre salad there, which was absolutely my own fault. I should’ve eaten something on the walk.

After the garden, I headed back to my apartment, cooled off a little, and did a quick bout of shopping. My plan was to meet Breno nearby for dinner and drinks. We went to Boteco Belmonte and hung out for a good while, trying small plates and having a few drinks. The food was good, and the company was better. Despite my small lunch and all my walking, I wasn’t terribly hungry, or I would’ve kept exploring the menu. I had my last caipirinha of the trip, but I also decided to try their Moscow Mule. It was a strange one, with the ginger added as a sort of creamy foam on top. I’m not sure I’d order it often, but it was fun as a weird surprise.

I had meant to see some other things on Monday, but I was pretty happy with the hours spent just looking at the outdoors. In retrospect, I just wish I’d gotten one more caipirinha, to go. Or maybe on the way back to my apartment.

Tuesday

Tuesday was my last day! My flight out of Rio was at 23:00, and I had to leave my apartment around eleven. Barbara and Breno graciously invited me to come by, leave my bags, and spend the day. I spent the morning packing, running a few more errands, and finishing off most of my groceries.

On my way to their place, my phone ran out of data. I’d bought an eSIM with Airalo, which was mostly just fine. (Actually, the service I got in Brazil was not as good as what I’d gotten elsewhere, but it was totally adequate.) I’d even topped it off the previous day, but I think that all my roaming in the parks had me using more data than I thought. As my Uber got me closer to their place, I realized that the map wasn’t updating, and Discord was offline. I knew their address, and I thought I remembered how to contact them, but once I was out of the car, I was stumped. Eventually, I received an SMS from Breno, and I went back to his place and got in. I had misremembered how to ring him from the front gate!

Inside, I bought more data. More importantly, I got a tour of their place, had some chit chat, and then it was time for lunch. Lunch was homemade vegan moqeueca, with plantains replacing the fish. It was delicious. I’m pretty sure that my grandmother sometimes made a similar fish stew, but I haven’t yet confirmed this with my siblings. Anyway, it was great, and was followed by a dessert of passionfruit and condensed milk. Yum!

After lunch, Breno and I dropped his daughter at school and stopped into Casa Roberto Marinho, a large house that’s been converted into a gallery space. It was good, and was the nth place I’ve seen in the past few years featuring art depicting Laocoön. Weird? I don’t know.

From there, the plan was to see the one absolute must-see thing in Rio: the giant Christ the Redeemer statue. The statue is 98’ tall, atop a 26’ pedestal, atop a 2,300’ mountain. You can see it from all sorts of places in the city. I saw it from Sugarloaf. I saw it from the beach. I saw it from the highway while the police searched my bags. It was everywhere! Also, it was going to have an incredible view of the city.

The problem is… the weather was absolutely miserable. Every day until Tuesday had been sunny and clear, but Tuesday it was cloudy, windy, and raining. We hoped it would clear up before we went up, but it didn’t. I wasn’t too fussed, really. From up close, I knew I’d see the whole statue. Still, it was not the ideal weather for it. Breno was a sport and drove us up the mountain, where we caught a train to the top.

Here’s a view of the weather taken near where we caught the train:

An aside: I had called this train a “funicular” when talking to friends, but further research tells me that it isn’t one. It is a “rack railway”, where the train is driven by a cog along a toothed rail. This allows for much steeper gradients than a normal rail line. It was pretty cool, and from inside the train, you could definitely see and feel the slope at which the train was traveling. This particular railway is the Corcovado Rack Railway, and I will definitely be reading more about it later.

Once we got to the top, the situation was both better and worse than I’d imagined. In some directions, we could see quite a ways, and I could recognize places I’d been or had heard of. In others, there was just a dense fog. It was pretty obvious that on a good day, you’d be able to see forever, and that the view of the city would be absolutely gorgeous. I wasn’t even disappointed, though. The view was still great, and the statue was really impressive. I was also delighted to find out the pedestal on which the Christ stands house a tiny, tiny church. We stepped inside briefly to get out of the wind, but we didn’t stay long, and I didn’t get a photo. It seemed a little uncouth to do so.

The weather up there wasn’t great. It was probably 55 or 60ºF, rainy, and windy. Breno was clearly miserable, and also seemed sort of baffled that I wasn’t. What can I say? Back here in Philly, we get way down below freezing, so 55ºF and windy is merely annoying. If the view had been better, I might’ve stuck around while he got out of the rain and off to pick up his kid. As it was, I saw everything there was to see pretty quickly, and we both got out of there and onto the train.

Back at their place, we had good while to sit around, talk, and have dinner. “We’ll order pizza,” they said, “but it’s going to be terrible compared to anything in the states.” I didn’t lie and say it wouldn’t be. I’ve had pizza outside the states, I know how it goes. (It was actually tasty, it just wasn’t good pizza.) After that, it was time to finally leave Rio. I got an Uber, got to the airport, and eventually flew home with no difficulty. I had plenty of things left in Rio that I could’ve stayed to do, but as always, it was really good to get home to my people.

I had meant to bring something for Barbara and Breno. I didn’t know they’d be such exemplary hosts, but either way it would’ve been gracious. I at least remembered to bring something for their daughter: Gritty. What better thing to bring as an ambassador from Philadelphia? Fortunately, he was well received, and I felt some civic pride at Gritty’s continued ability to make life a little better.

Anyway, if I go again, I’ll remember to bring a bottle of Malört or something!

As for whether I’ll go again… it’s hard to know. I’m surprised I went at all, honestly. There isn’t much natural pressure to visit South America. Work doesn’t send me there, conferences haven’t tried to entice me. It’s expensive to get to, even if it’s cheap to spend time there. Now that I’ve been, I could imagine spending more time there and enjoying it. On the other hand, there is a lot of the planet left that I haven’t even seen once. I think I’ll have to play it by ear.

In the meantime, I’ll be looking for the best caipirinha in Philadelphia. Wish me luck.

Saturday

Friday, I ended my day by watching the sunset, having a beer, and listening to two different bands on the way back to my apartment. How would I top that?

Fortunately, I had help. Breno and Barbara were back on the scene to show me around to cool things I would never have done on my own. I had a lazy morning of scrambed eggs and orange juice, and some amount of walking around the neighborhood. By this point, I’d decided that all the fearmongering around getting mugged in Rio was wildly overblown, but it did seem like I should pay attention to where I wandered, so I didn’t head too far in unknown directions. I did see a bunch more shops, including things that I probably should’ve tried eating, but didn’t. A little after ten, though, I headed to the farmer’s market at General Glicério street. I was interested in lots of the things, but stuck to the suggestions: a pastel (sort of like an empanada), a tapioca (like a taco or crêpe made with cassava), and caldo de cana (sugarcane juice). I posted a lot of photos in Flickr, but I’ll highlight this one, the tapioca:

It doesn’t look like much, but it was delicious. Breno and his daughter had one with nutella and banana — a classic pairing to stuff into anything. I had the more traditional cheese and coconut, which seemed weird but tasted great. I was also simultaneously pleased and weirded out by the shell. It was soft and chewy, and had a subtle flavor that I can’t describe. I would eat many more, with many different fillings.

We ran into a bunch of their friends and their friends’ kids, which made for a good farmer’s market experience. Who doesn’t like watching little kids play in a crowded but basically safe space? Eventually, though, we headed out toward Tacaca do Norte. I don’t know anything about this place other than it was billed as the place to get açai. Also, Brazil had already been billed as the place to get açai, so this was meant to be the best of the best. I had actually never had the stuff, although it’s definitely been sort of everywhere here. It just seemed like it would be some boring fruity health food.

There was some debate over whether I should get a huge order or a tiny order. We settled on tiny (I was so full already!), but what we got seemed pretty big to me! If you haven’t had an açai bowl (or maybe if you’ve only had whatever it is we serve in the US), I guess I’d say it’s a bit like frozen yogurt or mashed frozen bananas, like a cold, sweet, stiff pudding. It came with two little pots, one of tapioca beads and one of granola. I love putting granola into goo, so that was great. Even so, I couldn’t eat more than half of it. Even if I’d been very hungry, I’m not sure I could’ve. Meanwhile, people all around me were eating it by the liter.

After that, we split up. Breno and I continued on alone to CRAB, a museum of local and indigenous crafts. This was very cool, and had both traditional-style objects and contemporary reinterpretations. I’m pretty sure that a few of the things I saw were also in my grandmother’s house. Did she ever visit Brazil? I have no idea.

Rather than any photos of CRAB, though, here’s one of Central do Biscoito (Biscuit Central), a cookie store with a weirdly compelling mascot:

After that, I think there was some sort of general walking around, but it led us toward the Candelária Church, a beautiful (but slightly dilapidated) church. Across the street, there were June Festival celebrations, and that’s where we were headed. One of Breno’s friends was going to be part of the celebration, as a stilt walker. This event was good value. We watched a bunch of stilt walking, heard a bunch of music, saw some unexpected Capoeira, and even ran into Breno’s brother and family! We saw the thing that had been the Olympic torch when Rio hosted. Also, critically, we got caipirinhas.

We lingered a good long while, but eventually we were pretty beat (or maybe I was beat and Breno was polite) and we headed out. I think this was my first time riding the Rio Metrô, the subway. I picked up a subway pass as a souvenir. These are great souvenirs: they’re cheap, they don’t take up space, and they’re unambiguously associated with the place you went. This one was even better. It’s called a RioCard, which is an anagram of Ricardo.

The subway was clean, easy to ride, and felt safe. I rode it again alone a couple times, and have no complaints. Breno and I chatted the whole time, even as he overshot his stop by accident and accompanied me to mine on purpose. When I got back to my apartment, I took off my shoes, called home, and zoned out until it was time to sleep.

Also, here’s a picture of Breno’s niece wearing my hat.

Sunday

I have no recollection or photos of Sunday morning. I think that’s when I explored a street market near my apartment. It was pretty cool, and I bought a nice aloha shirt. The seller told me I should go a size smaller, and I didn’t listen, but I think she was right. Gloria suggests it should be easy to have shortened, so I might just do that! I also hit the grocery store (my local Zona Sul) and picked up some soap and shampoo, so I could get cleaner. I felt a little weird about buying so much for my three remaining days, but I felt better about not being gross.

I met Breno and his daughter near Biscuit Central, and we headed to the Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Sebastian. Coming to Rio, I knew that this was one of my top priorities to see. The photos made it clear that I’d be happy with it. In person, it was even better. It was beautiful. It made great use of the light while still providing a somber space. It felt like it really fit into the place it was, and it was still clearly a cathedral. I have seen many cathedrals, and even the best are often just very well constructed versions of “yet another cathedral”. This wasn’t that. Also, as we approached I could still smell the frankinsence from the morning’s mass.

I want to learn more about the place, including what required aspects of cathedral design it fulfilled in unusual ways. That seems certain to be a thing. Seeing my photos, Mark Dominus said, “A solid refutation of the people who complain about Brutalism.”

The plan had been to take the old fashioned tram from the cathedral to the way-uphill Bohemian neighborhood of Santa Teresa, but the line for the tram was two and a half hours long, which didn’t seem worth it. We got an Uber. Up in Santa Teresa, we looked around shops and watched trams go by, which was a pretty decent substitute for actually riding the thing. Eventually, Barbara met us and we got lunch: feijoada.

Feijoada is (I am told) the national dish of Brazil. It originates in Portugal, but let’s get real: it’s meat, beans, and rice, so it’s something people eat everywhere. It was served with collard greens and tapioca flour, and it was great. Could I have eaten our three person order? Yes, probably, but it’s surely also good that I didn’t try to. (Also, it would’ve been rude.) There is no photographic evidence, but I think I had a caipirinha there. We went to Bar Simplesmente, which apparently is a great place to go for feijoada. It certainly seemed like it to me!

The other notable part of the meal was the fried hunks of cassava. At first I said, “Hey these potatoes are great!” Almost as soon as I said it, I realized it wasn’t potato, and Barbara said, “This is cassava.” I said, “This is just like the yuca fries they used to serve at the Cuban place we liked.” Barbara politely explained that cassava and yuca are the same thing, and my mind was totally blown. I feel like I really should’ve know this, but I didn’t. Then again, I don’t live in a place where every single meal contains cassava!

From there, we walked a bit more and got some coffee. I usually only drink mocha lattes, but these weren’t commonly on offer in Rio, so mostly I just had tea. Here, though, I got a cappucino, which was good! (I’ve had them before and not liked them.) We saw a small exhibit of a fashion designer’s work in a cool gallery space with a great view. Soon, though, we came to the Escadaria Selarón.

The Escadaria Selarón is a (pretty long!) outdoor staircase. If asked, I’d say they led from Santa Teresa “all the way down” to Lapa, but I’m not really sure. At the bottom, we could see the huge, defunct aqueduct that the tram rides across. The point isn’t the destination, though, it’s the stairs themselves. They’re covered in tiles, and the work was done over twenty years by Jorge Selarón, an artist who lived in the area.

The steps were pretty popular, with lots of other tourists there to see, but they weren’t crowded or annoying, and we took our time wandering down and looking at the tiles.

After the steps, Breno and I carried on alone, heading to Glória market and the nearby June Festival celebration. Breno was very keen on me trying a bunch of sweets, so he bought a bag and we sat around drinking beer and eating candy. This was better than it sounds. I think the best thing we had was pé de moleque. As far as I’m concerned this is just shiny peanut brittle (the best kind of peanut brittle), but is weirdly pitched as being a local thing for Brazil. The one we got here was actually soft, sort of like a Pay Day bar, but much nicer. My only photo of the sweets is pretty bad, so I won’t put it in here. Instead, here’s me with Glória station, which made me think of Gloria every time I saw it, of course.

We’d meant to take a bike ride after this, but instead we sat around talking until it was dark and we were beat. This was good! Breno and I (and Barbara, on other occasions) spent a lot of time talking about this and that. Often this was work, sometimes politics, and sometimes movie, TV, and books. Most notably, though, I got a lot of Brazilian history, which was all interesting and valuable as I explored the place. More than once, I saw a monument or building that I understood much better because of a bit of history I’d learned earlier in the week.

From Glória station, Breno went home and I went back to my apartment in Ipanema, where I called home and caught up, then stared at the wall for a while until it was time to sleep.

Every night, I was watching a little Resident Alien. It was good travel TV. Not too stressful, sort of funny, and easy to stop watching when vacation was over. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch one more episode. Sunday night, as I wrapped up one last episode, I got a message from my sister that my dad had gone to the hospital. (He’s fine now.) I waited up to get more information, and while doing that decided to floss my teeth again. Doing that, I managed to pop the crown off one of my molars, which led to another hour or so awake, searching the web for “dental adhesive brands Brazil”. Eventually, I just cleaned everything involved and jammed it back in my mouth. It stayed put until I got home, but it meant I avoided peanut brittle until I got back!

Monday, I was on my own, so it was no problem to sleep in, and so staying up too late thinking about my teeth was no problem. More on the last two days in another post.

Background

The background for this trip is worth mentioning. For years, I’ve been seeing my friend Breno at the annual Perl Toolchain Summit. He was also a regular in an online D&D game I ran. All the time, he’d say, “Look, man, you’ve gotta come visit Brazil. It’d be so great!” I would say, “I bet it would, but I really mostly travel where work sends me, and I can’t see a work trip to Brazil happening any time in the near future.”

Then, early last year, I got an email from a frequent flyer program telling me that if I didn’t use my reward miles, I’d lose them. I managed to not lose them immediately, but it seemed like this was a sign. I tried to think of where I might go, and I remembered all of Breno’s exhortations. I looked it up, and I could definitely get to Rio and back on miles. I emailed him and said, “Okay, when would be good?” He wrote back with a long enthusiastic analysis of the year, including this:

The Festas Juninas are probably less known outside Brazil but also very typical and popular, happening all over the country in June/July, usually in the afternoon or at dusk. it’s less crowded and “partyesque” but there is dancing and fire and costumes and very typical food and drinks that are harder to find the rest of the year.

Sounded perfect! I decided to make plans.

Getting there

Over the course of the next year, this went from vague idea to definite plan, and I started to put together a list of things I’d like to see or do. I read a lot of “what you must see in Rio” pages, plus ones that covered more obscure topics. I asked Breno and Barbara (Breno’s wife, also a friend) to tell me whether my list was any good. By the time the trip was upon me, I had what felt like a great set of things to do. Even better, Barbara provided a suggested day-by-day agenda, which would’ve been a pain for me. It included a bunch of “and then we’ll take you to something we think is really worth it.” Who could ask for more?

Meanwhile, though, the articles I read kept saying, “You’re going to love Rio! It’s so wonderful! You are definitely at high risk of getting mugged, though!” Mostly I shrug this stuff off. I live in Philly, and I’m used to people talking about my home like it’s a warzone. Still, I got a little anxious. Breno reassured me, I decided to keep my phone in my purse, and I tried to put aside any fears. Then, on the 18th, I got my bag and headed to the airport. It was going to be a bit of a long trip, but I’m used to going to Australia. This would be no big deal.

Really, it mostly wasn’t. The only complication was that instead of a 6 hour layover between flights, I had a 6 hour layover plus a 16 hour delay. It was mostly overnight, so I didn’t get to tool around Miami. I mostly sat around the lounge and the Holiday Inn and watched TV. It was fine, but I didn’t love losing a day.

Eventually, I landed at GIG. (Did you know that Rio’s international airport is named after the guy who wrote The Girl from Ipanema? It is!). Instead of landing at 8:00 in the morning, I landed around 1:00 in the morning, and then I had to get through immigration and customs and find a cab. Then the cab got pulled over by the police, who ordered me out of the car at gunpoint and searched all my stuff. Honestly, I might have been more nervous if I wasn’t so tired.

Thursday

I feel a bit badly about beginning my trip story this way, but it’s how it began. The good news (spoilers!) is that it was the only remotely worrying event of my trip, and I wan’t even really worried at any point. We were let go pretty quickly, and then I was in my apartment and asleep. The next day, I was on the beach and everything was good.

My first day was supposed to be Wednesday, which I would’ve spent exploring the beaches and maybe finding one of the nearby art museums, but that was shot. It was Thursday, and that meant lunch with Breno and Babs and their daughter. We had “angu”, which I’d describe as something like a polenta-and-offal stew. It was great, right up my alley!

Then it was on to the Museum of Tomorrow (the architecture was great, but we mostly coasted through the exhibits), and then São Cristóvão Fair, which I later described as “what if Philly’s Reading Terminal Market was in Brazil and had three competing live music acts at all times”. It was great, although a little loud. We had a bunch more delicious food (lots of photos on Flickr), and I had my second caipirinha of the day. If I have one regret of the trip, it’s not drinking more of those. I suspect it’ll be hard to find or make a good one at home, but we’ll see.

A caipirinha is a bit like a daquiri. It’s made with cachaça, which is a bit like white rum. Then sugar, lime, and ice. It seems like the drink of Brazil, or at least Rio. (Brazil is huge. If you sort of vaguely agree that Brazil isn’t very small, go look it up. It’s the fifth largest country in the world, smaller than the USA and larger than Australia. I don’t want to get accused of saying something like “the mint julep is the drink of the US”.) Anyway, I had probably four or five across the trip, and I could’ve done with more like eight.

The music at the fair was foreshadowing. There was lots of live music all over the place, and it didn’t seem like a tourist gimmick. It was always pretty upbeat, and everybody sang along and danced with everything. “Oh, this is a very famous song,” was definitely one of the things Breno said to me the most.

Also notable: the ice cream. Breno pointed at the menu – and I’m sorry to say I didn’t get a photo! “On the right,” he said, “are all the boring flavors you know. Chocolate, vanilla, mint. Who cares? On the left, though, it’s all fruit flavors, and I won’t bother translating, because you don’t have words in English for any of these. They’re all South American fruits.” I had jaboticaba. The ice cream was very good, but the exciting thing was this list of weird fruits that I’d never heard of. Weirder, jaboticaba fruit grow right on the trunk of the tree? Just weird.

There was at least one fruit on the list that I did know: pineapple. I was surprised and pleased to learn, though, that in Brazil they don’t call pineapple ananás, as they do in Portugal and nearly everywhere else. They call it abacaxi. Rejecting the worldwide standard name for that fruit made the people of Brazil seem even more like my brothers and sisters. Too bad they still use the metric system.

After the fair, Breno dropped me off at my apartment. There’s only an hour of time difference from home to Rio, but I was beat. I wasn’t ready to collapse into sleep, but I was no good for any kind of conversation by the end of the night. I zoned out and eventually crashed.

Friday

Friday was my first day on my own, and I had a plan: Sugarloaf! Sugarloaf Mountain is a 1300’ mountain at the mouth of Rio’s bay. It’s called Sugarloaf because it looks like a sugarloaf. A sugarloaf is how sugar was sold for hundreds of years, well until the 19th century, so I guess at one point it was pretty useful to say “it’s that mountain that looks like a sugarloaf!” Now, I think of a sugarloaf as “a compressed hunk of sugar shaped like that mountain in Rio”.

I knew the mountain would have a good view of the city and the bay, but I was mostly in it for the cable car ride. I’m not sure why, since I’m not a huge lover of heights, but it seemed pretty compelling. Before I came down, Breno had said, “the cable car! Like in Moonraker!” I had never watched Moonraker, so I watched it on the flight down. I don’t recommend it. On the other hand, the cable car ride was great. Happily, the mountain was even better than that!

I’d hoped to ride up in the mid-afternoon so that I could ride down during sunset. In retrospect, I think I could’ve made that work, but it wasn’t a clear win at the time. I hadn’t been able to buy tickets online, so I’d have to go out to the mountain and hope to get timed entry tickets for a reasonable time. I didn’t want to get there only to find out that I couldn’t get tickets, so I ended up going early. I wasn’t disappointed, and honestly I’m not sure I’d have been any happier with sunset.

The cable car actually goes to two mountains. First, to Urca Hill, then Sugarloaf Mountain. It’s two separate cable car rides, and you can spend as much time as you want on Urca Hill between them. I spent a few hours, and it was great. There was food (I had corn, a sausage sandwich, ice cream, and later a beer), there were crafts, and there were amazing views in every direction. When I couldn’t appreciate the view any more, I sat down and read a book for ten minutes, then got back to the view. It was excellent.

That view above is actually from Urca Hill. In the distance, you can see Corcovado (“the hunchback”), the mountain on which Rio’s giant Christ the Redeemer statue stands. It was visible from all over the city, and I saw it up close and personal later in the trip. This was one of the cooler views of it, though.

From Urca Hill, I took the second cable car to Sugarloaf. It was very cool, and I think the views were marginally better, but it was much more crowded-feeling in that smaller space, and the food and shops weren’t inviting. I didn’t stay up there half as long as I was on Urca Hill. In fact, when I got back to Urca Hill I spend more time there, getting an ice cream cone and doing some people-watching.

After that, I was ready for a break. I got back to my apartment, zoned out for a little bit, and then hit the grocery. I picked up OJ, eggs, bread, and tea, which meant that I could start every day with a little breakfast. That meant I wouldn’t be hungry until dinner, most days, if I kept busy, which made every day easier. I also picked up a packet of Globo biscuits, which are a sort of flavorless cassava-based Funyun. They were everywhere, in Rio, but also had nothing much to recommend them other than the crunchiness.

I also also picked up some iced mate tea, which I enjoyed drinking most days. I think I’m going to see if I can get any tea leaves for making it at home, but we’ll see.

After I’d relaxed for a while, I headed to Arpoador, the peninsula between the Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. There’s a big rock there (Arpoador Rock), which some people say is the best place in the world to see the sunset. I was skeptical, but it was very good. The rock was swarming with people, but I managed to find a place to watch the sun set. There are lots more photos in my trip album, but here’s one:

After that, I walked slowly back to my apartment. I stopped at two concerts, both of which were great, and I had a Brahma beer, which was good, especially for the weather. I didn’t get to try many Brazilian beers, but I enjoyed this one. Looking back, I wish I’d bought one more beer to drink on the walk. I should try to enjoy “walk with a beer” time when traveling to places where that’s legal.

Eventually, I made it back to my apartment and turned in. More on the rest of the trip in future posts!

My problem is that the world of 2077 seems to have changed zero since 2013. From 1990 to 2013, in twenty three years: the USA collapses, space colonization (of the moon and Mars) begins in earnest, cybernetic prosthesis and mind uploading become practical, European nations collapse and reform, and powerful artificial general intelligence is developed. It’s an incredible amount of change to the world for twenty three years. Think back to 2001. How much has the world changed? Some, for sure, but really nothing like Cyberpunk proposes. That’s okay, because Cyberpunk is a game that proposes a world where everything is in a state of constant upheaval. But sixty five years later, the world hasn’t changed any further.

My problem is that CP2077 keeps reminding me of something that often bugged me about RPGs in the ’90s. Back then, I had a mailing list with some friends who were into RPGs. It was called “RPG Theory”, and that’s what we talked about. Here’s a (lightly edited) section of a post I made in August 2000, with the subject “Metaplot, Setting, Freedom, and Flavor”:

A role-playing game (RPG) is an interactive story-game created by a Game Designer, revolving mostly (although not exclusively) around the actions of Player Characters (PCs) largely told and entirely adjudicated by the Game Master (GM).

The game can be roughly defined by its theme, setting, and rules.

The game’s theme is composed of its mood, tone, and possibly an overall moral or message. The necessity of a particular mood to a game is hard to define. While slight variation is clearly possible (e.g. Vampire games centered chiefly around Humanitas or Jyhad), it may be that vast changes are not. (A Vampire game centered around fighting robots from Mars, or in the style of Paranoia.) I leave this question to the philosophers.

The games’s setting is the world in which the game takes place. This world exists in equilibrium or stasis. It is clearly not frozen in one moment, but it is frozen in one period. One can look at Casablanca and see a setting that is active, but also frozen. From the beginning to the end of the description (that is, the movie itself), the setting does not change. Only the characters change and take action.

Setting is the perogative of the Game Designer. They write the game’s chief book or books, which contain as basic description of rules and setting.

The perogative of the Player Character, chiefly and above all else, is action. Actions are easy to understand. When a PC speaks to another PC, shoots an NPC, or detonates a nucelar device, these are actions. They are undertaken by the PC as in-character (IC) tasks, generally with the implicit permission of the Game Master, which can use IC means to stop them, but will rarely rule out-of-hand that an attempt is impossible.

The perogative of the Game Master, chiefly and above all else, is motion. Motion is action taken by the setting. While the setting, as initially described, is static, during the course of the game it acts. This motion can be subtle: gangs working for the city’s mayor begin to muscle in on the PCs’ operation, which had in the Prelude (pre-game ‘time’) existed in equilibrium. It can also be drastic: all the women in America begin to grow wings. Through motion, the GM punctuates the equilibrium of the setting, communicates the theme, and forces the PCs to take action.

That is a campaign. (Or Chronicle, or Session, whatever.)

Metaplot is the superimposition of the Game Designer’s campaign onto the GM’s campaign. (The Game Designer, in his off time, presumably is able to act also as a GM.) The Game Designer’s motion must be accounted for by the Game Master, and this reduces his ability to communicate theme and act effectively. Or, at least, this is how many GMs perceive the problem. We could call the metaplot “metamotion.” (It is run by the Designer as ‘metaGM’ and stars ‘metacharacters.’)

The Golden Rule, “the GM can do whatever they want”, gives GMs the option to ignore any part of the Game Designer’s ideas. Generally this applies to setting, but it can be extended to rules, theme, and (of course) metaplot.

On the other hand, the Game Designer knows that GMs are unlikely to abandon “canon” rules. So, the Game Designer insidiously (or blithely) incorporates new metaplot into new rules, making it impossible for one to exist without the other. Or, only slightly less insidiously, they release books of metaplot which also contain useful or required information that can be discounted, which merely means that the GM will pay for material that they do want, as well as material that they do not.

The Cyberpunk RPG had its own metaplot. Books came out once in a while telling you what was new in the world. Night City is seized by the Metal Wars. Elziabeth Kress becomes President of the United States. The Fourth Corporate Wars happen. These books were generally of the “less insidious” type above: the book would tell you about how Arasaka and Militech were warring over an African land grab, and also introduce new weapons and cyberware being used there. You could use that story as a basis for your game, or you could ignore it and give the players access to the cool new tech just for fun.

Of course, as the years go by, more and more of this metaplot builds up. New books are released that build on the story of the last ten books. It’s harder and harder to carve out your game’s Night City from the currently canonical one. Cyberpunk was hardly the worst offender (if you consider this an offense) in this area. I wrote my post about White Wolf’s World of Darkness, which started off by describing the game world as a moment in time, and ended up releasing an enormous list of books detailing monumental in-game events that crowded out the Game Master’s own ideas.

Anyway, Cyberpunk 2077 feels enormously encumbered by this problem. Johnny Silverhand has been part of the Cyberpunk story since the original Cyberpunk RPG (set in 2013). His activities help define the setting, not just in the setting’s past, but in its present and future. His actions are so significant as to constrain the motion of the game.

This just becomes bizarre when we’re not thinking about the seven years from CP 2013 to CP 2020, but the 57 years from CP 2020 to CP 2077. Johnny blows up Arasaka tower in 2022, and then vanishes for fifty years. When he shows up again, nothing has changed. The world of 2077 is, I would say, literally indistinguishable from that of 2022. It’s not because Johnny isn’t there to do stuff, but because it’s not an option to really decontextualize Johnny by having the setting change out from under him.

Johnny complains about some fan of his from fifty years ago who’s living in the past, but actually nothing has changed since then. Johnny isn’t a creature of the past, he’s just as relevant in 2077 as he was in 2022. This world of constant upheaval and instability has become incredibly reliable. In sixty years, nothing really changed. The protagonist can’t really change anything, either. They’re just there to experience the show.

I wish the game had been set in 2022. They could’ve just let us play as Johnny Silverhand, carrying out the raid on Arasaka. But this would’ve given us agency over a character whose actions belong to the game designer, or maybe one of their friends in the canonical campaign of the game. They couldn’t let us have that agency, so they gave us the lesser agency of V, who lets us see that Johnny’s actions had no consequence, and neither will ours.

All of this is why I basically always throw away the setting that comes with an RPG. Anything that limits my ability to create a dynamic world of my own is antithetical to my idea of being a game master. The way that CP 2077 reflects a world defined by the game designer’s favorite NPCs and their millieu just makes me sad.

After a few days of use, though, I realized there was pretty annoying problem: the URL-like strings that 1Password’s op tool uses to find things don’t include account names. The tool doesn’t search all your accounts for a given item. It just checks the “current” one. (You can toggle which is “current” with op signin, but ugh.) I have more than one 1Password account, and I wanted to have both personal and work credentials available on my laptop while doing work. This was going to mean having a second environment variable, like APPNAME_CREDENTIAL_ACCOUNT in addition to the first variable that stored the op://vault/item/field string. It’s just one more field, but it’s one more field all over the place, and it meant complicating the library that was meant to just get a password from a string. It bugged me.

I finally fixed this in the new version. Now, there’s another format of string you can specify:

  opcli:a=${Account}:v=${Vault}:i=${Item}:f=${Field}

You don’t have to specify everything, so you can still skip the vault and field names to fetch a complete item (as long as the item locator is unambiguous). On the other hand, now you can specify the account name.

With this finally done, I think I’ll be updating a bunch of little programs to fetch credentials from 1Password!

Back then, and later, I’d also review code on paper. This was before I was doing formal “code review” for work. Sometimes I just wanted to look at my own code, out of the context of my computer, and think about it. Sometimes I wanted to look at somebody else’s code. Either way, putting it on paper was really useful. I could read it away from the rest of the distractions of my computer, and I could draw circles and arrows in a bunch of different colors.

The way I did it, then, was to use Vim’s :hardcopy command. Like the rest of Vim, it has slightly strange but actually very good documentation. I worked on Windows in the early 2000s, and I could enter :ha and get a printout. Sometimes, though, I’d use the a2ps program instead. That was a bit more work to use, but it produced better listings (as I recall), especially because it would print two pages of code on one piece of paper, while remaining quite legible.

Over time, I printed code less often. This was partly, but not entirely, because I was coding less. Lately, I’ve been coding a bit more. On top of that, I do a lot of it sitting not twenty feet from Mark Dominus, who seems to print out nearly every hunk of code he reviews. This has brought back memories of how much I got out of printing code. It also led to him asking me a question or two about a2ps that left me a little surprised and embarrassed that I had forgotten how to use it well.

Over the last twenty four hours, I’ve tried to get back up to speed, and to find (and simplify) a method for printing code listings on demand. This blog post is a bit of a recounting of that work, and what I found.

PostScript

I wanted to start with a2ps but I have to write a prelude about PostScript.

The “a” in a2ps stands for “any”. The idea is that you feed it basically any kind of source code (or plain text) and it will build a PostScript file for printing. PostScript is a programming language created by Adobe and used (mostly but not entirely) to drive printers. It’s a bit of a weird language, but it’s postfix and stack-based, so I have a soft spot in my heart for it. You can see three books on PostScript on shelf three in my post about my technical bookshelf. Ten years ago, showing the kid different kinds of programming, we wrote this program:

/text {
  /Times-Roman findfont exch scalefont setfont
} def

newpath 24 text 200 400 moveto
        (You're standing on my neck!) show

newpath 284 284 72 0 360 arc stroke
newpath 265 300 12 0 360 arc fill
newpath 303 300 12 0 360 arc fill
newpath 250 225 moveto 275 225 lineto
        275 200 lineto 250 200 lineto
        250 225 lineto stroke
newpath 275 225 moveto 300 225 lineto
        300 200 lineto 275 200 lineto
        275 225 lineto stroke

newpath 300 225 moveto 325 225 lineto
        325 200 lineto 300 200 lineto
        300 225 lineto stroke

It draws a skull with the caption “You’re standing on my neck!”. Try it!

But how? Well, in theory you can send it directly to your printer with lp, but on current macOS (unlike older versions) you will get this error: Unsupported document-format “application/postscript”.

I’m not sure exactly where the problem lies. My suspicion is that it’s in the CUPS service that serves as the mediator between the user and the printer on macOS. Probably I could get around this by using mDNS and IPP, and honestly I am tempted to go learn more. But there was a simpler solution: ps2pdf converts a PostScript program to a PDF file. It’s shipped with Ghostscript and is easy to get from Homebrew.

PDF is actually based on PostScript, but I don’t know the details. PostScript has also been used for rendering graphical displays, using a system called Display PostScript (DPS), which was developed by both Adobe and NeXT, and later became the basis for the MacOS X display system. So, why doesn’t macOS support PostScript well anymore? Honestly, I don’t know.

Anyway: lots of the things I tried using for printing output PostScript, which is meant to be easy to send on to the printer. With ps2pdf installed, printing these files isn’t so hard. It’s just a drag that they can’t be send right to the lp command.

a2ps

Right, back to a2ps! Given a piece of source code, it will spit out a PostScript program representing a nice code listing. Unfortunately, running it out of the box produced something pretty awful, and I had to fumble around a good bit before I got what I wanted. I didn’t save a copy, so if you want to see it, you can try to reproduce it on your own. The problems included being off center, running off the page margins, using a mix of different typefaces in one source listing, using awful colors, and probably other stuff. So, I had to consult the manual. Unfortunately, I started doing that by running man a2ps, immediately hitting the problem that has infuriated geeks for decades: I got a pretty mediocre man page with a footnote saying the real docs were in Texinfo. And info isn’t installed.

Eventually I found myself reading the a2ps manual as a PDF on the web. With that (and with some help from Mark), I found that much of what I needed would come down to putting this in ~/.a2ps/a2psrc:

Options: --medium=letter
Options: --line-numbers 1
Options: --prologue color

This set my paper size, turned on line numbering on every line, and said that I wanted highlighting to be expressed as color, not just font weight.

There were two problems that I could not get over:

1. Typeface mixing! Everything was in fixed text except for literal strings, which were (to my horror) represented in a proportional font.
2. Awful colors. For example, subroutine names were printed in black on a bright yellow background. Probably some people think this is fine. I did not. (The a2ps manual admits: “It is pretty known that satisfying the various human tastes is an NEXPTIME-hard problem.”)

So, how to fix it? By hacking on a PostScript file!

a2ps combines (roughly) two things to build the final PostScript program: the prologue, and the program. (There’s also the header (“hdr”), but that’s included directly by the prologue. Let’s not split hairs.)

The program is a series of PostScript instructions that will print out your listing. The prologue is a set of function definitions that the program will used. The a2ps binary (written in C) reads your source document, tokenizes it for syntax highlighting, and then emits a program. For example, here’s a hunk of output for the Perl code that I’ll be using in all the samples in this post.

0 T () S
(sub) K
( ) p
(richsection) L
( \(@elements\) {) p n
(185) # (  Slack::BlockKit::Block::RichText::Section->new\({) N
0 T (    elements => _rtextify\(@elements\),) N
0 T (  }\);) N
0 T (}) N
0 T () N
(190) # () S

The parentheses are string delimiters, and because PostScript is a postfix language, when you see (richsection) L it’s calling the function L with the string “richsection” on the stack. True, there may be other things on the stack, but I happen to know that L is a one-argument function. It looks like this:

/L {
  0 0 0 FG
  1 1 0 true BG
  false UL
  false BX
  fCourier-Bold bfs scalefont setfont
  Show
} bind def

This prints the string on the stack to the current position on the page in black on bright yellow. Yuck. This function comes from the “color” prologue, which is installed in share/a2ps/ps. There’s no way to change parameters to it, so the recommended practice is to copy it into ~/.a2ps and edit that. This would be more horrifying if there were new version of a2ps coming out with notable changes, but there aren’t, so it’s … fine.

I hacked up a copy of color.pro and changed the prologue option in my configuration file to rjbs.pro. I renewed my PostScript programmer credentials! While doing this, I also fixed the typefaces, replacing Times-Roman with Courier in the definition of str, the string literal display function.

This got me some pretty decent output, shown here, and linked to a PDF:

By the way, all the samples in this post will be from formatting this copy of Slack::BlockKit::Sugar.

This was fine, but I had two smaller problems:

1. The syntax highlighting is a bit anemic (but not so bad).
2. The line spacing is a little tight for me.

Fixing the first one means editing the “style sheet” for Perl. This isn’t like CSS at all. It doesn’t define the style, it defines how to mark up tokens as being one thing or another. The functions in the prologue will do the styling. I looked at what might be worth putting here as a sample, but I think if you want to see what they look like, you should check out the perl.ssh file itself. It’s fine, but it’s also obvious that making it better would be an ordeal. I bailed.

Fixing line spacing felt like it should be easy, though. Surely there’d be an option for that, right? Sadly, no. I decided to use my PostScript expertise to work. Here’s the N function, which renders a line and moves to the next position:

/N {
  Show
  /y0 y0 bfs sub store
  x0 y0 moveto
} bind def

bfs is the “body font size”. We’re moving a little down the page by reducing the y position of the cursor by the font size. What if we did this?

/y0 y0 bfs 1.1 mul sub store

That should add a 10% line spacing increase, right? Well, yes, but the problem is this: remember how the a2ps binary is responsible for spitting out the PostScript program? That’s where it computes how many lines per page. By mucking with the vertical spacing, we start running off the end of the page. We need to change the number of lines that a2ps puts on the page. No problem, we’d just tweak this code:

job->status->linesperpage =
  (int) ((printing_h / job->fontsize) - BOTTOM_MARGIN_RATIO);

…at which point I realized I had to install automake. I did, and I went a few steps further, and finally gave up. It was too annoying for a Saturday.

What if instead I changed the default style? I won’t bore you with the PostScript, but I made a new function, vbfs, defined as 0.9 of bfs. I updated all the rendering functions to use that value for size, but the full value was still used for line spacing. This worked! But changing the font size mean that I was ending up with horizontal dead space. I was scaling everything down, when all I wanted to scale up was the vertical space. It was unsatisfactory, and I decided to settle for the tight line spacing.

…for about five minutes. And then I decided to try the other GNU program for turning source code into PostScript.

enscript

GNU Enscript bills itself as “a free replacement for Adobe’s enscript program”. I don’t know what that was, but I can tell you that enscript is basically “a2ps, except different”. It serves the same function. I fed it the same hunk of code, but not before reading the manual and finding --baselineskip, which is exactly what I wanted: a way to control line spacing. I used this invocation:

enscript lib/Slack/BlockKit/Sugar.pm \
  --columns=2       \
  --baselineskip=2  \
  --landscape       \
  --color           \
  --highlight       \
  --line-numbers    \
  --output Sugar.ps

It looked pretty good at first, when looking at the first page of output (not pictured here). On the other hand, here’s page three:

The line spacing is nice (and maybe nicer when cranked up), and the colors aren’t offensive. But they’re all wrong. Part of the issue is that this source is using =func as if it was a real Pod directive, which it isn’t. On the other hand, it’s real enough that Perl will ignore the enclosed documentation. Syntax highlighting should start at =func and end at =cut. The syntax definition for Perl in enscript is very strict, and so this is wrong. And that means that the documentation’s syntax highlighting ends up all wrong all over the place. It’s unusable.

Syntax highlighting in enscript is different than a2ps’s style sheets. Instead, it’s programmed with a little “state” language. You can read the Perl state program, but I’m not sure I recommend it. It’s relatively inscrutable, or at least it is written in terms of some other functionality that doesn’t seem well documented. Fixing the Pod thing seemed trivial, but all I could imagine was an endless stream of further annoyance. Maybe this isn’t fair, but it’s where I ended up.

At this point, settling on a2ps might have been a good idea, but instead I moved on to Vim.

Vim :hardcopy

Way up at the top of this post, I mentioned that I had used Vim in the past. So, why not now? Well, reasons. The first one is that I didn’t remember how, and I knew that “it didn’t work anymore”. But I was in for way more than a penny by now, so I went further down the rabbit hole.

It turned out that “it didn’t work anymore” was trivial. I was getting this error:

E365: Failed to print PostScript file

Right. Because lp doesn’t handle PostScript anymore. I could just write the PostScript file to a file, then apply ps2pdf. I did so, and it was bad. The good news was that getting from bad to okay wasn’t so hard. I had to set some printoptions in Vim.

set printoptions=paper:letter,number:y,left:5pc

This sets my paper size (which I’d already had in my .vimrc actually!), turns on line numbering, and reduces the left margin to 5%. The default left margin was 10%, which was just way too much. It’s nice to have space to write, but I usually do that in the whitespace on the right side of the code. To print to a file in Vim, you can execute :hardcopy > filename.ps. With these settins, I got this output:

The main problem here is that it’s one-up. Only one page of code per sheet of paper. It’s easy to read, but it takes twice as much paper. It’s a waste, and also leads to more desk clutter than necessary. My desk is enough of a mess as it is.

Fortunately, there’s a solution for this! The slightly obscure mpage command reads a PostScript document in, then spits out another one that’s multiple pages per sheet. It hasn’t quite fallen off the web, but it’s not extremely well published. Here’s a link to its man page hosted at a fairly random-seeming location at CMU. Fortunately, it’s in Homebrew. I could take the PDF above and run this:

mpage -2 -bLetter -S Sugar.ps > Sugar2.ps && ps2pdf Sugar2.ps

The -S option there is fairly critical. It says “allow non-square scaling”. In theory this might introduce some distortion, but I can’t notice it, and it gets a better use of space on the page. I also go back to my printoptions in Vim and set all the margins to 0pc. Since mpage will be adding a margin when it produces the two-up pages, I don’t need any margin on the pages it’s combining. I get four more lines per page, plus more space on the right of each listing.

Here’s what we get:

I wasn’t sure how to get a better set of colors. I’m pretty sure it’s possible, but I’ll have to think about it and play around. There is a very large benefit here, though. The syntax highlighting that I get in the PDF will be based on the same syntax highlighting that I’m used to seeing every day in Vim. I know nothing is critically wrong, and if there was, I’d be very motivated to fix it, because I’d be seeing it every day in my editor!

The real problem, for fixing the colors, is that I use a dark-background color scheme in Vim. Printing tries to emulate your color scheme, but has to correct for the fact that it’s going to print on white paper. The real answer is to have an alternate color scheme ready for printing.

Still, I’m pretty happy with this. All that remained was to make it really easy. So, I wrote a stupid little Perl program that finds a PostScript file on disk, runs it through mpage, then ps2pdf, then puts it on the Desktop and opens it in Preview. Then I updated my Vim configuration to make :hardcopy send print jobs to that instead of lp. It looks like this:

set printexpr=ByzantinePrintFile()
function ByzantinePrintFile()
  call system("/Users/rjbs/bin/libexec/vim-print-helper "
    \.. v:fname_in
    \.. " "
    \.. shellescape(expand('%:t'))
  \)
  call delete("v:fname_in")
  return v:shell_error
endfunc

Vim script is still weird.

This is where I’ll stop, feeling content and full of PostScript. I think for many people, all this PostScript nonsense would leave a bad aftertaste. For them, there’s another option…

Vim 2html.vim

Vim ships with a helper file called 2html.vim, which exports the current buffer as HTML, using the settings and colors currently in use. You can enter this in your Vim command line:

runtime! syntax/2html.vim

…and you’ll get a new Vim buffer full of HTML. The parity with the Vim display is impressive.

The problem is that so far, I’ve found going from HTML to a two-up PDF is too much of a pain. Possibly there’s some weird route from HTML to PostScript to piping through mpage but I think I’ll leave that adventure for another day or another dreamer. Me, I’ve got printing to do.