Blogs By People Named Richard - BlogFlock

I’ve seen the Edward Burtynsky and Jennifer Baichwal trilogy - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:36.015Z

I’ve now seen, in quick succession, all three films by Edward Burtynsky and Jennifer Baichwal. This one follows Manufactured Landscapes (which I’d seen a couple of times previously to last month’s screening) and Watermark. Anthropocene makes the case that we’ve entered a geological epoch that follows the Holocene, which we are ostensibly currently in. The idea is that humans have so transformed the Earth, including inside, on top, and the atmosphere that we now have the most effect on the planet.

It was awe-inspiring to see the wide, colourful shots of the three films on the big screen. Anthropocene doesn’t show any of Burtynsky’s photographs like the previous two films do. It does linger on drone shots and sweeping views of people (including the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Nigeria, which, wow), however, and it’s a worthy successor to the documentaries it follows. I plan on owning all three on Blu-ray to watch on my TV which will do none of them justice.

Thoughts on on the King St. Pilot after One Year - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:36.007Z

I've lived in the same apartment in Toronto, near Queen & Spadina, for almost 3 years. Initially my commute to an office at Church and The Esplanade was taking the 510 streetcar from either Queen or King St. depending on where the winds took me. That seemed like the fastest way to go until it donned on me that I was essentially taking a detour south past Front to Queens Quay and then back north to Union Station, and then walking through the morning wave of people coming in from all directions via the GO trains. At some point I changed my commute to take the King St. streetcar, with the new Flexity cars just coming into service on the 504 route. (That might have been when I learned of the Secret Streetcar, the 503, with its semi-permanent short turn at Spadina Ave. and threading through Charlotte to head back east on King. It's the only time I can get a seat in the morning, and I'll let multiple packed streetcars pass knowing that soon, soon I will be the only one boarding an empty streetcar on my way to work.)

The year or so I spent on the King St., no matter which route, was a contract with congestion. Luckily then my pager duty shifts would start in the afternoons, because at least then I did not have to be in the office by a certain time in the mornings. It was not so much that travel times were long but how unpredictable they were. It wasn't even a joke that people could walk faster than the streetcar, it was a reality. If the choice was spending 45 minutes standing in a streetcar and a 45-minute walk to work, I would choose the latter.

As soon as I got wind that the City of Toronto, in conjunction with the TTC, would change the traffic pattern so that cars were required to exit King St. at each intersection (with exceptions), and not only be required to turn right but mandated to do so, meant that the streetcar would be the only vehicle on the road. The right lane on both sides is closed to traffic, and open only for art installations or loading zones or taxi bays. I called the pilot project a success at the outset, because it felt like a daring exercise the TTC is not exactly known for, and it prioritized transit riders which not only benefited me directly (I have never owned a car and don't want to), but it would benefit the tens of thousands of transit riders along the King St. corridor. After a year of the pilot, I was surprised how low the increase was in ridership at 11%, though it does seem to me and other riders of the streetcar that people are more packed in, and that Presto undercounts due to 'free rides' simply because people can't reach to tap in. (If I had any doubt that the TTC counts Bluetooth devices to determine the number of riders, the open data catalogue has put them to rest.) I remain of the opinion that no matter how many streetcars are on the route, they will fill up, because of how predictable the commute times are. That's a good thing! I'm just a little dismayed that overcrowding is presented as a problem, which it is, but unless they keep up with densification along the corridor, which they won't anytime soon, "overcrowding" will be present for a long while.

(Don't get me wrong: I'm in favour of more streetcars along King St., since it will mean even people on streetcars, which means fewer people driving cars. I just don't think getting a seat is something anybody should realistically count on.)

This evening I attended a roundtable discussion hosted by TTCRiders.ca. Attendees were split up into groups of 7 or 8 and led by a facilitator to discuss the pilot. To my pleasant surprise, a candidate for council in my ward, April Engleberg, led the discussion at my table. We had a sheet with 5 questions in front of us, and for each of the 5 questions, we had time to answer them on our own and then discuss them among the group. I represented the early-40s white male perspective as best I could, and found the complaints and concerns everybody brought to be eye-opening. Since my commute time is very predictable now (always under 17 minutes while in a streetcar, and traffic is only ever stuck behind one), I call the line a subway on the ground. My vision for the King St. has it extended to Roncesvalles Ave., if only to make it easier for me to move to Etobicoke, but that's another story.

Did some people think it was a session to complain to city staff despite being explicitly told it wasn't. Yes. Was it a shame that the groups stayed the same throughout the night? Possibly. Did I reframe some of my thoughts about the pilot based on other people's experiences of it? Absolutely.

At work, we had to stop calling a new service that we tried out with a select group of customer as a pilot because they associated that word with a temporary thing. The customers saw themselves as early adopters of something, so I worry too that the King St. Transit Pilot is seen by implementors and stakeholders and consumers as impermanent. I see everybody in the area as being not so much as early adopters, but as participants in a new way of thinking of city streets that was (and still is) disruptive, with some problems to iron out (and possibly people to compensate). I hope King St. becomes a transit-only part of town, and that we listen to people in the roundtables, who suggested that maybe public art in street lanes didn't work as well as it could, but can still reclaim that lane for people by making it a wider sidewalk (with public art!).

Three Years In My Downtown Toronto Apartment - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.998Z

I have reflected recently on my three years at Acquia and my three years living in Toronto, and today marks three years living in my downtown Toronto apartment. I got the keys to the place on December 1st, 2015, and spent the next two weeks slowly moving in, making multiple subway and streetcar trips from a friend's basement to Queen & Spadina to bring over the stuff I had bought over the course of a month, and waiting for my Ikea furniture to be delivered and then put together. I would go several months without a couch, its purchase being a story of its own. I still rent, having failed to convince the landlord to buy the place off him, and have done two rounds of looking for a similarly new (my building was built in 2013 or so) and similarly tiny apartment to buy, without any luck.

The location of my current place couldn't be more ideal. It's a 17-minute streetcar ride to work, and I'm located on one of Toronto's best shopping avenues (Queen St.) and its entertainment district (King St.), at the intersection of two streets with dedicated streetcar paths (both King and Spadina). Every music venue I end up attending seems to be half an hour away by transit for some reason, but at least it's only ever that.

My Adirondack chair (or is it a Muskoka chair?!) arrived. I can’t wait to sit on and drink a frosty beverage. pic.twitter.com/0baBHAbook

— Richard Brynjólfsson (@sillygwailo) March 23, 2016

My proudest moment, aside from the couch purchase, has been the addition of a Muskoka chair. The dream of owning a cottage in Ontario is the dream of owning a car, and I'd just rather not. So instead of bringing me to the cottage, I brought the cottage to me. Would you believe I'm the only one in my building with one? You wouldn't, and that's because I own two now.

The cushion and a cover arrived, not to mention a side-table… pic.twitter.com/sLFE2QAHog

— The Whale House (@hvalhus) July 28, 2018

In order for it to have a name in Foursquare's Swarm app, I gave my apartment the moniker Hvalhús, which translates into "Whale House" (because I love whales). The English translation of if gets a "The" and there's an infrequently updated Twitter account and Instagram account for it every time something significant gets added to it.

"Space is at a premium" every time someone suggests I buy something for it, so I always order the smallest version of that thing. Three years of stuff has accumulated, and hopefully the winter months of January and February will be boring enough for me to want to part with some things. Overall, though, I'm very happy with it, and do things (like cook and hang art on the walls) that I would never have considered doing when I lived alone in my twenties. Now that I'm in my forties and living alone again, my apartment feels like a place to live in.

I Came Second Place In Helping People Out for the 504 Streetcar - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.989Z

You might remember such blog posts as my thoughts on the King St. Pilot and my long thread on Twitter on the subject. Since the pilot has started, I have used the Transit app more and more to give me transit directions. It does things like notify me when I'm two stops away and when my stop is approaching, useful only when GPS is available (i.e. not underground in the TTC subway). In August, it introduced Go, a crowdsourced real-time vehicle location feature. Many transit agencies, the TTC included, give the public access to real-time location of buses and streetcars, but the Transit app developers claim it can be 30 seconds out of date. With this new feature, riders are the source of information, and it feeds back to Transit's servers.

As a way to entice people to turn tracking on, the developers gamified it by counting how many people you've "helped" along the way. Presumably these are people who are sending their location to the app in the background, or looking at the app currently. They are not necessarily people thinking of using the route I'm on, but just people nearby. Over the course of a month, the number of people "helped" is aggregated and I'm ranked among other people who are doing the same thing. For November 2018, I came in second place:

I imagine the person who came in first tracked their trips for every rush hour during weekdays, whereas I worked from an undisclosed location couple of days in November and forgot to press "GO" a few times I did commute to the office along King St.

Some interesting problems came up: I sometimes take the 503, but it's not always listed as an option in the Transit app. It's truly the Secret Streetcar! I counted it as 504 for the purpose of the game. It did sometimes ask me if I was on the 503 or the 504, and I told the truth each time. Midway through using Transit Go, the 504 changed how it was split. Long story short, instead of two routes, 504 and 514, it changed where they turned off and kept 504A and 504B as the route numbers. The Transit app doesn't seem to differentiate between the two. That works out fine for me, since I'm aware of the difference, and even once a 504B caught up with a 504A (which I wanted to be on eventually), so I hopped off the streetcar that would turn left at Dufferin and got on the streetcar that would take me to Roncesvalles.

I don't know what happens if I end up 1st since I haven't ended up as 1st on any of the routes I take over the course of a month. There doesn't appear to be an API that I can tap into (to get where I went, how many people I helped, which place I'm currently in for a route). There are real-time updates to the directions (e.g. when I might miss a connection), but I haven't tested updated instructions for times when I stop at a transfer point to do something, like go to a coffee shop. It's still neat to try to get to the top and to wonder who it is that's more eager to give their location data away for free than I am, though.

Watching Movies - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.980Z

Joseph Planta, a podcaster who interviews notable people in public life, once posted the list of films he had watched over the course of the year.

The list I've been keeping since January 1st of films I've seen/finished in 2016. Up to 102 as of today. pic.twitter.com/c1PCVu2aiA

— Joseph Planta (@Planta) August 26, 2016

Recalling this at the end of 2017, I had made added to my yearly list of New Year's Intentions the idea to carve out time to watch more movies. I decided that Friday would be movie night, and that as part of my Sunday routine, I would pick a film to watch the following week. As 2018 progressed, it was obvious that I couldn't rely on Friday night to be the specific night for watching a movie, but my conscious effort paid off in making good on a promise to watch a movie almost every week.

It certainly helps that I live two blocks from a commercial cinema and the TIFF Bell Lightbox, not to mention subscribing to Netflix and Amazon Prime. I'm a Bronze member of The Revue Cinema in Roncesvalles, and have had a fun time at their Drunken Cinema series, where hooting and hollering is encouraged. It is not often that I rent a DVD, the closest store being an hour round trip, but the Toronto Public Library has a good selection, so I include them on my list. Only as a very last resort do I secretly and illegally download a film. I tend to turn on captions for movies, especially if people with British accents are speaking, but also because almost always captions capture what is said at low volume in the background, adding colour to the scenes. I'm not sure I'm willing to use the captioning display unit that Cineplex theatres offer, but that's without having tried it.

I'm particularly interested in movies in which a character’s understanding and effective internalization of the content of a systematic moral theory is a major driver of the story, films that showcase Los Angeles, and movies directed by women.

I post my movie-watching activity to my profile on Letterboxd, and have even been known to add a movie or two to the database it pulls from. For 2019, I switched from Friday being movie night to having at least one movie night sometime during the week. My watchlist on Letterboxd is plenty long, so I shouldn't lack for films to watch over the coming months.

One thing that has been lacking has been my ability to talk about film. It is common across all media, that is, my inability to tell people why I think something is good. When I come across the course for film appreciation that I lost track of, I'll sign up for it.

Just a Gwai Lo Supports Dark Mode - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.970Z

I have to say, I was skeptical about dark mode in our current operating systems, but since wiring it up to switch to it automatically after sunset, I’m a believer. I know some people always operate their in dark mode, and that's not for me. I prefer the light on my screen to match the light of the day. It's especially nice to have my iPhone in dark mode at concerts, so I can avoid being "that guy" who blinds the person behind me,

Websites now respect the system setting of dark mode, and ever since Jeff Geerling updated his site's theme to support dark mode, I had on my list to do the same.

It turns out that the Responsive Blog Drupal theme, a very nice theme that does what it says on the tin, has a switch for turning on the dark mode version of it. I'm glad I realized that most of the work had been done for me, and I've submitted a patch to the project for review.

The last frontier of dark mode based on system setting is third-party JavaScript widgets. None of the 3 widgets on my blog, to my knowledge, have the ability to switch automatically.

A Month of Sheltering In Place - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.962Z

Even though I'm Canadian, I've long preferred the American expressions for things. A "furlough" is the temporary leave of absence that employees don't choose, and in recent times has referred to employees during government shutdowns in the United States. I think "donut" is a funnier way to spell doughnut, which is the Canadian spelling. And "shelter in place" is a term I learned during the days after the Boston Marathon bombing, and is my preferred term for "stay at home" or "lockdown" during the COVID-19 pandemic.¹

My first day of working from home full time was March 13th, a month ago today. My manager knew which way the wind was blowing, and beat the wider company's order to work from home by a week. Our organization, Customer Service, has a lot of experience working from home, as many of us working from home once a week before the pandemic to begin with, plus others on my team not located in Toronto or Boston had their home office setup already.

I find myself well-placed for this. I've tried to avoid the words "privileged" or "lucky" because, while undeniable, they don't fully account for decisions I made in the four years of living in Toronto. One of them was to establish a space in my apartment for working. Another was to start the habit of buying in bulk for necessities and get them delivered on a regular basis. A third decision was to learn how to cook for myself. In a previous life, I ate out tremendously, and knew how to cook maybe one meal that wasn't macaroni & cheese. Now, my fridge is half full of ingredients to cook (with deliveries each week) and half full with leftovers. (The third half is taken up by beer.) Twentysomething Richard would marvel at the full fridge and the fact that I have a full set kitchen utensils that I use regularly.

The other aspect that puts me well-placed is introversion. I've overheard people on the street say it has been hard for them as an extrovert to have to stay home all day and not have an office to go to and the ability to visit friends. On the flip side, however, as the crisis started, I saw the jokes by introverts who mockingly asserted this should be easy for them, since they were used to being alone and now get to do it all the time. I had a hard time with those jokes.

Introversion (being comfortable with being alone) is not the same thing as shyness (anxiety about establishing new relationships and maintaining existing ones). In the first couple of weeks, my social anxiety took a back seat to anxiety about the pandemic. I found that frustrating because, due to an overly anxious Valentines Day, I resolved to restart the work I had done about the social anxiety. I'm less anxious about the pandemic after considering what I have control over, such as washing my hands, staying away from crowds, "s o c i a l d i s t a n c i n g" (which sounds funnier when said ominously), and muting keywords related to The Virus on Twitter. I've also accepted I don't have control over when we will sufficiently flattened the curve, or when therapies or a vaccine become available. I've done and will continue to do everything health authorities have asked of me, all the while keeping an eye on the impact to civil liberties.² The improving weather will be a test for Canada's resolve to stay away from crowds or travel unnecessarily. It will test my resolve. Now that pandemic anxiety has subsided, it won't be easy to work on my social anxiety, as there the number of social situations in which I meet new people are going to be few and far between. I can still work on the feelings associated with it, though.

Other aspects of my current life that have me well-placed:

Two bookshelves full of books and DVDs, at least a quarter of them unread and unwatched, and a long-enough watchlist.
Friends and family who not only check on me but care about me
A job which keeps me busy during the day, and that I can effortlessly do remotely, with a reduced cost of living (which I haven't fully understood) and savings that make it possible for me to donate to food banks.

I'm grieving for a lot of things as a result of this: the quiet that now surrounds my apartment, making downtown Toronto feel like a small town; having to work from home when I moved here so I could work in an office; no in-person gatherings of any kind; the oxygen that the crisis sucked out of the news and conversations; travel plans I've had to cancel and visits by family that are a lot less certain now. The opportunity is in time gained. I don't plan on starting any new hobbies, but rather jump-starting old ones, like synthesizers and running.

Walking and exercising outside hasn't been cancelled. Cooking isn't cancelled. The economy collapsed but Canada's social safety net kicked into overdrive. Medical science around the world has been put on hold to work almost exclusively on one problem. People in Toronto, as they so often do, are more or less coming together. My balcony hasn't been cancelled. So I'm still optimistic in the ethic sense of the word. We'll get through this because we, at least in Canada, are embracing the challenge, and when we embrace the challenge, our track record is very good.

I also liked "shutdown" for a while, seeing as how we weren't locked in our homes, but rather anything that involved lingering, such as restaurants or concert venues or libraries or art galleries, were shut down. "Shelter in place" quickly replaced that in my mind, though. ↩︎
I'm signing up for decentralized privacy-preserving proximity tracing the day it becomes available. ↩︎

Two Months of Sheltering in Place - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.953Z

The weeks have gone by a lot faster these past 30 days than the first 30 days. Toronto is slowly loosening it’s restrictions, allowing curbside pickup from retail stores, though all restaurants are still open only for delivery or pickup. So far none of the restaurants I get food from have closed permanently, though I don’t have a lot of hope for the diner across the street from me. I take a walk each day, weather permitting, go grocery shopping for snacks once a week, and as of today, I finally have masks that fit me. A family friend, Ruby, made them for not just our whole family, but my sister’s in-laws as well. We call them our Ruby Masks. It was a heartwarming gesture, one I've seen friends on social media gush about as well when their friends make them masks. I don't know if we're all in this together, but a lot of people are stepping up.

My task list is just as long as it was before the pandemic. If I've said "I'm too busy to do [xyz]," well, that wasn't the reason. I watch more movies than usual, with Saturday having become movie night with co-workers. We stream it over one of the video chat services, and we make up for the low quality with camaraderie during the film. There’s a demand for a service like this, even in a post-pandemic world, or a world in which movie theatres still exist, because of the distributed nature of teams and friends. A browser plugin won’t cut it.

The weather is warming up, and even in a cold May, I’m out on the balcony in the sunlight. I went on my first bike ride of the pandemic to Trinity Bellwoods Park on a warm Saturday, which was followed by a week of cold weather. That all changed this week. I can finally drop my parka off at the dry cleaner.

I've taken two streetcar trips, both of which were back from a computer repair place, having walked to get there. I took note of the time and ID number of the streetcars, but that has been at least 2 weeks ago. The next streetcar I board, I'll be wearing a mask. I still keep track of every place I go using Foursquare's Swarm. While before the pandemic it was a game, the winner getting more points based on how many places they visit, now it has taken on the sombre task of logging where I was in case I need to retrace my steps up to 14 days later.

All concerts I had tickets for to this point have been either cancelled or postponed. I expect the same of June concerts, and any concert happening this year. I know why sports leagues have not cancelled their seasons (they traffic in optimism), though it's all but certain no games will be shown in front of live crowds in North America in 2020.

It's easy to rationalize away the things I miss. "Restaurants weren't such a great experience anyway." "Concerts always had annoyances that I don't miss." "Museums are boring." But I'll go to them when they re-open, taking any precautions that's asked of me. I'm still optimistic that we will get to enjoy what we enjoyed before the pandemic, just in a different way.

Drupal 9 Is Here, and the Pirate Module is Ready. Yarr! - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.944Z

In anticipation of the June 3rd launch of Drupal 9, I spent the weekend a week previous to the launch dusting off the Drupal module I'm most famous for: the Pirate module! What does it do, exactly? Like the WP extension, the Pirate module changes your site's content to pirate-speak on September 19th, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I took the tagline ("Ah, Squiddy! I got nothing against ye. I just heard there was gold in yer belly. Ha ha har, ha ha ha har!"), which I buried in the configuration, from a non-pirate, sea captain Horatio McCallister. (Spoiler alert: He's not even a real sea captain.) It adds a text filter (previously known as an input format) to whatever field you specify, and on September 19th, that field's content is changed into various pirate-like sayings, interspersed with yarr! and avast! During Drupal's semantic versioning transition, versions 8.x-1.1 forward are intended to be fully compatible with Drupal 9.

The module started out as an internal ticket at Bryght in 2005. Boris Mann came across the Talk Like a Pirate plugin for WordPress, and since both Drupal and WordPress are written in PHP, he wanted it ported over. I took the ticket, 45 minutes before a colleague saw it and, almost 15 years later, it serves as the project I use to keep up with Drupal internals. Thanks to a patch from Snehal Brahmbhatt, later confirmed by a robot, I am able to legitimately claim that the module has full Drupal 9 compatibility. (Unlike the move from Drupal 7 to 8, Drupal 9 is an update, not a rebuild.) It has had an official release for all versions of Drupal since 4.6.

Over the weekend of updating the module for D9, I caught wind of DrupalSpoons, and without fulling realizing the implications, I applied to have the Pirate module mirrored there. (Moshe was excited!) After reading the DrupalSpoons announcement, I understood it to be an experiment in using GitLab as the issue queue and repository platform more directly than the Drupal core and contributed modules projects, which uses GitLab as an underlying provider for their official repositories. As long as code and issues are synced between the two, I don't have a problem pushing and responding in both spaces.

I'm looking forward to September 19th this year and years to come. Yarr!

Three Months of Sheltering in Place - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.933Z

Ontario has only flattened the curve, and it has reached a plateau. I would have more confidence in the approach Canada's second largest (and therefore second greatest) province took if we've increased hospital resources if we need to accommodate a rise in cases, but I don't have a close enough read on that. So far the large outdoor gatherings that finger-wavers thought would lead to spikes have been benign, but I expect a second wave sometime in the colder months when we spend a larger amount of our day indoors. As long as we've developed runbooks and we've increased resources available for when (not if) the second wave hits, I'm not too worried about the strain on our health care system. Canada's neighbour to the south, that I'm not so sure about.

The Ontario government has split the province into two regions, which is to say The Greater Toronto Area (which I cal Ontario 1) and outside the GTA (Ontario 2). I largely support the move since the province is too big (and therefore too great) to administer as one unit in a situation like this, but I worry since I've in the region that isn't opening up as much as the other region. I've taken to calling it "loosening up" since that has been my feeling of the last two weeks. The reasons for that are:

I get beer delivered rather than pick it up at the LCBO, a process which has made it a lot easier to drink every craft beer made in Ontario. If I was drinking only on weekends or on nights before a holiday, in order to cut down on the next day's brain fog. The pandemic changed that habit to about a beer a day. Only one on days before a workday, though. This is only to take the edge off, not to drown my sorrows.

The Lakeshore Boulevard Activeway is real, and it’s spectacular. #ActiveTO #BikeTO pic.twitter.com/LVTP4hNH25

— Richard Brynj ó l f s s o n (@sillygwailo) May 16, 2020

The City of Toronto has opened some of its major streets as activeways for people wanting to get some exercise and maintain physical distance on weekends. I don't expect the Lakeshore Boulevard Activeway to be permanent, or at least not open to cyclists and whatnot in the colder months, but it's a big hit, and I hope they learn something from it for next year's warmer months, pandemic or no pandemic.
Businesses re-opening and the possibility of increased ability to do things if we wear a face covering (which I'm on board with), even if it means no concerts or street festivals for a little while. I'm trying not to rationalize not being able to do things ("I didn't like [x] anyway"), but it has given me the opportunity to reflect on what I miss and what I don't miss.

We're getting there. The months of May and now June have passed faster than the months of March and April. I still have optimism about treatments and a vaccine, if only because the survival of the current system depends on it. As we've seen with the rise in support for the Black Lives Matter movement, it has long been obvious that the current system was not tenable for a very large portion of North American population. Due to the confluence of the pandemic, the resulting furloughs and layoffs, the slow, painful, agonizing death of a Black man at the hands (or, rather, the knee) of police caught on camera in Minneapolis, the resulting fall in popularity of an already-unpopular President, the overdue removal of monuments celebrating the lost effort to conserve slavery, the painful and welcome realization that Canada's institutions are not necessarily less racist than those of the United States, hopefully a new system (which still welcomes treatments and a vaccine for COVID-19) will take its place so both the United States and Canada can truly emerge better for having gone through this pandemic.

Toronto Heritage - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.920Z

When I lived in Vancouver, I wanted a way to explore the city in a structured way, and as someone who loved riding transit, the perfect way to do that was by doing the tours in SkyTrain Explorer: Heritage Walks From Every Station by John Atkin. Having moved to Toronto almost 5 years ago, I was able to see the city through Jane's Walks and other walking tours, and I was on the lookout for something similar to Atkin's book. Toronto Architecture: A City Guide by Patricia McHugh and Alex Bozikovic is a close analogue. While they don't use subway stations as their starting point, I flipped through the book and the tours seemed brisk and informative, not to mention opinionated. (Each tour references others, as they overlap, so the reader is often referred to the building description in another tour by walk number and building number.) I have created a separate page for the architecture I'll take from the book, and the format of that page will closely follow that of the SkyTrain Explorer page.

The book does not direct the reader to each point like SkyTrain Explorer does, and has more to see on each walk than that book does. The book does number the buildings, so you can piece together a route. In the Yonge St. walking tour I just completed, I ran Strava in the background to capture the route I took. You can see the diversions to side streets, as well as deciding not to retrace my steps early on.

Like with the SkyTrain Explorer section, I will embed the photos in a page per walk. It will take some time to upgrade the code behind it, which is a both a major PHP version and Drupal version behind, but I'm looking forward to exploring the city I live in again, and documenting it here along the way.

The Lakeshore Boulevard Activeway is Real, and It’s Spectacular - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.903Z

As soon as it was announced in May, I couldn't wait to bike the sections of Lakeshore Boulevard to cyclists, runners, walkers and others who want to exercise and stay physical distant. My position is: As long as the gyms are closed, the city needs to open up as much public space to move around as possible. I've gone every weekend it has been opened, missing only one day. (After I missed that day, I realized I wanted to go each day the road was open.) I even went on a day when I assumed it was open, but it was closed to active participants because the Gardiner "Expressway" was closed due to repairs.

The Lakeshore Boulevard Activeway is real, and it’s spectacular. #ActiveTO #BikeTO pic.twitter.com/LVTP4hNH25

— Richard Brynj ó l f s s o n (@sillygwailo) May 16, 2020

I don't own a bike, mainly because I don't want to have to lock it up. Instead, I have a monthly membership with Toronto Bike Share. It's a 10-minute walk to the nearest bike share dock (more like the dock that's most convenient to depart from), and after that, it's about an hour of biking. That's from the time I take out my first bike share bike to the time I dock. My yearly membership gives me unlimited 30-minute rides, and as long as I dock at a station. Each day I go, I take a photo to memorialize a moment, add a tweet to the above thread, and I keep track of the rides through Strava. Some days I try to get a personal best, and some days I go for a leisurely ride. The days with a headwind are usually followed by days with a light breeze, so I don't let it demoralize me.

While I appreciate the branding of and the effort into SafewaysTO¹, since it refers to roads that have reduced or no car traffic on them, I'm trying to make 'activeway' a thing. That's especially true of Lakeshore Boulevard.² It hasn't caught on yet.

I still don't know what to make of people using motorized vehicles, like e-bikes and scooters. I guess they're getting some freedom on the open road and outside time, but I don't think that was the idea.

On my rides, I take along my $50 Anker speaker and play music as loud as it will go. Inspired by Roland, I use the Volumatic app to control my volume based on my velocity. As soon as I'm biking full speed, the speaker is at full volume, but when I slow down (such as at a stoplight), it turns the volume down to about 70%. It's especially nice for when I have to dock a bike, since the music still plays, meaning no pausing and unpausing, and no manually having to adjust the volume for nearby ears.

It has been my way to stay active, see the lake, and see other people, which reminds me that we're not locked down even if restrictions on large gatherings are still in place. I haven't yet ridden on the other sections that are open to active users, and that's something I hope to do by the end of summer. Toronto has recently entered Phase 2, meaning patios are open for service and we can get haircuts now. I'm not happy with how long it has taken to flatten the curve, and I think it could have been a lot flatter, but opening up streets to people on weekends has been such an inspired idea that I hope we learn from it, and I hope it can be made a permanent feature of summers in Toronto.

I'm very fond of maps and mapping, but found, to my surprise, that I didn't find the SafewayTO map useful. It has spurred some thinking on how useful I find maps to begin with. I now have more questions than answers, like "What do I use maps for most?" and "What story is any particular map trying to tell me?" and "Is a map the best way to display this?" A map like the SafewayTO map would be very useful in an app like MapinHood and, don't worry, I told them so. ↩︎
I prefer the spelling Lakeshore to the official Lake Shore. It feels like it should be one word rather than two. ↩︎

King St. W. Heritage - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.888Z

Faced with having someone over to clean my apartment, and nowhere to go, my first idea was to sit on my balcony for 2½ hours. Eating dinner there that evening, it was obvious that being stationary in the sweltering Toronto heat would not be a good idea. If it weren't for the COVID-19 pandemic, I would go to a Starbucks and sit inside for the duration, and cross off some items on my task list. Dining inside is currently not possible, and patio space is at a premium, so I took along my copy of Toronto Architecture: A City Guide by Patricia McHugh and Alex Bozikovic and walked around my neighbourhood, the area of King St. West near Spadina Ave. Starting at Bathurst and King, I walked east and took photos of the buildings and construction sites along what is mostly restaurants and nightclubs, but is transitioning towards high-rise residential. My favourite view along the King St. corridor is the location of where ing Toronto will be located, giving me a temporary view of the side of a building and the CN Tower. That site will be filled by King Toronto, a huge residential development that I quite like, if it comes close to the proposed designs.

The directions too me north on John St., back south to Adelaide, then to Peter St., then the home stretch on Richmond St. W. all the way to Maud St. to see the Waterworks residential and food hall building under construction.

The first walk I took was northbound on Yonge St., which is mythically the longest street in the world, and this was the second walk. All of the buildings were familiar to me, but they didn't have names. Every walk I go on contains a surprise, though, and this was no different. On Adelaide St. W. near Widmer, is a map of the southern parts of Toronto engraved in the sidewalk. I hadn't noticed it before because usually there are chairs and tables on top.

It doesn't photograph well, but I admired it as a flat memorial to the city and Lake Ontario. I killed even more time in St. Andrew's Playground Park, itself slated for redevelopment, though the pandemic has delayed that too, if only slightly. Overall the walk serves as a good introduction to my neighbourhood as it changes rapidly.

For all of the photos taken on this architectural tour, visit my set on Flickr.

Four Months of Sheltering in Place - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.873Z

The one thing that has kept me going, from the gloomiest times in March of this year, is that time marches forward no matter what. I look at my Timehop recap of where I went and what I said on this day in previous years on a daily basis, the years seem both so long ago and like it was yesterday. Either way, time will its way, and this too shall one day be in the past. I never lost track of what day it was, thanks to still having a job. (Co-workers lost track of what weekday it was, so I'm not saying continuing to work and have a weekend was the only reason.) I stuck to my Sunday routine and did everything I was allowed to do while taking all the precautions asked of me.) I've read the various articles about experiencing time differently, and that could be true for March and parts of April. That said, May, and especially June, went by about as quickly as they do outside of a pandemic. I experienced a loosening up from the pandemic anxiety as stores opened up again (or closed for good), and restaurants started offering patio service. My beloved diner even came through with a re-opening, first with takeout and then with patio service, which I take advantage of on Saturdays, weather permitting. While planning ahead has been more difficult (no plane travel until at least Christmas, for example), I have been taking it 2 weeks at a time, and that has worked well for my peace of mind.

The other ideas that keep me calm come from an interview with epedimiologist Larry Brilliant. From that I get the confidence there will be a vaccine. (Also a treatment for those that, rolling my eyes here, choose not to take the vaccine.) This quote near the end stands out: “Everybody needs to remember: This is not a zombie apocalypse. It's not a mass extinction event.” To my knowledge there's no obvious treatment, but our knowledge of the virus grows, and, if they're not 100% guarantees, I have yet to hear someone say treatment will definitely never come and that a vaccine is impossible. All signs point to the scientific community coming to a full understanding of the virus this year.

Also encouraging has been that my office has opened up. I have the benefit of living in downtown Toronto, and the office is a 12-minute bike ride away. I'm only comfortable going in twice a week, mainly to get a break from the construction noise across the street from my apartment and to sit in a comfortable chair, and not taking transit to get there. I don't have a plan for the colder months other than working from home, though generally speaking, Toronto has been good about clearing the bike lanes of snow.

I haven’t taken up any new hobbies or restarted many old ones. I have been biking for leisure as much as possible, and have just started doing self-guided architectural tours of Toronto. I’ve been cooking at about the same frequency, but double the amount each time. That and gaming take up most of my time, and reading books has come to be a habit again. I'm still listening to full albums like I had started a few years ago.

I have been spending a lot of time on my balcony. So much so that I have dinner out there regularly, and I now have a storage box so that I make less frequent trips to get things.

The storage box took 5 minutes to snap together. I tucked it behind my dining table for now. This will mean less bringing things in and out, and more time to enjoy sitting on my balcony. pic.twitter.com/otao8atLtj

— Richard Brynj ó l f s s o n (@sillygwailo) June 5, 2020

In the box I have paper towel, a glass or two, placemats, cutlery, and earplugs for the times I want to have breakfast or lunch out there when construction across the street is happening. I expect to be able to stay out there through September, and possibly October if warmer weather prevails that long. Because of how well things have gone these four months, the only thing I have to plan for is cold weather during lineups to the grocery store, and so far trips have been minimal because I cook using meal kits that are delivered to me weekly.

I've also been making a number of fixes to this blog. It's been nice getting back into the depths of Drupal 7 again, which has had some life breathed into it recently. I've restored the following sections: my bookmarks, no longer syndicated from anywhere; my Flickr photos, which will start being syndicated here shortly, and the station pages of my SkyTrain Explorer section. This is all in anticipation of an upgrade to Drupal 8, though there's at least two years until I have to do that.

Toronto Islands - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.862Z

I had a vacation day today, the day after a weekend on-call shift. This year I decided I didn't want to work 12 days in a row, so for this weekend and the next time I have pager duty, I have a day off in between. Today started out with breakfast from the diner across the street from where I live, sitting in the park catching up on personal email while sitting on the new lawn chair I bought, and trying to decide whether to visit Toronto Islands. In the COVID-19 era, the ferry there is open to non-residents, at half capacity, and everybody has to wear a mask, even on the top deck, which is open to the elements. I had the presence of mind to take a bad selfie with the CN Tower in the background. How else are people going to know it was taken in Toronto?

I had no plan other than to take a Toronto Bike Share on the ferry and bike around Wards Island, which I hadn't seen much of previously. I was treated to this view of downtown Toronto:

It was a short bike ride, no longer than 40 minutes. Near the end of it, I took a wrong turn and ended up on a boardwalk on Centre Island:

I had intended to get a hot dog at a local bar (with outside seating), so with half an hour to spare, I did just that. 5 minutes before the ferry was due to leave, I discovered the bike had a flat tire. That meant I had to wait for an hour for the next ferry, and I couldn't venture far due to disabled bike, though I was able to read a book on a bench.

On every trip I take, I try to fit in a boat ride. There's no travel for the foreseeable future, so for $9, that's my boat ride for the summer.

For more photos, see my set of the trip on Flickr.

Five Months of Sheltering in Place - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.851Z

I'm still riding bikes, and still going to the office once or twice a week. I bought a sturdy lawn chair so I could sit in the park next to my building. I reasoned that it would be a useful thing to have post-pandemic as well. I'm otherwise sheltering in place because there’s no events to attend. At least there are still places to go. I remain optimistic that we'll get to the other side of this pandemic, but I'm also getting used to the idea of not attending any more events in person in the year 2020.

Toronto mandated masks inside public places (and common areas of private places), and has been steadily re-opening businesses, especially restaurants for dining in. Dining solo isn't such a great experience to begin with, but it adds back vibrancy to the city streets. During the pandemic, wearing a mask is the price to pay to go to stores, and that's a fairly small price. I don't think I'm going to like doing it for more than an hour at a time, though, which may come into play if I go on a group day-trip, something I'm considering as a way to get out of town for a few hours.

In an article where the headline signalled pessimism, an interview with Bill Gates in Wired actually gives more hope:

for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022. That is only because of the scale of the innovation that’s taking place. Now whenever we get this done, we will have lost many years in malaria and polio and HIV and the indebtedness of countries of all sizes and instability. It’ll take you years beyond that before you’d even get back to where you were at the start of 2020. It’s not World War I or World War II, but it is in that order of magnitude as a negative shock to the system.

(Although the criticism is that it relies too heavily on the idea that innovation will save us when there are established practices for this sort of thing.)

I'm still single, and while this year started off with a date (and for once, a second date), while dating apps reported a surge in signups, I can't report increased matches, so I decided to take all of August off. It was always time-consuming to spend an hour swiping in the hopes of making a match, and then trying to think of something original but sincere and getting to what I call the "values conversation" (i.e. getting beyond small talk to discuss what each other wants in a relationship). Matches seemed to get fewer and further between, so I'm taking the hint and re-tooling in that department.

I haven't learned any new skills or read many books during the shutdown period. Every time I start to feel bad about that, I recall that I've been cooking a lot, writing in my blog more, sitting on my balcony and in the park more, and focussing on learning how to relax, something I'm not sure I've experienced in a while. I have started learning Chinese again, using the Duolingo app, and recalling my time in university, the courses I enjoyed the most were those that assigned short essays based on course readings, i.e. no research outside of the texts already suggested. I'm looking to take such a course again, possibly in a field new to me. One that isn't computers (self-learner) or political science (my university major).

Six Months of Sheltering in Place - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.834Z

Summer is almost over. I’ve so far weathered the pandemic by continuing to have a job, already having made a bulk purchase in what was temporarily in short supply, and by keeping active by biking the Lakeshore Boulevard Activeway. The office opening up in July gave me respite from the construction across the street. I bike there and back once or twice a week, partly for a change of scenery and food options, but mostly for some peace and quiet.

Winter is coming, but not before Toronto’s typically magical autumn. I tried to plan a day trip out of the city, but I ultimately couldn’t think of what I’d do once I'd arrive at my destination. A boat trip to Toronto Islands soothed the soul in July, and I have some upcoming vacation where I hope to recapture that feeling. The farthest east I've been has been the office, the fathest north I've been is College St., and the farthest west I've been is Windemere Ave. and Lakeshore Drive W. (one end of the aforementioned Lakeshore Boulevard Activeway). I'm hopeful the City of Toronto will continue to encourage active use of the city while the second phase of the pandemic (acceptance of possible shutdowns if cases surge too fast) before the next phase (the safe introduction of a vaccine).

My main worry about the pandemic was not so much getting the disease but the boredom of events not going forward. Only by knowing what we know now (wearing a mask if you can't physically distance, going outside is relatively safe) do I think some of Toronto events could take place. I'm thinking mostly of one of Toronto's best events, Nuit Blanche, where the city becomes an outdoor art gallery and is celebrated now by all 4 corners of it. I'm hopeful an in-person event can be held next October, 13 months from now, instead of this year's online-only event.

I've more or less avoided virtual events. Concerts and movies aren't the same on the smaller screen and my lesser sound systems. I've helped organize an event normally held in person, so I understand the amount of work that goes into it, and the Icelandic Canadian Club of Toronto's upcoming premier event, Thorrablót, will be online-only as well. In-person events is a prime reason I live in a city, and the hope that they'll return have me staying put until we enter the vaccine phase of the pandemic. If I was worried Toronto had turned into a quiet small town during the initial emergency phase of the pandemic, car traffic has returned, restaurants are open (in limited capacity), people are walking the street (masked and unmasked), so big-city life is making an attempt at a return, at least.

I continue to have questions about Canada's, Ontario's, and Toronto's handling of the pandemic. Are hospitals at increased capacity if they have to accommodate a sustained surge? Are better treatments on the way? When the vaccine is approved in Canada, how will health units deliver it? Will I be able to fly home to British Columbia to visit family for Christmas?

In the meantime, I'm making plans to take a course or two in case boredom sets in again. I will miss the deadline for the fall semester of continuing education courses, though the course I stumbled into for this season will be about an unlikely subject: myself. I hope to one day get a chance to talk about that.

Toronto Islands a Second Time - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.820Z

I've been trying all summer to think of somewhere to go on a day trip. My last outing was to Toronto Islands, and despite a flat tire at the tail end of it, it was a success. I decided against venturing out of town. That was necessarily because I was worried about catching COVID-19 on a train or bus, since the stories I had read of people doing it seemed OK. I just didn't know what I'd do once I got to, say, Kitchener-Waterloo, in-person events having been put on hold this year. So I did what was easy: I took a Bike Share Toronto bike to Toronto Islands again, and this time was even better than the last.

I play location-based games when I'm out and about. It's a way for me to interact with my surroundings while also passing the time on walks and bike rides. On this trip, I played:

Fog of World, with a mechanic I saw first in Warcraft. If you visit a place on the map in that game, the fog at that location dissipates. Once you leave that place in the game, your vision as to what's there becomes limited, but the fact that the fog is gone marks that you had been there. Fog of World is the real life version of that. The game, if you want to call it that, will lure me into places that I haven't defogged, and this time, it was Algonquin Island, a highly residential area of Toronto Islands.
Ingress, which defies an one-line explanation, but in brief, you join one of either two teams, and the goal is to cover the most territory in fields. It had occurred to me recently that how one does that is actually faire daunting, but thanks to teamwork, much of the work (laying down resonators, making paths for links) is often done for you. Since it takes a little bit of effort to get to, the portals on Toronto Islands were unclaimed, so I "captured" quite a few by biking around, especially in the amusement park area. It being a non-holiday weekday, there wasn't anybody around to wonder what I was doing there. I haven't stopped playing Ingress completely. Until this trip, I had been holding steady at almost-but-not-quite Level 14. On this trip I crossed the threshold.
Foursquare's Swarm, where you get points (coins) by checking into nearby places. Since the start of the pandemic, Foursquare has discouraged people from venturing out by reducing the amount of coins (and thereby reducing your chances of climbing the leaderboard) one gets by checking in. I do it in part out of habit, but also to be able to easily retrace my steps if called upon to do so.
Untappd, which tracks beer consumption, and has a location component to it (where one drinks the beer, and, if applicable, where one bought it from). There's no leaderboard or points system, so it barely qualifies as a game.
While not a game, I ground-truthed two microconfluences. (What's a microconfluence?) It so happened that one was pretty much the exact location of a church. Did the people who build it know that at the time?

On my last trip to Toronto Islands, the last hour was marred by a flat tire, and I ate the hot dog I was so looking forward to at the ferry terminal, waiting an hour in blustery conditions. This time, I got a seat on the patio overlooking the lake, and enjoyed it a lot more.

I noticed I wasn't the only one who took a Bike Share Toronto bike on the ferry. While on the Islands, on three separate occasions, someone asked me where they could get one. Being from British Columbia, having grown up on Vancouver Island, I think of a larger body of land that's adjacent to an island as "The Mainland" (after B.C.'s Lower Mainland region). So I told them "the mainland" was where they could get it, hoping they knew what I meant. The bike rental shop (a separate entity from the Toronto Bike Share system) was closed that day, so I assumed that's why they were asking. I knew that if I didn't dock a bike every half an hour, it would cost me $4 per hafl and hour not docked. I looked at my credit card bill afterwards, and it cost me $45 in rental. I knew more or less what the cost would be, and happily ate it as a cost of the day trip, but I still wonder what the effect would be of having one or two docks on Toronto Islands. It would make it easy for a family or friends, or even me solo, to justify a trip there and not have to take a bike on a ferry each way. I made my feedback known to Bike Share Toronto, so I hope they consider that if we're still under pandemic restrictions and need a pleasant getaway from the city.

This trip elsewhere on social media:

Seven Months of Sheltering in Place - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.804Z

Since last time I checked in, I had a couple of days of vacation in the same week, meaning two 3-day weekends in a row. I spent one of those days on Toronto Islands again. I played several location-based games, and even ground-truthed a couple of microconfluences. The other day I kept open in case I was needed for helping with an online event the Icelandic Canadian Club held. It was a great success!

I've gotten the hang of wearing a mask, and most shops are open and tensions are a lot lower than they were up until about June. I didn't need to line up outside of a grocery store the few times I needed to go, not that I spent a lot of time waiting to get in. Winter is coming, and I hear people being worried about having to stay outside in the cold before getting provisions, but I don't anticipate that being a problem. I'm more comfortable with buying things again, though almost all online. I recently looked at my new year's intentions for 2020, and other than a big trip that I never got too deep into planning, I've more or less done everything I set out to do this year. That's been somewhat of a surprise.

In late September, I dined in a few times, once at Five Guys Burgers and Fries, another couple of times at the diner across the street from me. Up until then, I had dined exclusively at my apartment (either my own cooking or takeout), or the "balcony" outside the diner across the street. Other than those cases dining at the restaurant on Toronto Islands (both times outside), I did not dine at restaurants. Dining alone is bad enough to begin with. Dining alone and having my guard up was worse.

The gods smiled on me, and while I approached the bike rides along the Lakeshore Boulevard Activeway of September 26th and the 28th as the last of the year, the City of Toronto extended them into October. There are noticeably fewer people on the roads, but Ontario announced increased restrictions on gatherings, calling it Modified Stage 2. That meant no dining indoors at restaurants, and gyms closed. I don't go to gyms, but I know it's a part of a lot of people's lives. Extending ActiveTO was the right move, and I'm looking forward to hearing what's in store for the colder months so that I can stay active. I've lost count of how many times I've ridden along the Activeway, and update my long Twitter thread about it each time.

The course about me started a couple of weeks ago, and it's going well so far, having made my way through 4 workbooks already. I've registered for an American literature course in March, which optimistically states is an in-person course. I anticipate it being held online, even if a vaccine is available.

Throughout the pandemic, I've never felt days melting into others like some people have felt. It doesn't feel like an extension of March, and having a job there I work Monday to Friday, weekends felt like weekends. At work, I would grace Wednesdays with the "What a week, huh?" meme from 30 Rock, but I had to suspend the running joke because it had lost its pre-pandemic edge. I hope to return to days where I can drop the image macro in chat again.

Now Witness the Firepower of This Fully Armed and Operational Blog - Just a Gwai Lo

2024-11-30T23:36:35.794Z

With in-person events cancelled in the Greater Toronto Area for the duration of 2020, that opened up my schedule tremendously. I largely avoided online or virtual events, with a few exceptions, such as events that I helped organize through the Icelandic Canadian Club of Toronto, and a birthday party or two. I'm used to spending extended periods of time at home, so I took the opportunity to fix my blog. The one you're reading right now!

As it was for the last few years, this site was a broken upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. I made do with redirecting portions of it to the working Drupal 6 site using the Rabbit Hole module. Among other things, it can redirect based on a content type to a different site, and I did so to archive.justagwailo.com. Now, since this site is more or less repaired, the redirection happens the other way around. I'm keeping the archived site alive in case there's anything I've forgotten.

It turns out fixing my website is something I enjoyed doing, and there has been much to fix since archiving the Drupal 6 version of the site.

I restored the Delicious Bookmarks and Flickr photos section (minus some features around sets), and started a Toronto Architectural Tours section. I still use Flickr as the back-end for hosting photos, and have a few photos to syndicate over to the site still. Individual broken posts are for the most part fixed, and I watch the logs for any signs of errors. Broken links in the bookmark section are tagged as such when I come across them, and I'm excluding my posts from responsible search engines. I hope to automate the flagging of broken links, at least in the bookmarks section, so that I don't just do it as I come across them. The site's changelog is back, with updates regarding major restorations. There have been quite a bit of behind-the-scenes changes, tremendously speeding up the loading of the site.

The goal was to restore functionality and content to the Drupal 7 site so that I could more easily migrate to Drupal 8 (and more likely, 9). With that latest version of the CMS, I would be able to do things of an Indieweb nature, especially now that the ActivityPub module has an active release and is under sustained development, and send and receive webmentions and receive pingbacks (I'm not sure I will, though), and have content posted elsewhere (aka Mastodon and Twitter) originate here as much as possible though Micropub.

I still post to Flickr, though I haven't imported all of the missing photos into this site, and I've paused the automatic syndication of photos. Twitter is where I post thoughts most frequently. I'm updating my blog on more or less a monthly basis now, especially the "Sheltering In Place" posts during the COVID-19 pandemic. While on the blog those posts appear in reverse-chronological order, the Sheltering In Place section is chronological, an experiment in Twitter-like threads on a website. I have comments to posts stored in the database, but not set to display. I'll make those public again at some point in the near future. I don't anticipate ever enabling comments on my blog, at least not directly, again. I keep my Elsewhere page up-to-date.

The next step is to upgrade to Drupal 8 and add all of the aforementioned Indieweb technologies. With a vaccine on the horizon, though still somewhat distant, I'm hopeful that will be my next big project during the pandemic.