Here in my hotel room, high above Barcelona, I woke up. It was still dark outside, so I looked to my phone – sitting in its charging cradle – as a bedside clock. It told me that the
time was 02:30 (01:30 back home), and that the sun would rise at 07:17.
But how long would it be, until then?
Daylight savings time is harmonised across Europe by EU Directive 2000/84/EC1, but for all the good this harmonisation achieves it does not
perfectly remove every ambiguity from questions like this. That it’s 02:30 doesn’t by itself tell me whether or not tonight’s daylight savings change has been applied!
It could be 00:30 UTC, and still half an hour until the clocks go back, or it could be 01:30 UTC, and the clocks went back half an hour ago. I exist in the “hour of uncertainty”, a
brief period that happens once every year2. Right now, I don’t know what time it is.
I remember when it first started to become commonplace to expect digital devices to change their clocks twice a year on your behalf. You’d boot your PC on a morning and it’d pop up a
dialog box to let you know what it had done: a helpful affordance that existed primarily, I assume, to discourage you from making the exact same change yourself, duplicating the effort
and multiplying the problem. Once, I stayed up late on last Saturday in March to see what happened if the computer was running at the time, and sure enough, the helpful popup
appeared as the clocks leapt forward, skipping over sixty minutes in an instant, keeping them like leftovers to be gorged upon later.
Computers don’t do that for us anymore. They still change their clocks, but they do it silently, thanklessly, while we sleep, and we generally don’t give it a second thought.
That helpful dialog that computers used to have had a secondary purpose. Maybe we should bring it back. Not as a popup – heaven knows we’ve got enough of those – but just a subtle
subtext at the bottom of the clock screens on our phones. “Daylight savings: clock will change in 30 minutes” or “Daylight savings: clock changed 30 minutes ago”. Such a message could
appear for, say, six hours or so before and after our strange biannual ritual, and we might find ourselves more-aware as a result.
Of course, I suppose I could have added UTC to my world clock. Collapsed the waveform. Dispelled the ambiguity. Or just allowed myself to doze off and let the unsleeping computers do
their thing while I rested. But instead I typed this, watching as the clock reached 02:59 and then to 02:00. I’d started writing during summertime; I’d finished after it ended, a few
minutes… earlier?
There’s a pretty, lightweight, short-sleeved shirt that I own. If you know me personally, it’s reasonably likely you’ll have seen me wearing it at some point.
It’s a perfectly nice casual shirt. And it’s also really quite old.
And I’m confident that it’s the oldest piece of clothing I own. I first got it in the winter of 2001/2002, which makes it a massive 23 years old!
Given that I seem to be incapable of owning clothing without holing it in short order1,
why has this shirt lasted so long? Is it imbued with some form of mystical draconic longevity?2
A 23-year-old shirt that’s been worn most months would most-likely already represent good value, but I bought this particular garment second-hand, from a stall in Preston’s Covered Market. For 50 pence! That’s cheap enough that it would have
been the best-value shirt I’d ever owned even if it had fallen apart as quickly as my clothes do typically.
That it’s instead lasted over two decades is just… mind-boggling.
Footnotes
1 My socks wear holes within a year or two; my trousers gain crotch tears, possibly as a
result of over-aggressive cycling, within a similar timespan; my t-shirts for some reason reliably get holes under the left armpit usually within four years, and so on.
2 With thanks to the Wayback Machine, I found an original web page about my shirt on the designer’s website (in an
example of full “early 2000s” web design – look at those image navigation buttons with no alt-text! – as well as other retro touches like being able to order by fax before paying in
deutschemarks). They’re still making shirts, I see, although no longer in this design.
You might reasonably have assumed I’d have already enjoyed pickled onion crisps. After all, I not only enjoy actual pickled onions but also the far more “acquired taste” of
pickled eggs, shown.
There’s a need for somebody… anybody… to eat Pickled Onion Monster Munch in our household, because we have a bit of an oversupply. In order to reliably get both of the
other flavours that people like (Roast Beef and Flamin’ Hot, respectively), we end up buying multipacks that also contain Pickled Onion flavour, and these unwanted extras pile
up in the snack cupboard until we happen to have a houseguest that we can palm them off onto.
Yes, I’m aware that there are multipacks of individual flavours, but none of our local supermarkets seem to stock multipacks of Flamin’ Hot, which is objectively the best flavour of
Monster Munch and anybody who claims otherwise is wrong.
My entire life, I’ve claimed not to like pickled onion flavour crisps. As a kid, I would only eat salt & vinegar and ready salted flavours, eventually expanding my palate into “meaty”
flavours like chicken and roast beef (although never, absolutely never, prawn cocktail). Later, I’d come to also enjoy cheese & onion and variants thereof, and it’s from this
that I realise that I’m probably being somewhat irrational.
Because if you think about it: if you want to make a “pickled onion” flavour crisp, what flavouring ingredients would you use? It turns out that most crisp manufacturers use a
particular mixture of (a) the ingredient that makes salt & vinegar crisps taste “vinegary” and (b) the ingredient that makes cheese & onion crisps taste “onioney”. So in summary:
I like pickled onions.
I like salt & vinegar crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste vinegary.
I like cheese & onion crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste onioney.
Therefore, I ought to like pickled onion crisps, which use two ingredients I like to try to emulate a food I like.
I should like this. Right?
Maybe that deliberate and conscious thought process is all I need? Maybe that’s it, and just having gone through the reasoning, I will now like pickled onion crisps!
Conveniently, I have a cupboard in my kitchen containing approximately one billion packets of Pickled Onion Monster Munch. So let’s try it out.
The first time I’ve tried a pickled onion flavour crisp in almost 30 years, captured on camera for your amusement.
It turns out they’re okay!
They’re not going to dethrone either of the other two flavours of Monster Munch that we routinely restock on, but at least now I’m in a position where I can do something about our
oversupply.
And all it took was stopping to think rationally about it. If only everything were so simple.
Six or seven years ago our eldest child, then a preschooler, drew me a picture of the Internet1. I framed it and I
keep it on the landing outside my bedroom – y’know, in case I get lost on the Internet and need a map:
Lots of circles, all connected to one another, passing zeroes and ones around. Around this time she’d observed that I wrote my number zeroes “programmer-style” (crossed) and clearly
tried to emulate this, too.
I found myself reminded of this piece of childhood art when she once again helped me with a network map, this weekend.
As I kick off my Automattic sabbatical I’m aiming to spend some of this and next month building a new server architecture for Three Rings. To share my plans, this weekend, I’d
been drawing network diagrams showing my fellow volunteers what I was planning to implement. Later, our eldest swooped in and decided to “enhance” the picture with faces and names for
each server:
I don’t think she intended it, but she’s made the primary application servers look the grumpiest. This might well fit with my experience of those servers, too.
I noted that she named the read-replica database server Demmy2, after our dog.
You might have come across our dog before, if you followed me through Bleptember.
It’s a cute name for a server, but I don’t think I’m going to follow it. The last thing I want is for her to overhear me complaining about some possible future server problem and
misinterpret what I’m saying. “Demmy is a bit slow; can you give her a kick,” could easily cause distress, not to mention “Demmy’s dying; can we spin up a replacement?”
I’ll stick to more-conventional server names for this new cluster, I think.
Footnotes
1 She spelled it “the Itnet”, but still: max props to her for thinking “what would
he like a picture of… oh; he likes the Internet! I’ll draw him that!”
2 She also drew ears and a snout on the Demmy-server, in case the identity wasn’t clear to
me!
Here’s how nex://danq.me/ looks in my favourite desktop Gemini/smolweb browser Lagrange.
Nex is a lightweight Internet protocol reminiscent to me of Spartan (which CapsulePress also supports), but even more lightweight.
Without even affordances like host identification, MIME types, response codes, or the expectation that Gemtext might be supported by the client, it’s perhaps more like Gopher than it is
like Gemini.
It comes from the ever-entertaining smolweb hub of Nightfall City, whose Web interface clearly states at the top of every page the command you
could have run to see that content over the Nex protocol. Lagrange added support for Nex almost a year ago and it’s such a lightweight protocol that I was quickly able
to adapt CapsulePress’s implementation of Spartan to support Nex, too.
This is genuinely the entirety of my implementation of my Nex server, atop CapsulePress. And it’s mostly boilerplate.
Why, you might ask? Well, the reasons are the same as all the other standards supported by CapsulePress:
The smolweb is awesome.
Making WordPress into a CMS things it was never meant to do is sorta my jam.
It was a quick win while I waited for the pharmacist to shoot me up with 5G microchips my ‘flu and Covid boosters.
If you want to add Nex onto your CapsulePress, just git pull the latest version, ensure TCP port 1900 isn’t firewalled, and don’t add USE_NEX=false to
your environment. That’s all!
A lot of attention is paid, often in retrospect, to the experience of the first times in our lives. The first laugh; the first kiss; the first day at your job1.
But for every first, there must inevitably be a last.
I recall a moment when I was… perhaps the age our eldest child is now. As I listened to the bats in our garden, my mother told me about how she couldn’t hear them as clearly as she
could when she was my age. The human ear isn’t well-equipped to hear that frequency that bats use, and while children can often pick out the sounds, the ability tends to fade with age.
“Helloooo? Are you even listening to me?”
This recollection came as I stayed up late the other month to watch the Perseids. I lay in the hammock in our garden under a fabulously clear sky as the sun finished setting, and –
after being still and quiet for a time – realised that the local bat colony were out foraging for insects. They flew around and very close to me, and it occurred to me that I
couldn’t hear them at all.
There must necessarily have been a “last time” that I heard a bat’s echolocation. I remember a time about ten years ago, at the first house in Oxford of
Ruth, JTA and I (along with
Paul), standing in the back garden and listening to those high-pitched chirps. But I can’t tell you when the very
last time was. At the time it will have felt unremarkable rather than noteworthy.
First times can often be identified contemporaneously. For example: I was able to acknowledge my first time on a looping rollercoaster at the time.
The Tower of Terror at Camelot, circa 1994, was my first looping rollercoaster2.
The ride was disassembled in 2000 and, minus its “tower” theming3lived on for a while as Twist ‘N’ Shout at Loudoun Castle in Ayrshire, Scotland before that park
shut down. I looked at some recent satellite photography and I’m confident it’s now been demolished.
Last times are often invisible at the time. You don’t see the significance of the everyday and routine except in hindsight.
I wonder what it would be like if we had the same level of consciousness of last times as we did of firsts. How differently might we treat a final phone call to a loved one or the
ultimate visit to a special place if we knew, at the time, that there would be no more?
Would such a world be more-comforting, providing closure at every turn? Or would it lead to a paralytic anticipatory grief: “I can’t visit my friend; what if I find out that
it’s the last time?”
Footnotes
1 While watching a wooden train toy jiggle down a length of string, reportedly; Sarah
Titlow, behind the school outbuilding, circa 1988; and
five years ago this week, respectively.
2 Can’t see the loop? It’s inside the tower. A clever bit of design conceals the
inversion from outside the ride; also the track later re-enters the fort (on the left of the photo) to “thread the needle” through the centre of the loop. When they were running three
trains (two in motion at once) at the proper cadence, it was quite impressive as you’d loop around while a second train went through the middle, and then go through the middle while a
third train did the loop!
3 I’m told that the “tower” caught fire during disassembly and was destroyed.
I’ve spent the last week1 in Tulum, on Mexico’s beautiful Yucatan Peninsula, for an Automattic meetup.
And as usual for these kinds of work gatherings, it was magical (and, after many recent departures, a welcome opportunity to feel a closer
connection to those of us that remain).
Obviously, meeting in-person with my immediate team2 was a specific goal for the event.
Only after deciding the title of this blog post did I spot my own accidental wordplay. I mean that it was metaphorically magical, of course, but there also happened to
be more than a little magic performed there too, thanks to yours truly.
I made magic a theme of a “flash talk”. After that ~350 people was a suboptimal audience size for close-up magic and offering to later replicate
the trick I was describing in-person to anybody in the room… I ended up performing it many, many more times.
No, I mean that the whole thing felt magical. Like, I’ve discovered, every Automattic meetup I’ve been to has been. But this is perhaps especially true of the larger
ones like Vienna last year (where my “flash talk” topic was Finger for WordPress; turns out I love the excuse to listen to
other people’s nerdity and fly my own nerd flag a little).
There’s plenty of reasons it was a magical trip, as I’ll explain. But after arriving late and exhausted, this view from the doorstep of my bedroom the
following morning was a great start. I made a habit of a pre-breakfast swim each morning in the warm Caribbean waters.
Our events team, who are already some of the most thoughtful and considerate planners you might ever meet, had gone above and beyond in their choice of location. The all-inclusive
resort they’d booked out for pretty-much our exclusive use was a little isolated and not the kind of place I’d have chosen for a personal holiday. But it provided all of the facilities
my team, sibling teams, and division could desire for work, rest and play.
One day, I returned to my room and discovered that in the course of their tidying, the hotel’s housekeeping team had been asked to tidy up any stray charging cables using
reusable Automattic-branded cable ties. These are the kinds of nice touches that show how hard our events coordinators think about their work3!
As usual, an Automattic meetup proved to be a series of long but energising days comprising a mixture of directly work-related events, social team-building and networking opportunities,
chances for personal growth and to learn or practice skills, and a sweet sprinkling of fun and memorable activities.
A particular treat as a trip to swim through a cenote – caverns formed by sinkhole erosion of the limestone sediment by
rainwater, often considered sacred to the Maya – complete with fish, bats, and the ugliest spiders you’ll ever
see.4Harvey Mackay said5 that if you choose a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. That might not ring
true for me every day of my working life, but it certainly feels significant when I’m at Automattic meetups.
Work that feels like fun, and fun that contributes to work? Is that the secret sauce? My colleague Boro and I certainly tried to bring that energy to our workshop on the philosophy of
code reviews, pictured.
Our meetups might not feel like “work” (even when they clearly are!), but rather like… I don’t know… a holiday with 400 of the coolest, friendliest, most-interesting people you could
ever meet6… which just happens to have
an overarching theme of something that you love.
Recently-developed changes to strategic priorities, and the departure of a few of our colleagues during the recent aforementioned “realignment”, meant that my “superteam” – my team and
its siblings – had a lot to talk about. How can we work better together? How can we best meet the needs of the company while also remaining true to its open-source ideology? What will
our relationships with one another and with other parts of the organisation look like in the year to come?
All the best meetings take place in bars, right?
Every morning for a week I’d wake early and walk the soft warm sands and swim in the sea, before meeting with colleagues for breakfast. Then a day of networking and workshops, team-time
activities, meetings, and personal development, which gave way to evenings with so much on offer that FOMO was inevitable7.
I continue to appreciate the ways that Automattic provides the time and space for me to expand my horizons. Whether that’s at one end of a spectrum learning a new technical skill. or
at the other sitting-in on a “sound bath”8.
Automattic remains… automaggical to me. As I rapidly approach five years since I started here (more on that later, I promise,
because, well: five years is a pretty special anniversary at Automattic…), it’s still the case that routinely I get to learn new
things and expand myself while contributing to important and influential pieces of open source software.
Our meetups are merely an intense distillation of what makes Automattic magical on a day-to-day basis.
At home, I usually start my day with a skim of my RSS reader from bed. But with the sea calling to me, first, each morning of the Tulum
meetup, I instead had to suffice with reading my feeds from the nearest available hammock to the beach on my doorstep.
4 The spiders, which weave long thin strand webs that hang like tinsel from the cave roof,
catch and eat mosquitoes, which I’m definitely in favour of.
6 Also, partially-tame trash pandas, which joined
iguanas, agouti, sand pipers, and other wildlife around (and sometimes in) our accommodation.
7 I slightly feel like I missed-out by skipping the board gaming, and it sounds like the
movie party and the karaoke events were a blast too, but I stand by my choices to drink and dance and perform magic and chat about technology and open source and Star Wars
and blogging and music and travel and everything else that I found even the slightest opportunity to connect on with any of the amazing diverse and smart folks with whom I’m fortunate
enough to work.
8 While I completely reject the magical thinking espoused by our “sound bath” facilitator,
it was still a surprisingly relaxing and meditative experience. It was also a nice chill-out before going off to the higher-energy environment that came next at the poolside bar:
drinking cocktails and dancing to the bangin’ tunes being played by our DJ, my colleague Rua.
It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.
So we decided to design the most generous buy-out package possible, we called it an Alignment Offer: if you resigned before 20:00 UTC on Thursday, October 3, 2024, you would receive
$30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher.
…
HR added some extra details to sweeten the deal; we wanted to make it as enticing as possible.
I’ve been asking people to vote with their wallet a lot recently, and this is another example!
…
This was a really bold move, and gave many people I know pause for consideration. “Quit today, and we’ll pay you six months salary,” could be a pretty high-value deal for some people,
and it was offered basically without further restriction2.
Every so often, though, I spend time with a company that is so original in its strategy, so determined in its execution, and so transparent in its thinking, that it makes my head
spin. Zappos is one of those companies
…
It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the
company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.
After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people
to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its
new employees to quit!
…
I’m sure you can see the parallel. What Zappos do routinely and Automattic did this week have a similar outcome
By reducing – not quite removing – the financial incentive to remain, they aim to filter their employees down to only those whose reason for being there is that they
believe in what the company does3. They’re trading money for
idealism.
Buried about half way through the Creed is the line I am more motivated by impact than money, which seems
quite fitting. Automattic has always been an idealistic company. This filtering effort helps validate that.
The effect of Automattic’s “if you don’t feel aligned with us, we’ll pay you to leave” offer has been significant: around 159 people – 8.4% of the company – resigned this week. At very
short notice, dozens of people I know and have worked with… disappeared from my immediate radar. It’s been… a lot.
I chose to stay. I still believe in Automattic’s mission, and I love my work and the people I do it with. But man… it makes you second-guess yourself when people you know, and respect,
and love, and agree with on so many things decide to take a deal like this and… quit4.
Departures have been experienced across virtually all divisions, but not always proportionally.
(These numbers are my own estimation and might not be entirely accurate.)
There’ve been some real heart-in-throat moments. A close colleague of mine started a message in a way that made me briefly panic that this was a goodbye, and it took until half way
through that I realised it was the opposite and I was able to start breathing again.
But I’m hopeful and optimistic that we’ll find our feet, rally our teams, win our battles, and redouble our efforts to make the Web a better place, democratise publishing (and
eCommerce!), and do it all with a commitment to open source. There’s tears today, but someday there’ll be happiness again.
Footnotes
1 For which the Internet quickly made me regret my choices, delivering a barrage of
personal attacks and straw man arguments, but I was grateful for the people who engaged in meaningful discourse.
2 For example, you could even opt to take the deal if you were on a performance
improvement plan, or if you were in your first week of work! If use these examples because I’m pretty confident that both of them occurred.
3 Of course, such a strategy can never be 100% effective, because people’s reasons for
remaining with an employer are as diverse as people are.
4 Of course their reasons for leaving are as diverse and multifaceted as others’ reasons
for staying might be! I’ve a colleague who spent some time mulling it over not because he isn’t happy working here but because he was close to retirement, for example.
tl;dr: I’m tidying up and consolidating my personal hosting; I’ve made a little progress, but I’ve got a way to go – fortunately I’ve got a sabbatical coming up at
work!
At the weekend, I kicked-off what will doubtless be a multi-week process of gradually tidying and consolidating some of the disparate digital things I run, around the Internet.
I’ve a long-standing habit of having an idea (e.g. gamebook-making tool Twinebook, lockpicking puzzle game Break Into Us, my Cheating Hangman game, and even FreeDeedPoll.org.uk!),
deploying it to one of several servers I run, and then finding it a huge headache when I inevitably need to upgrade or move said server because there’s such an insane diversity of
different things that need testing!
DNDle, my Wordle-clone where you have to guess the Dungeons & Dragons 5e monster’s stat block, is now hosted by GitHub Pages. Also, I
fixed an issue reported a month ago that meant that I was reporting Giant Scorpions as having a WIS of 19 instead of 9.
Abnib, which mostly reminds people of upcoming birthdays and serves as a dumping ground for any Abnib-related shit I produce, is now hosted by
GitHub Pages.
RockMonkey.org.uk, which doesn’t really do much any more, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Sour Grapes, the single-page promo for a (remote) murder mystery party I hosted during a COVID lockdown, is now hosted by GitHub
Pages.
A convenience-page for giving lost people directions to my house is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Dan Q’s Things is now automatically built on a schedule and hosted by GitHub Pages.
Robin’s Improbable Blog, which spun out from 52 Reflect, wasn’t getting enough traffic to justify
“proper” hosting so now it sits in a Docker container on my NAS.
My μlogger server, which records my location based on pings from my phone, has also moved to my NAS. This has broken
Find Dan Q, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue with that in its current form anyway.
All of my various domain/subdomain redirects have been consolidated on, or are in the process of moving to, to a tinyLinode/Akamai
instance. It’s a super simple plain Nginx server that does virtually nothing except redirect people – this is where I’ll park the domains I register but haven’t found a use for yet, in
future.
I was pretty proud of EGXchange.org, but I’ll be first to admit that it’s among the stupider of my throwaway domains.
It turns out GitHub pages is a fine place to host simple, static websites that were open-source already. I’ve been working on improving my understanding of GitHub Actions
anyway as part of what I’ve been doing while wearing my work, volunteering, and personal hats, so switching some static build processes like DNDle’s to GitHub
Actions was a useful exercise.
Stuff I’m still to tidy…
There’s still a few things I need to tidy up to bring my personal hosting situation under control:
DanQ.me
You’re looking at it. But later this year, you might be looking at it… elsewhere?
This is the big one, because it’s not just a WordPress blog: it’s also a Gemini, Spartan, and Gopher server (thanks CapsulePress!), a Finger server, a general-purpose host to a stack of complex stuff only some of which is powered by Bloq (my WordPress/PHP integrations): e.g.
code to generate the maps that appear on my geopositioned posts, code to integrate with the Fediverse, a whole stack of configuration to make my caching work the way I want, etc.
FreeDeedPoll.org.uk
Right now this is a Ruby/Sinatra application, but I’ve got a (long-running) development branch that will make it run completely in the browser, which will further improve privacy, allow
it to run entirely-offline (with a service worker), and provide a basis for new features I’d like to provide down the line. I’m hoping to get to finishing this during my Automattic
sabbatical this winter.
The website’s basically unchanged for most of a decade and a half, and… umm… it looks it!
A secondary benefit of it becoming browser-based, of course, is that it can be hosted as a static site, which will allow me to move it to GitHub Pages too.
When I took over running the world’s geohashing hub from xkcd‘s Randall Munroe (and davean), I flung the site together on whatever hosting I had sitting
around at the time, but that’s given me some headaches. The outbound email transfer agent is a pain, for example, and it’s a hard host on which to apply upgrades. So I want to get that
moved somewhere better this winter too. It’s actually the last site left running on its current host, so it’ll save me a little money to get it moved, too!
Geohashing’s one of the strangest communities I’m honoured to be a part of. So it’d be nice to treat their primary website to a little more respect and attention.
Right now I run this on my NAS, but that turns out to be a pain sometimes because it means that if my home Internet goes down (e.g. thanks to a power cut, which we have from time to time), I lose access to the first and last place I
go on the Internet! So I’d quite like to move that to somewhere on the open Internet. Haven’t worked out where yet.
Next steps
It’s felt good so far to consolidate and tidy-up my personal web hosting (and to rediscover some old projects I’d forgotten about). There’s work still to do, but I’m expecting to spend
a few months not-doing-my-day-job very soon, so I’m hoping to find the opportunity to finish it then!
Back when I was a student in Aberystwyth, I used to receive a lot of bilingual emails from the University and its departments1.
I was reminded of this when I received an email this week from CACert, delivered in both English and German.
Simply putting one language after the other isn’t terribly exciting. Although to be fair, the content of this email wasn’t terribly exciting either.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were some kind of standard for multilingual emails? Your email client or device would maintain an “order of preference” of the languages that you
speak, and you’d automatically be shown the content in those languages, starting with the one you’re most-fluent in and working down.
It turns out that this is a (theoretically) solved problem. RFC8255 defines a mechanism for breaking an email into multiple
different languages in a way that a machine can understand and that ought to be backwards-compatible (so people whose email software doesn’t support it yet can still “get by”).
Here’s how it works:
You add a Content-Type: multipart/multilingual header with a defined boundary marker, just like you would for any other email with multiple “parts” (e.g. with a HTML
and a plain text version, or with text content and an attachment).
The first section is just a text/plain (or similar) part, containing e.g. some text to explain that this is a multilingual email, and if you’re seeing this
then your email client probably doesn’t support them, but you should just be able to scroll down (or else look at the attachments) to find content in the language you read.
Subsequent sections have:
Content-Disposition: inline, so that for most people using non-compliant email software they can just scroll down until they find a language they can read,
Content-Type: message/rfc822, so that an entire message can be embedded (which allows other headers, like the Subject:, to be translated too),
a Content-Language: header, specifying the ISO code of the language represented in that section, and
optionally, a Content-Translation-Type: header, specifying either original (this is the original text), human (this was translated by a
human), or automated (this was the result of machine translation) – this could be used to let a user say e.g. that they’d prefer a human translation to an automated
one, given the choice between two second languages.
Let’s see a sample email:
Content-Type: multipart/multilingual;
boundary=10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
To: <b24571@danq.me>
From: <rfc8255test-noreply@danq.link>
Subject: Does your email client support RFC8255?
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:06:56 +0000
--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
This is a multipart message in multiple languages. Each part says the
same thing but in a different language. If your email client supports
RFC8255, you will see this message in your preferred language out of
those available. Otherwise, you will probably see each language after
one another or else each language in a separate attachment.
--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Language: en
Content-Translation-Type: original
Subject: Does your email client support RFC8255?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
MIME-Version: 1.0
RFC8255 is a standard for sending email in multiple languages. This
is the original email in English. It is embedded alongside the same
content in a number of other languages.
--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Language: fr
Content-Translation-Type: automated
Subject: Votre client de messagerie prend-il en charge la norme RFC8255?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
MIME-Version: 1.0
RFC8255 est une norme permettant d'envoyer des courriers
électroniques dans plusieurs langues. Le présent est le courriel
traduit en français. Il est intégré à côté du même contenu contenu
dans un certain nombre d'autres langues.
--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664--
Why not copy-paste this into a raw email and see how your favourite email client handles it! That’ll be fun, right?
Can I use it?
That proposed standard turns seven years old next month. Sooo… can we start using it?4
Turns out… not so much. I discovered that NeoMutt supports it:
NeoMutt’s implementation is basic, but it works: you can specify a preference order for languages and it respects it, and if you don’t then it shows all of the languages as a series
of attachments. It can apparently even be used to author compliant multilingual emails, although I didn’t get around to trying that.
Support in other clients is… variable.
A reasonable number of them don’t understand the multilingual directives but still show the email in a way that doesn’t suck:
Mozilla Thunderbird does a respectable job of showing each language’s subject and content, one after another.
Some shoot for the stars but blow up on the launch pad:
GMail displays all the content, but it pretends that the alternate versions are forwarded messages and adds a stack of meaningless blank headers to each. And then offers to
translate the result for you, even though the content is already right there in English.
Others still seem to be actively trying to make life harder for you:
ProtonMail’s Web interface shows only the fallback content, putting the remainder into .eml attachments… which is then won’t display, forcing you to download them and
find some other email client to look at them in!5
And still others just shit the bed at the idea that you might read an email like this one:
Outlook 365 does appallingly badly, showing the subject in the title bar, then the words “(No subject)”, then the message “This message might have been removed or deleted”. Just
great.
That’s just the clients I’ve tested, but I can’t imagine that others are much different. If you give it a go yourself with something I’ve not tried, then let me know!
I guess this means that standardised multilingual emails might be forever resigned to the “nice to have but it never took off so we went in a different direction” corner of the
Internet, along with the <keygen> HTML element and the concept of privacy.
Footnotes
1 I didn’t receive quite as much bilingual email as you might expect, given that the
University committed to delivering most of its correspondence in both English and Welsh. But I received a lot more than I do nowadays, for example
2 Although you might not guess it, given how many websites completely ignore your
Accept-Language header, even where it’s provided, and simply try to “guess” what language you want using IP geolocation or something, and then require that you find
whatever shitty bit of UI they’ve hidden their language selector behind if you want to change it, storing the result in a cookie so it inevitably gets lost and has to be set again the
next time you visit.
3 I suppose that if you were sending HTML emails then you might use the lang="..." attribute to mark up different parts of the message as being in different
languages. But that doesn’t solve all of the problems, and introduces a couple of fresh ones.
4 If it were a cool new CSS feature, you can guarantee that it’d be supported by every
major browser (except probably Safari) by now. But email doesn’t get so much love as the Web, sadly.
5 Worse yet, if you’re using ProtonMail with a third-party client, ProtonMail screws up
RFC8255 emails so badly that they don’t even work properly in e.g. NeoMutt any more! ProtonMail swaps the multipart/multilingual content type for
multipart/mixed and strips the Content-Language: headers, making the entire email objectively less-useful.
If you’re active in the WordPress space you’re probably aware that there’s a lot of drama going on right now between (a) WordPress hosting company WP Engine, (b) WordPress
hosting company (among quiteafewotherthings) Automattic1,
and (c) the WordPress Foundation.
If you’re not aware then, well: do a search across the tech news media to see the latest: any summary I could give you would be out-of-date by the time you read it anyway!
I tried to draw a better diagram with more of the relevant connections, but it quickly turned into spaghetti.
In particular, I think a lot of the conversation that he kicked off conflates three different aspects of WP Engine’s misbehaviour. That muddies the waters when it comes to
having a reasoned conversation about the issue3.
I’ve heard Matt speak a number of times, including in person… and I think he did a pretty bad job of expressing the problems with WP Engine during his Q&A at WCUS. In his defence,
it sounds like he may have been still trying to negotiate a better way forward until the very second he walked on stage that day.
I don’t think WP Engine is a particularly good company, and I personally wouldn’t use them for WordPress hosting. That’s not a new opinion for me: I wouldn’t have used them last year or
the year before, or the year before that either. And I broadly agree with what I think Matt tried to say, although not necessarily with the way he said it or the platform he
chose to say it upon.
Misdeeds
As I see it, WP Engine’s potential misdeeds fall into three distinct categories: moral, ethical4,
and legal.
Morally: don’t take without giving back
Matt observes that since WP Engine’s acquisition by huge tech-company-investor Silver Lake, WP Engine have made enormous profits from selling WordPress hosting as a service (and nothing else) while
making minimal to no contributions back to the open source platform that they depend upon.
If true, and it appears to be, this would violate the principle of reciprocity. If you benefit from somebody else’s
effort (and you’re able to) you’re morally-obliged to at least offer to give back in a manner commensurate to your relative level of resources.
The principle of reciprocity is a moral staple. This is evidenced by the fact that children (and some nonhuman animals) seem to be able to work it out for themselves
from first principles using nothing more than empathy. Companies, however aren’t usually so-capable. Photo courtesy Cotton.
Abuse of this principle is… sadly not-uncommon in business. Or in tech. Or in the world in general. A lightweight example might be the many millions of profitable companies that host
atop the Apache HTTP Server without donating a penny to the Apache Foundation. A heavier (and legally-backed) example might be Trump Social’s
implementation being based on a modified version of Mastodon’s code:
Mastodon’s license requires that their changes are shared publicly… but they don’t do until they’re sent threatening letters reminding them of their obligations.
I feel like it’s fair game to call out companies that act amorally, and encourage people to boycott them, so long as you do so without “punching down”.
Ethically: don’t exploit open source’s liberties as weaknesses
WP Engine also stand accused of altering the open source code that they host in ways that maximise their profit, to the detriment of both their customers and the original authors of
that code5.
It’s well established, for example, that WP Engine disable the “revisions” feature of WordPress6.
Personally, I don’t feel like this is as big a deal as Matt makes out that it is (I certainly wouldn’t go as far as saying “WP
Engine is not WordPress”): it’s pretty commonplace for large hosting companies to tweak the open source software that they host to better fit their architecture and business model.
But I agree that it does make WordPress as-provided by WP Engine significantly less good than would be expected from virtually any other host (most of which, by the way, provide much
better value-for-money at any price point).
There’s nothing to stop me from registering TurdPress.com and providing a premium WordPress web hosting solution with all the best features disabled: I could even disable
exports so that my customers wouldn’t even be able to easily leave my service for greener pastures! There’s nothing stop me… but that wouldn’t make it
right7.
It also looks like WP Engine may have made more-nefarious changes, e.g. modifying the referral links in open source code (the thing that earns money for the original authors of
that code) so that WP Engine can collect the revenue themselves when they deploy that code to their customers’ sites. That to me feels like it’s clearly into the zone ethical bad
practice. Within the open source community, it’s not okay to take somebody’s code, which they were kind enough to release under a liberal license, strip out the bits that provide
their income, and redistribute it, even just as a network service8.
Again, I think this is fair game to call out, even if it’s not something that anybody has a right to enforce legally. On which note…
Obviously, this is the part of the story you’re going to see the most news media about, because there’s reasonable odds it’ll end up in front of a judge at some point. There’s a good
chance that such a case might revolve around WP Engine’s willingness (and encouragement?) to allow their business to be called “WordPress Engine” and to capitalise on any confusion that
causes.
I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of the legal case: I Am Not A Lawyer and all that. Naturally I agree with the underlying principle that one should not be allowed to profit
off another’s intellectual property, but I’ll leave discussion on whether or not that’s what WP Engine are doing as a conversation for folks with more legal-smarts than I. I’ve
certainly known people be confused by WP Engine’s name and branding, though, and think that they must be some kind of “officially-licensed” WordPress host: it happens.
If you’re following all of this drama as it unfolds… just remember to check your sources. There’s a lot of FUD floating around on the Internet right now9.
In summary…
With a reminder that I’m sharing my own opinion here and not that of my employer, here’s my thoughts on the recent WP Engine drama:
WP Engine certainly act in ways that are unethical and immoral and antithetical to the spirit of open source, and those are just a subset of the reasons that I wouldn’t use them as
a WordPress host.
Matt Mullenweg calling them out at WordCamp US doesn’t get his point across as well as I think he hoped it might, and probably won’t win him any popularity contests.
I’m not qualified to weigh in on whether or not WP Engine have violated the WordPress Foundation’s trademarks, but I suspect that they’ve benefitted from widespread confusion about
their status.
Footnotes
1 I suppose I ought to point out that Automattic is my employer, in case you didn’t know,
and point out that my opinions don’t necessarily represent theirs, etc. I’ve been involved with WordPress as an open source project for about four times as long as I’ve had any
connection to Automattic, though, and don’t always agree with them, so I’d hope that it’s a given that I’m speaking my own mind!
2 Though like Manu, I don’t
think that means that Matt should take the corresponding blog post down: I’m a digital preservationist, as might be evidenced by the unrepresentative-of-me and frankly embarrassing
things in the 25-year archives of this blog!
3 Fortunately the documents that the lawyers for both sides have been writing are much
clearer and more-specific, but that’s what you pay lawyers for, right?
4 There’s a huge amount of debate about the difference between morality and ethics, but
I’m using the definition that means that morality is based on what a social animal might be expected to decide for themselves is right, think e.g. the Golden Rule etc., whereas ethics is the code of conduct expected within a particular community. Take stealing, for example,
which covers the spectrum: that you shouldn’t deprive somebody else of something they need, is a moral issue; that we as a society deem such behaviour worthy of exclusion is an
ethical one; meanwhile the action of incarcerating burglars is part of our legal framework.
5 Not that nobody’s immune to making ethical mistakes. Not me, not you, not anybody else.
I remember when, back in 2005, Matt fucked up by injecting ads into WordPress (which at that point didn’t have a reliable source of
funding). But he did the right thing by backpedalling, undoing the harm, and apologising publicly and profusely.
6 WP Engine claim that they disable revisions for performance reasons, but that’s clearly
bullshit: it’s pretty obvious to me that this is about making hosting cheaper. Enabling revisions doesn’t have a performance impact on a properly-configured multisite hosting system,
and I know this from personal experience of running such things. But it does have a significant impact on how much space you need to allocate to your users, which has cost
implications at scale.
7 As an aside: if a court does rule that WP Engine is infringing upon
WordPress trademarks and they want a new company name to give their service a fresh start, they’re welcome to TurdPress.
8 I’d argue that it is okay to do so for personal-use though: the difference for
me comes when you’re making a profit off of it. It’s interesting to find these edge-cases in my own thinking!
9 A typical Reddit thread is about 25% lies-and-bullshit; but you can double that for a
typical thread talking about this topic!
Dungeons & Dragons players spend a lot of time rolling 20-sided polyhedral dice, known as D20s.
In general, they’re looking to roll as high as possible to successfully stab a wyvern, jump a chasm, pick a lock, charm a Duke1,
or whatever.
Submerging your dice set in the blood of a halfling is a sure-fire way to get luckier rolls.
Roll with advantage
Sometimes, a player gets to roll with advantage. In this case, the player rolls two dice, and takes the higher roll. This really boosts their chances of not-getting a
low roll. Do you know by how much?
I dreamed about this very question last night. And then, still in my dream, I came up with the answer2.
I woke up thinking about it3
and checked my working.
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Table illustrating the different permutations of two D20 rolls and the “advantage” result (i.e. the higher of the two).
The chance of getting a “natural 1” result on a D20 is 1 in 20… but when you roll with advantage, that goes down to 1 in 400: a huge improvement! The chance of rolling a 10 or 11 (2 in
20 chance of one or the other) remains the same. And the chance of a “crit” – 20 – goes up from 1 in 20 when rolling a single D20 to 39 in 400 – almost 10% – when rolling with
advantage.
You can see that in the table above: the headers along the top and left are the natural rolls, the intersections are the resulting values – the higher of the two.
The nice thing about the table above (which again: was how I visualised the question in my dream!) is it really helps to visualise why these numbers are what they are. The
general formula for calculating the chance of a given number when rolling D20 with advantage is ( n2 – (n-1)2 ) / 400. That is, the square of the number
you’re looking for, minus the square of the number one less than that, over 400 (the total number of permutations)4.
Why roll two dice when one massive one will do?
Knowing the probability matrix, it’s theoretically possible to construct a “D20 with Advantage” die5. Such a tool would
have 400 sides (one 1, three 2s, five 3s… and thirty-nine 20s). Rolling-with-advantage would be a single roll.
I don’t think anybody’s ever built a real 400-sided die, but Numberwang! claimed to have one.
This is probably a totally academic exercise. The only conceivable reason I can think of would be if you were implementing a computer system on which generating random numbers
was computationally-expensive, but memory was cheap: under this circumstance, you could pre-generate a 400-item array of possible results and randomly select from it.
But if anybody’s got a 3D printer capable of making a large tetrahectogon (yes, that’s what you call a 400-sided polygon – you learned something today!), I’d love to see an “Advantage
D20” in the flesh. Or if you’d just like to implement a 3D model for Dice Box that’d be fine too!
Footnotes
1 Or throw a fireball, recall an anecdote, navigate a rainforest, survive a poisoning,
sneak past a troll, swim through a magical swamp, hold on to a speeding aurochs, disarm a tripwire, fire a crossbow, mix a potion, appeal to one among a pantheon of gods, beat the
inn’s landlord at an arm-wrestling match, seduce a duergar guard, persuade a talking squirrel to spy on some bandits, hold open a heavy door, determine the nature of a curse, follow a
trail of blood, find a long-lost tome, win a drinking competition, pickpocket a sleeping ogre, bury a magic sword so deep that nobody will ever find it, pilot a spacefaring rowboat,
interpret a forgotten language, notice an imminent ambush, telepathically commune with a distant friend, accurately copy-out an ancient manuscript, perform a religious ritual, find
the secret button under the wizard’s desk, survive the blistering cold, entertain a gang of street urchins, push through a force field, resist mind control, and then compose a ballad
celebrating your adventure.
2 I don’t know what it says about me as a human being that sometimes I dream in
mathematics, but it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given I’m nerdy enough to have previously recorded instances of dreaming in (a) Perl, and (b) Nethack (terminal mode).
3 When I woke up I also found that I had One Jump from Disney’s Aladdin stuck in my head, but I’m not sure
that’s relevant to the discussion of probability; however, it might still be a reasonable indicator of my mental state in general.
4 An alternative formula which is easier to read but harder to explain would be ( 2(n
– 1) + 1 ) / 400.
5 Or a “D20 with Disadvantage”: the table’s basically the inverse of the advantage one –
i.e. 1 in 400 chance of a 20 through to 39 in 400 chance of a 1.
I’m a big fan of blocking out uninterrupted time on your work calendar for focus activities, even if you don’t have a specific focus task to fill them with.
It can be enough to simple know that, for example, you’ve got a 2-hour slot every Friday morning that you can dedicate to whatever focus-demanding task you’ve got that week, whether
it’s a deep debugging session, self-guided training and development activities, or finally finishing that paper that’s just slightly lower priority than everything else on your
plate.
My work focus time is Friday mornings. It was originally put there so that it immediately followed my approximately-monthly coaching sessions, but it’s remained even since they
wandered elsewhere.
I appreciate that my colleagues respect that blocked period: I almost never receive meeting requests in that time. That’s probably because most people, particularly because we’re in
such a multi-timezone company, use their calendar’s “find a
suitable time for everybody” tool to find the best time for everyone and it sees that I’m “busy” and doesn’t suggest it.
If somebody does schedule a meeting that clashes with that block then, well, it’s probably pretty urgent!
But it turns out this strategy doesn’t work for everybody:
‘Urgent meetings only’ might not mean the same thing to you and I as it does to the not one, not two, not three, but four people who scheduled meetings that clash with it.
My partner recently showed me a portion of her calendar, observing that her scheduled focus time had been
overshadowed by four subsequently-created meetings that clashed with it. Four!
Maybe that’s an exception and this particular occasion really did call for a stack of back-to-back urgent meetings. Maybe everything was on fire. But whether or not this
particular occasion is representative for my partner, I’ve spoken to other friends who express the same experience: if they block out explicit non-meeting time on their
calendar, they get meeting requests for that time anyway. At many employers, “focus time” activities don’t seem to be widely-respected.
Maybe your workplace is the same. The correct solution probably involves a cultural shift: a company-wide declaration in favour of focus time as a valuable productivity tool
(which it is), possibly coupled with recommendations about how to schedule them sensitively, e.g. perhaps recommending a couple of periods in which they ought to be scheduled.
But for a moment, let’s consider a different option:
A silly solution?
Does your work culture doesn’t respect scheduled focus time but does respect scheduled meetings? This might seem to be the case in the picture above: note that the meetings
that clash with the focus time don’t clash with one another but tessellate nicely. Perhaps you need… fake meetings.
“Wow, what a busy afternoon Dan’s got. I’d better leave him be.”
Of course, creating fake meetings just so you can get some work done is actually creating more work. Wouldn’t it be better if there were some kind of service that could do it
for you?
Here’s the idea: a web service that exposes an API endpoint. You start by specifying a few things about the calendar you’d like to fill, for example:
What days/times you’d like to fill with “focus time”?
What industry you work in, to help making convincing (but generic) event names?
Whether you’d like the entire block consistently filled, or occasional small-but-useless gaps of up to 15 minutes inserted between them?
This results in a URL containing those parameters. Accessing that URL yields an iCalendar feed
containing those meetings. All you need to do is get your calendar software to subscribe to those events and they’ll appear in your calendar, “filling” your time.
So long as your iCalendar feed subscription refreshes often enough, you could even have an option to enable the events to self-delete e.g. 15 minutes before their start time, so that
you don’t panic when your meeting notification pops up right before they “start”!
This is the bit where you’re expecting me to tell you I made a thing
Normally, you’d expect me to pull the covers off some hilarious domain name I’ve chosen and reveal exactly the service I describe, but I’m not doing that today. There’s a few reasons
for that:
I’m not saying I think the prior art in this area is good, but it’s certainly good-enough.
Firstly, I’ve got enough too many pointless personal/side projects on the go already1. I don’t need another
distraction.
Secondly, it turns out others have already done 90% of the work. This
open-source project runs locally and fills calendars with (unnamed, private) blocks of varying lengths. This iOS app
does almost exactly what I described, albeit in an ad-hoc rather than fully-automated way. There’s no point me just doing the last 10% just to make a joke work.
And thirdly: while I searched for existing tools I discovered a significant number of people who confess online to creating fake meetings in their calendars! While some of these do
so for reasons like those I describe – i.e. to block out time and get more work done in an environment that doesn’t respect them simply blocking-out time – a lot of folks admit to doing
it just to “look busy”. That could be either the employee slacking off, or perhaps having to work around a manager with a presenteeism/input-measurement based outlook (which is a
terrible way to manage people). But either way: it’s a depressing reason to write software.
Nope
So yeah: I’m not going down that avenue.
But maybe if you’re in a field where you’d benefit from it, try blocking out some focus time in your calendar. I think it’s a fantastic idea, and I love that I’m employed somewhere that
I can do so and it works out.
Or if you’ve tried that and discovered that your workplace culture doesn’t respect it – if colleagues routinely book meetings into reserved spaces – maybe you should try fake
meetings and see if they’re any better-respected. But I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.
Three Rings operates a Web contact form to help people get in touch with us: the idea
is that it provides a quick and easy way to reach out if you’re a charity who might be able to make use of the system, a user who’s having difficulty with the features of the software,
or maybe a potential new volunteer willing to give your time to the project.
But then the volume of spam it received increased dramatically. We don’t want our support team volunteers to spend all
their time categorising spam: even if it doesn’t take long, it’s demoralising. So what could we do?
It’s clearly spam, but if it takes you 2 seconds to categorise it and there are 30 in your Inbox, that’s still a drag.
Our conventional antispam tools are configured pretty liberally: we don’t want to reject a contact from a legitimate user just because their message hits lots of scammy keywords (e.g.
if a user’s having difficulty logging in and has copy-pasted all of the error messages they received, that can look a lot like a password reset spoofing scam to a spam filter). And we
don’t want to add a CAPTCHA, because not only do those create a barrier to humans – while not necessarily reducing spam very much, nowadays – they’re often terrible for accessibility,
privacy, or both.
But it didn’t take much analysis to spot some patterns unique to our contact form and the questions it asks that might provide an opportunity. For example, we discovered that
spam messages would more-often-than-average:
Fill in both the “name” and (optional) “Three Rings username” field with the same value. While it’s cetainly possible for Three Rings users to have
a login username that’s identical to their name, it’s very rare. But automated form-fillers seem to disproportionately pair-up these two fields.
Fill the phone number field with a known-fake phone number or a non-internationalised phone number from a country in which we currently support no charities.
Legitimate non-UK contacts tend to put international-format phone numbers into this optional field, if they fill it at all. Spammers often put NANP (North American Numbering Plan)
numbers.
Include many links in the body of the message. A few links, especially if they’re to our services (e.g. when people are asking for help) is not-uncommon in legitimate
messages. Many links, few of which point to our servers, almost certainly means spam.
Choose the first option for the choose -one question “how can we help you?” Of course real humans sometimes pick this option too, but spammers almost always
choose it.
None of these characteristics alone, or any of the half dozen or so others we analysed (including invisible checks like honeypots and IP-based geofencing), are reason to
suspect a message of being spam. But taken together, they’re almost a sure thing.
To begin with, we assigned scores to each characteristic and automated the tagging of messages in our ticketing system with these scores. At this point, we didn’t do anything to block
such messages: we were just collecting data. Over time, this allowed us to find a safe “threshold” score above which a message was certainly spam.
Even when a message fails our customised spam checks, we only ‘soft-block’ it: telling the user their message was rejected and providing suggestions on working around that or emailing
us conventionally. Our experience shows that the spammers aren’t willing to work to overcome this additional hurdle, but on the very rare ocassion a human hits them, they are.
Once we’d found our threshold we were able to engage a soft-block of submissions that exceeded it, and immediately the volume of spam making it to the ticketing system dropped
considerably. Under 70 lines of PHP code (which sadly I can’t share with you) and we reduced our spam rate by over 80% while having, as far as we can see, no impact on the
false-positive rate.
Where conventional antispam solutions weren’t quite cutting it, implementing a few rules specific to our particular use-case made all the difference. Sometimes you’ve just got to roll
your sleeves up and look at the actual data you do/don’t want, and adapt your filters accordingly.
My life affords me less time for videogames than it used to, and so my tastes have changed accordingly:
I appreciate games that I can drop at a moment’s notice and pick up again some other time, without losing lots of progress1.
And if the game can remind me what it was I was trying to achieve when I come back… perhaps weeks or months later… that’s a bonus!
I’ve a reduced tolerance for dynamically-generated content (oh, you want me to fetch you another five nirnroot do you? – hard pass2):
if I might only get to throw 20 hours total at a game, I’d much prefer to spend that time exploring content deliberately and thoughtfully authored by a human.
And, y’know, it has to be fun. I rarely buy games on impulse anymore, and usually wait weeks or months after release dates even for titles I’ve been anticipating, to see
what the reviewers make of it.
That said, I’ve played three excellent videogames this year that I’d like to recommend to you (no spoilers):
Horizon: Forbidden West
I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn. Even if this review persuades you that you should play its sequel, Forbidden
West, you really oughta play Zero Dawn first3.
There’s a direct continuation of plot going on there that you’ll appreciate better that way. Also: Zero Dawn stands alone as a great game in its own right.
Horizon gives a lot to love, from a rich world and story, immersive environments, near-seamless loading, excellent voice acting, and a rewarding difficulty curve. But perhaps
all are second-place to what a kickass character the protagonist is.
The Horizon series tells the story of Aloy from her childhood onwards, growing up an outcast in a tribal society on a future Earth inhabited by robotic reimaginings of
creatures familiar to us today (albeit some of them extinct). Once relatively docile, a mysterious event known as the derangement, shortly before Aloy’s birth, made these
machines aggressive and dangerous, leading to a hostile world in which Aloy seeks to prove herself a worthy hunter to the tribe that cast her out.
All of which leads to a series of adventures that gradually explain the nature of the world and how it became that way, and provide a path by which Aloy can perhaps provide a brighter
future for humankind. It’s well-written and clever and you’ll fight and die over and over as you learn your way around the countless permutations of weapons, tools, traps, and
strategies that you’ll employ. But it’s the kind of learning curve that’s more rewarding than frustrating, and there are so many paths to victory that when I watch Ruth play she uses tactics that I’d never even conceived of.
Horizon: Forbidden West is like Zero Dawn but… more. More quests, more exploration, more machines, more characters, and more of the same story, answering questions
you might have found yourself thinking during the prequel. But it’s not just more-of-the-same.
Forbidden West is in some ways more-of-the-same, but it outgrows the mould of its predecessor, too. Faced with bigger challenges than she can take on by herself, Aloy comes to
assemble a team of trusted party members, and when you’re not out fighting giant robots or spelunking underwater caves or exploring the ruins of ancient San Francisco you’re working
alongside them, and that’s one of the places the game really shines. Your associates chatter to each other, grow and change, and each brings something special to the story that invites
you to care for each of them as individuals.
The musical score – cinematic in its scope – has been revamped too, and shows off its ability to adapt dynamically to different situations. Face off against one of the terrifying new
aquatic enemies and you’ll be treated to a nautical theme, for example. And the formulaic quests of the predecessor (get to the place, climb the thing…), which were already
fine, are riddled with new quirks and complexities to keep you thinking.
And finally: I love the game’s commitment to demonstrating the diversity of humanity: both speaking and background characters express a rarely-seen mixture of races, genders, and
sexualities, and the story sensitively and compassionately touches on issues of disability, neurodiversity, and transgender identity. It’s more presence than
representation (“Hey look, it’s Sappho and her friend!”), but it’s still much better than I’m used to seeing in major video game releases.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
If ever I need to explain to an American colleague why that one time they visited London does not give them an understanding of what life is like in the North of England… this is the
videogame I’ll point them at.
Among the many language options available for the game are “English”, as you’d probably expect, and “Dialect”, which imposes a South Yorkshire accent to everything, as illustrated
here by the main menu.
A short, somewhat minigame-driven, absurd to the point of Monty Python-ism, wildly British comedy game, Thank Goodness You’re
Here! is a gem. It’s not challenging by any stretch of the imagination, but that only serves to turn focus even more on the weird and wonderful game world of Barnsworth (itself
clearly inspired by real-world Barnsley).
Playing a salesman sent to the town to meet the lord mayor, the player ends up stuck with nothing to do4,
and takes on a couple of dozen odd-jobs for the inhabitants of the town, meeting a mixed bag of stereotypes and tropes as they go along.
Ahm gowin t’shop to gi’ sumof Big Ron’s Big Pies! Y’wanout, buggerlugs? Players without a grounding in Yorkshire English, and especially non-Brits, might benefit from turning
the subtitles on.
Presented in a hand-drawn style that’s as distinctive and bizarre as it is an expression of the effort that must’ve gone into it, this game’s clearly a project of passion for
Yorkshire-based developers Coal Supper (yes, that’s really what they call themselves). I particularly enjoyed a recurring joke in which the
player is performing some chore (mowing grass for the park keeper, chopping spuds at the chippy) when the scene cuts to some typically-inanimate objects having a conversation (flowers,
potatoes) while the player’s actions bring them closer and closer in the background. But it’s hard to pick out a very favourite part from this wonderful, crazy, self-aware slice of
Northern life in game form.
Tactical Breach Wizards
Finally, I’ve got to sing the praises of Tactical Breach Wizards by Suspicious
Developments (who for some reason don’t bother to list it on their website; the closest thing to an official page for the project other than its Steam entry might be this launch announcement!)5, the
team behind Gunpoint and Heat Signature.
The game feels like a cross between XCOM/Xenonauts‘ turn-based tactical combat and Rainbow Six‘s special ops theme. Except instead of a squad of gun-toting
body-armoured military/police types, your squad is a team of wizards in a world in which magical combat specialists work alongside conventionally-equipped soldiers on missions where
their powers make all the difference.
Jen the Storm Witch primarily uses large static shocks to fling targets around: relatively harmless, unless she and her teammates have arranged for/tricked enemies to be standing next
to something they can be thrown into… or near a window they can be flung out of!
By itself, that could be enough: there’s certainly sufficient differences between all of the powers that the magic users exploit that you’ll find all kinds of ways to combine them. How
about having your teleport-capable medic blink themselves to a corner so your witch’s multi-step lightning bolt can use them as a channel to get around a corner and zap a target there?
Or what about using the time-manipulation powers of your Navy Seer (yes, really) to give your siege cleric enough actions that they can shield-push your opponent within range of the
turret you hacked? And so on.
But Tactical Breach Wizards, which stands somewhere between a tactical squad-based shooter and a deterministic positional puzzle game, goes beyond that by virtue of its
storytelling. Despite the limitations of the format, the game manages to pack in a lot of background and personality for every one of your team and even many of the NPCs too (Steve Clark, Traffic Warlock is a riot). Oh, and much of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, to boot.
The dialogue between your teammates – most of it right as they’re about to breach a door – reads like lighthearted banter but exposes the underpinning backstory of the setting.
The writing’s great, to the extent that when I got to the epilogue – interactive segments during the credits where you can influence “what happens next” to each of the characters you’ve
come to know – I genuinely flip-flopped on a few of them to give some of them a greater opportunity to continue to feature in one another’s lives. Even though the game was clearly over.
It’s that compelling.
And puzzling out some of the tougher levels, especially if you’re going for the advanced (“Confidence”) challenges, too, is really fun. But with autosaves every turn, the opportunity to
skip and return to levels that are too challenging, and a within-turn “undo” feature that lets you explore different strategies before you commit to one, this is a great game for
someone who, like me, doesn’t have much time to dedicate to play.
So yeah: that’s what I’ve been up to in videogaming-time so far this year. Any suggestions for the autumn/winter?
Footnotes
1 If a game loads quickly that’s a bonus. I still play a little of my favourite variant of
the Sid Meier’s Civilization series – that is, Civilization V + Vox Populi (alongside a few quality-of-life mods) but I swear I’d play
more of it if it didn’t take so long to load. Even after hacking around it to dodge the launcher, logos, and introduction, my 8P+4E-core i7 processor takes ~80 seconds from clicking
to launch the game to having loaded my latest save, which if I’m only going to have time to play three turns is frustratingly long! Contrast Horizon: Forbidden West, which I
also mention in this post, a game 13 years younger and with much higher hardware requirements, which takes ~17 seconds to achieve the same. Possibly I’m overanalysing this…
2 This isn’t a criticism of the Elder Scrolls games specifically, but of the
relatively-lazy writing that goes into some videogames that feel like they’re using Perchance to come up with their quests, in order to stretch
the gameplay. I suppose a better example might have been the on-the-whole disappointment that was Starfield, but I figured an Elder Scrolls reference might be easier
to identify at-a-glance. Fetch-questing 100 tonnes of Beryllium just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
3 In fact, if you’re trying to consume the Horizon story as thoroughly as
possible and strictly in chronological order, you probably should read the graphic novel between one and the other, which covers some of the events that occur between the two.
4 Did you ever see the alternate ending to Far Cry 4, by the way? If you
did, you might appreciate that a similar trick can be used to shortcut Thank Goodness You’re Here! too…
5 They’re also missing a trick by using the domain they’ve registered,
wizards.cool, only to redirect to Steam.
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