No, I still don’t want to work for Google.

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You think those Google recruiters would know not to contact me, but the other day I got another perky “Opportunities at Google” email from one of them, telling me that they’d found my “online profile” and that based on my experience they think I “could be a great addition to our team!”

Riiiiight.

Since I just deleted my LinkedIn profile, I emailed them asking where they’d found this “online profile”, since it was obviously outdated. Oddly enough, it seems they’d found a page about me on the Geek Feminism Wiki, and were using the rather sketchy outline of my open source background there as justification for trying to recruit me.

The recruiter admitted that the page was out of date, and asked me to let them know what I’d been up to lately so they could add it to their records. Below is a copy of what I sent them. I’m posting it here, lightly edited, for anyone who’s interested, and in the hopes that the next Google recruiter (I have no doubt that there’ll be one) might use that web search thingamajig to find out whether I’m a suitable candidate before emailing me.

Here’s what I’ve been up to for the last couple of years, since you asked.

In July 2010 the startup I was working for, Metaweb, was acquired by Google. I was brought in on a 1-year fixed term employment contract, since the group we were acquired into (Search) didn’t really know what to do with a technical community manager. I attempted to transfer my role over to Developer Relations, but was told that I “wasn’t technical enough” for the job I’d been doing for 3+ years, presumably because I didn’t have a computer science degree and believed that supporting our developer community was more important than being able to pass arbitrary technical quizzes.

Around the same time, Google started to develop Google+. As a queer/genderqueer woman, victim of abuse, and someone who was (at that very time) experiencing online harassment and bullying, I was very vocal within Google for the need for Google+ to support pseudonymity. Google decided not to do that, and instead told people they should use “the name they are known by” while in actual fact requiring their full legal names, in many cases requiring people to provide copies of their government ID when challenged. (Extensive documentation about this is available on the Geek Feminism wiki, if you’d like to read it. See Who is harmed by a “Real Names” policy? for starters.)

When I walked out the door of Google’s San Francisco office on July 15th, 2011, I was very glad to have left a company I thought was doing evil towards any number of marginalised and at-risk people. My first tweet on leaving was to criticise them for it.

Less than a week later I got my first email from a Google recruiter — not first ever, of course; I’d been spammed with them for years, but first since I quit working for them. Here’s the blog post I wrote about it. In case you can’t be bothered clicking through and reading it, here’s the money shot:

If you are a Google recruiter, and you want me to interview for SWE or SRE or any role that has an algorithm pop quiz as part of the interview, if you want me to apply for something without knowing what team I’ll be working on and whether it meshes with my values and goals and interests, if you want me to go through your quite frankly humiliating interview process just to be told that my skills and qualifications — which you could have found perfectly easily if you’d bothered to actually look before spamming me — aren’t suitable for any of the roles you have available, then just DON’T.

The very day after I blogged about that, my Google+ account was suspended, for using the name I was almost universally known by. Over the next couple of months, I campaigned tirelessly for Google+ to change its policies, working with the EFF and other advocates. My work was covered in Wired, The Atlantic, and a number of other mainstream press outlets. Obviously this was to no avail as Eric Schmidt (at the time, CEO of Google) described pseudonymous users like me as “a dog or a fake person” and no substantive change has ever been made to allow pseudonymous use of the service, despite promises to do so.

I returned to Australia and went back to school. I did a semester of Sound Production at TAFE, but it turned out that the sound engineering course I was enrolled in wasn’t really my cup of tea, just like I’d previously decided, back in the ’90s, that university wasn’t for me. Like so many others, I quit my computing degree because I was more interested in the Internet and open source software than in fixing COBOL applications for banks who were worried about Y2K. But then, I’m sure Google’s HR system already knows all about that — if I’d had a degree, you might have considered me worth keeping on last year. Instead, Google’s reliance on higher education credentials causes it to weed out people like me, even though I have a track record a mile long and buckets of evidence to show that I’m good at what I do.

In the end, I’ve spent most of the last year lying in hammocks reading books, working in my garden, going to gigs, hanging around recording studios, doing the odd bit of freelancing, and, over the last few months, travelling around Europe. It’s given me a good opportunity to reflect on my previous work.

Since I’ve been out of the Silicon-Valley-centred tech industry, I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s morally bankrupt and essentially toxic to our society. Companies like Google and Facebook — in common with most public companies — have interests that are frequently in conflict with the wellbeing of — I was going to say their customers or their users, but I’ll say “people” in general, since it’s wider than that. People who use their systems directly, people who don’t — we’re all affected by it, and although some of the outcomes are positive a disturbingly high number of them are negative: the erosion of privacy, of consumer rights, of the public domain and fair use, of meaningful connections between people and a sense of true community, of beauty and care taken in craftsmanship, of our very physical wellbeing. No amount of employee benefits or underfunded Google.org projects can counteract that.

Over time, I’ve come to consider that this situation is irremediable, given our current capitalist system and all its inequalities. To fix it, we’re going to need to work on social justice and rethinking how we live and work and relate to each other. Geek toys like self-driving cars and augmented reality sunglasses won’t fix it. Social networks designed to identify you to corporations so they can sell you more stuff won’t fix it. Better ad targetting or content matching algorithms definitely won’t fix it. Nothing Google is doing will fix it, and in fact unless Google does a sharp about-turn, they’ll only worsen the inequality and injustice there is in the world.

I guess you’ll want to know what I’m working on at the moment. My current project is an open source, open data project called Growstuff, which helps food gardeners track and share information about what they’re growing and harvesting. It is built on principles of sustainability, including a commitment to a diverse and harassment-free community, to actively supporting developers rather than excluding them based on misguided ideas of meritocracy, and to funding the project through means that will never put the people running the website in opposition to our customers. That means no ads, in case you’re wondering. We’d rather our members paid us directly; that way, we’ll never forget who we’re meant to be serving. I’m working on Growstuff from home, where I can be myself and feel safe and comfortable. I work with volunteers from all round the world, and get to teach programming and web development and system administration and project management and sustainability to all kinds of people, especially those who’ve previously been excluded from or marginalised in their technical education or careers. We get to work on things we know are wanted and appreciated, and we don’t have to screw anyone around to do it.

Let me know when Google has changed enough to offer me something more appealing than that. If you don’t think that’s likely to happen, then please put me on whatever “Do Not Contact” blacklist you might have handy. I know you must have some such list; I only wish you regularly referred to it instead of spamming people who not only don’t want to work for you, but have nightmares about it.

Home!

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Well, I’m home. Have been for a few days, actually, but in between jetlag, flaky internet, and nesting, I haven’t gotten around to posting.

The flight home was ghastly and let’s never talk about it, okay? I am still processing my thoughts on the trip overall but I guess the quick version is: 2.5 months is a long time to be city-hopping, it was more expensive than I expected, it was great to meet people everywhere (hi! thanks!), and I really want to spend more time in Andalusia and in the north-east of England.

Now I’m home I’m sorting out money (yay Centrelink) and work (some balance of Growstuff and more audio stuff), settling into our rearranged home (we have a new housemate, and a significant turnover and reshuffling of furniture as a result), and trying to restart my social life. Incidentally, if you’re interested in my domestic blog it’s over here and likely to have lots of food/gardening/crafts in the near future. NESTING. SPRING CLEANING. MORE NESTING.

I’m becoming increasingly disenchanted with social networking websites and probably going to delete my Facebook account. Yes, again. Especially after they outed queer students to their parents and then blamed the students for not understanding Facebook’s “robust privacy controls” — despite the students having locked down their accounts, and Facebook ignoring those settings.

With the way Twitter is going these days, I may drop that too. Or at least stop using it as a primary interface to the world. I keep coming back to the fact that if I’m going to create stuff, I don’t want some corporate jerkwads shoving ads all over it, potentially ads for things that are anathema to me. See, for example, that time when LiveJournal put anti-equality ads all over someone’s post celebrating a same-sex marriage, or the “Meet Hot Gamer Chicks” ads we used to get on the Geek Feminism wiki. I’ll gladly pay money to support a service, but I won’t stick around for that sort of misuse of my words.

So, if you want to be sure to keep following me even if I drop off those places, you might want to subscribe to my blog (by RSS, or you can get email updates if you prefer — there’s a subscription form on the bottom of every page on my site.); or subscribe to my journal on Dreamwidth (mostly an aggregate of this blog and my domesticity blog, with a few other things from time to time); or on whatever the next not-completely-asshatty social network gets enough people to be worth the trouble.

Why yes, I’ll gladly run your infographic…

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Via David Gerard, who links to Tom Morris’s Infographics are porn without the happy ending:

If you wanted to catalogue the shit-eating complacency and pretentiousness of Web 2.0, infographics would be right up there with the damn TED conference and people who put “rockstar” on their business card.

Did someone really sit down one day and think “you know, unless we have the market share of the iPad illustrated as a pie chart shaped as an apple, people will think this statistic is too dry”? The story of the iPad is an interesting one: much, much more interesting than can be displayed in three factoids hastily put together in a crappy infographic. You don’t need an infographic to tell the story of a computer that is the size and form of a magazine. You need a writer.

Everyone keeps telling me that infographics are fine, and that I’m just getting stuck in Sturgeon’s Law. I keep hearing infographics designers turn up at design events talking about the awesomeness of infographics. But in my day to day life, I can’t remember ever seeing a good infographic. That is, I can’t remember ever seeing an infographic that made it worth the page taking even half a second longer to load.

I get these requests to run infographics on my blog all the time. Today I actually replied to one, asking me if I’d like to post something about the rise of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) fields. Interesting! Especially since a number of studies show that fewer women are pursuing STEM careers and that there is a growing gender gap in computing.

So, I replied saying that I’d take a look at the infographic and consider running it on the following terms:

  1. The information is based on respected, preferably peer reviewed, studies, and provides citations.
  2. The graphical display of the information provides insight that would not have been available through text.
  3. A textual summary of the infographic is also provided, to improve accessibility for readers who have trouble interpreting a graphic.
  4. The graphic is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA) license.

I don’t expect a reply, but I’ll let you know if I get one. Now I just need to come up with similar terms for the dozens of people who keep asking to guest-post on my blog. I suspect the top condition would be, “I get to mock you and your post.” Especially that one that emailed me the other day, saying: “When searching Google for Open Source Development, we found a post on infotrope.net.” O RLY?

Despise Alan Jones for his vile comments, not for having sex with men

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In case you missed it (and if you’re not in Australia, you probably did), right-wing radio personality Alan Jones gave a speech to the Sydney University Liberal (i.e. conservative — yeah, I know) Club in which he said that Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s father, who recently passed away, had “died of shame” because of his daughter. This is part of a string of really nasty, misogynistic slurs against the PM, from Jones and other right-leaning journalists, commentators, and even MPs.

Anyway, there are a number of petitions going around in protest of this. One petition I found today (ironically, via a gay friend who tweeted in support of it) contains the following text:

Sign to remove the order of Australia from Alan Jones of 2GB radio . Alan Jones was arrested in 1988 in London on two accounts for indecent acts in a public toilet . Later he was directly involved in the Cronulla riots calling bikies to be involved . Now Alan Jones on air called for our prime minister to be drowned at sea in a chaff bag and that her father died due to her actions . Sign this and share this petition to stop this injustice .

(emphasis mine)

Now don’t get me wrong. Alan Jones is a vile worm of a man, and his comments against Ms. Gillard (and on a range of other topics) are completely unsupportable. I would love to see him stripped of his OA, and for all his radio station’s sponsors to pull their support. But let’s not make this about who he has sex with. As Sarah (@Stokely) says, it’s homophobic and irrelevant.

Before anyone says it’s about breaking the law, not about homosexuality: note that he was cleared of all charges (see citations in this Wikipedia article). And if you’re so concerned about the law, why not mention the other things he’s been accused of, and in many cases been found guilty and fined by the courts: plagiarism, defamation (many times), corruption, contempt of court (multiple times, including for broadcasting the name of a juvenile involved in court proceedings), racial vilification (many times), multiple breaches of the commercial radio code of conduct, and of course involvement in the cash for comment affair.

Someone on Twitter mentioned that the problem was the “indecency”, nothing to do with the gender of the people involved. You should be aware that the charge in question would have been made under the Sexual Offences Act 1956, which predates the 1967 legalisation of homosexuality in the UK. The act says:

Indecency between men. It is an offence for a man to commit an act of gross indecency with another man, whether in public or private, or to be a party to the commission by a man of an act of gross indecency with another man, or to procure the commission by a man of an act of gross indecency with another man.

The term “indecency”, in British law in 1988, only referred to male/male activity. The law against “indecency” was repealed in the Sexual Offences Act 2003, and replaced with Sexual activity in a public lavatory, which applies to all genders equally.

Fresh links for October 1st

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  • OStatus: like Twitter, but open – Ooh. I'm actually quite excited about this. The HN thread has some good points about WordPress integration as well. If OStatus can get itself hooked in closely to the WordPress ecosystem, it could actually have enough people using it — non-geek people, that is — to be worthwhile.
  • Proofreading font – Did you know there is a special font for proofreading OCR'd texts? This one was developed by Project Gutenberg. "It's designed to constantly throw you OUT of the story and get you to focus on the letters and punctuation. It's glorious. And ugly. Wow, I didn't know it was possible to make a font that ugly and still readable."
  • The day I confronted my troll – An engaging story with a twist at the end. There's something about it that rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps it's the delight with which people have been latching on to a story that portrays trolls as harmless individual actors. Few such stories are solved as neatly as this.
  • To Encourage Biking, Cities Forget About Helmets – What makes cycling safe? Tons of cyclists on the road. Helmet laws make cycling seem difficult and scary, discouraging ordinary riders and paradoxically making cycling less safe. Take note, Melbourne!

On the home stretch

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It’s almost a month to the day since I posted my last travel update. Since then I’ve been to Paris, then to Calais and across the channel to Dover, along the south coast to Brighton and Portsmouth, up to London, stayed a week and a half, then north to York, brief visits to Durham and Newcastle, a few days in Edinburgh, then over to Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, and five days in Cornwall.

Tonight I was meant to have taken the ferry from Plymouth to Roscoff in Bretagne, then spent a week meandering back through France and across the Pyrenees to Spain and fly home from Madrid. Problem: ferry strikes mean that my ferry’s not going anywhere. Rather than try and arrange my travel to figure that out, I decided I was a bit over high-energy travel and not all that enthused about figuring out a new route through France and Spain on short notice. So here I am back in London, staying at a friend’s place again, for a week til I hop on an EasyJet flight to Madrid and then home.

I suspect I’ll be taking it pretty easy in London, mostly just kicking around and working on Growstuff. I do want to make it to the one museum that was closed during the Olympics/Paralympics when I was last here, but that’s about it. Okay, and maybe another visit to the V&A. Um. Well, let’s just say that I don’t have any particular plans, and don’t intend to work too hard at it.

That said, if anyone wants to catch up for drinks/meals/pair programming this week, let me know.

You keep using this word.

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I know I have a lot of historian and/or textile-inclined friends, so I was wondering if anyone has ever heard the word “stitch” used to mean “stitched textile goods”, in contexts like, “The importance of stitch during World War II…”?

I ask because it keeps being used that way in the book I’m reading: “Stitching for Victory” by Suzanne Griffith. I thought I read a fair bit of textile history and I’ve never encountered this usage before. Is it just this author’s idiosyncracy, or am I missing something?

(This post brought to you by a half-assed resolution to blog things that are too long for Twitter, rather than spreading them across two or three tweets.)

Room available in feminist, fannish, foodie house in Thornbury

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My housemate Emily and I are looking for a new housemate around the time I get back from my travels. It’s for a smallish room in a largish house in Thornbury, in Melbourne’s inner north. Would suit a feminist fan who’s also a foodie, or something along those lines. It’s $152/week or $658 a month, and available from October 10th.

Click through for the full description/room ad and more details than you could poke a stick at. Please feel free to share this with anyone you know who might be interested.

Continue reading →

Growing stuff (vegies, open source projects, communities…)

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The other week I posted from GUADEC, saying I’d been inspired to start an open source project to build a gardening website.

If I posted, “I planted tomatoes in my garden in Melbourne on the 1st of November” and everyone else did likewise, we’d wind up with an extensive database of food plants, including things like heirloom varieties and where to source them from. We could also build a histogram of the distributions of planting times for every location. Eventually, we could build in tools for sharing your harvest with your local community, saying eg. “I have a tree full of lemons, does anyone want them?” or facilitating seed-sharing and other community gardening activities.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this over the next day or so, and I realised it’s something I really want. Really really want. I want a resource that’s like Ravelry, but with a focus on food gardening, especially the sustainable/organic/heirloom end of that scene. My perfect site would have a strong community committed to sustainability both in the green sense and in the sense of a successful online community. I’m also thinking of Dreamwidth as inspiration, especially with regard to its ethics and the way its developer community works. I’d definitely want this whole thing to be open source and community-built.

This project is now up and running, and has been active for about a month, so I thought it was about time to post an update.

What we have so far:

  • Github — this is where our source code lives, along with most of our project management. Take a look at our dev branch for active development, also our wiki (note: moving to self-hosted soon) and issue tracker, especially this iteration’s stories (see notes below on development process).
  • Mailing list — most of our interaction happens here, strongly recommended to join if you want to take part in the development of the site. We need technical and non-technical people, coders and gardeners. If you’re interested in having input into what Growstuff will be, you should probably be on this.
  • Dreamwidth community/project blog — Dreamwidth and its inclusive development community are inspirations for Growstuff, and many of our contributors already have accounts there. The Dreamwidth community operates, to some extent, as the project’s blog, and has an RSS feed you can follow if you don’t already use Dreamwidth. It’s low-traffic and often gets highlights and important points crossposted from the mailing list. Note that if you don’t have a DW account you can still comment anonymously or using OpenID.
  • IRC channel – realtime chat room for anyone interested in the project. If you are already familiar with IRC, it’s #growstuff on irc.freenode.net, otherwise see the linked page for more information on connecting.
  • Twitter — if you want to follow us for occasional updates on that platform.
  • Server hosting with a provider that uses 100% renewable energy — geothermal, actually, as they’re based in Iceland. This is part of our commitment to sustainability.
  • Placeholder website on growstuff.org — there’s nothing much there, but I link this so that if you want to tell people about it, it’s somewhere to send them.
  • License (AGPL3+) — Growstuff is free, open source software. Our license choice allows anyone to use or build on our work, but they must use the same license for what they do. Our data about crops, once we have the site up and running, will be under the roughly equivalent CC-BY-SA.
  • Community guidelines — we wanted to get this in place from the start so everyone would know the groundrules. These apply to all project-related forums.

Most importantly, we already have a team of people who are working on building this thing. I wanted to talk briefly about our development process, because I think it’s unusual. We’re using an agile development methodology called Extreme Programming. XP consists of a collection of practices including:

  • sustainable pace
  • constant involvement of the customer (in our case, gardeners)
  • simple design focused on present needs
  • pair programming
  • test-driven development
  • continuous integration
  • short release cycles

XP isn’t often used by remote teams or by open source projects, but we’re taking a shot at it because it’s such a good fit with our community’s goals. It’s been a bit rocky trying to get things going at first, but we are currently in our second iteration, and as I am travelling around Europe (currently in London) I’ve had the opportunity to meet and pair-program with a few of our developers on different tasks. It’s amazing how much more productive, and more fun, it’s been to work on stuff with other people, especially as we’re learning the development stack. This is my first “real” Rails project, though I’ve played with it before. If it weren’t for pair programming, I would have been spending a lot of time pounding my head on my keyboard in frustration as I tried to figure out how everything fits together. For other contributors, it’s their first open source project, or first time sysadmining, or first time writing unit tests, but since we have people who know all these things, we can use pair programming to help spread that knowledge around. For those who can’t pair face to face, we make sure that the two people assigned to each story can work together online, co-ordinating via email and/or using tools like tmux and voice chat to share their work.

Right now, we’d love to more people to join us. If you have Rails experience (and experience with all the related technologies, like RSpec and Capistrano and so on) that would be great, but we’ll also welcome inexperienced developers who are keen and want to learn, or non-developers who’d like to be involved by sharing their gardening knowledge and helping us understand what you’d want from a site like this.

If you’d like to help us build Growstuff.org, please join our mailing list.

Democrats’ voter reg app is not open source.

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Via Chris Blow (@unthinkingly) and his tweet on the subject, I found out that the US Democrat party has released a voter registration app via github. Wired’s all over it, calling it — as the app’s README does — an open source app. Only it’s not.

The LICENSE file contains the following text:

This permission does not include: (a) any use of the Software other than for its intended purpose

Its intended purpose is to enable voter registration. As commenters on Hacker News have pointed out, this means that although the app is a pretty good framework for a PDF-generating web app, you can’t use it as the basis for your own app for any other purpose. Not for generating dog-license applications, say, or for generating voter reg applications in another country. This means it’s not open source nor free software. The Free Software Foundation’s description of software freedom says:

A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

(And another three, of course, but the freedom to run the software for any purpose is the most fundamental.)

The Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Definition says:

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

The Democrats’ code is restricted from use in any field of endeavour other than registering voters in the United States of America. The app is not open source. As further demonstration of this, their license does not appear anywhere on the OSI’s list of open source licenses.

The Democrats need to amend either their license or their README. Or, of course, we could simply fork the repo, fix it, and issue a pull request. Wired, meanwhile, really ought to issue a correction to their article, and stop spreading this misinformation.

Travel update

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I’m halfway through my 10-week-long trip and I haven’t updated in a month. The only excuse I can offer is that I wanted to include pictures, but my relationship with Flickr has turned out to be strangely complicated lately, and the whole process of uploading them (often via dodgy hotel wifi) has just seemed too hard.

Actually, I’m noticing something new in my picture-taking this trip. Just as, a few years ago, I purged any book from my shelves that was effectively obsoleted by Wikipedia or Project Gutenberg, now I am avoiding taking pictures that would be available by a Creative Commons image search. What’s the point of taking a photo of Notre Dame when so many other people have done so already, and undoubtedly better than I could? Sure, a photo of me standing in front of Notre Dame would actually have some individuality, but I’m not that big a fan of photos of myself in random locations, so I haven’t been doing that. Instead I’ve been carrying around a somewhat clunky, heavy camera (not a DSLR or anything, but an Olympus PEN camera) and using it to take pictures of odd, quirky things here and there, which I might as well just use my iPhone for. Ah well.

So, places I have been since my last update, and what I thought of them.

The week in A Coruña for the conference was a mixture of hanging out at the conference venue, sleeping in the university residence where we were staying because I had come down with a fairly nasty cold, and a bit of wandering around the city. I saw the ancient Roman lighthouse, but didn’t go inside; I spent more time wandering around the old part of town looking for food than I really wanted to; and I found a pretty good craft/artisan market near the bus stop where I had a awkward (due to language incompatibility) but pleasant conversation with a handweaver and bought a linen and alpaca shawl she’d woven.

On the second-last day, I daytripped to Santiago de Compostela, just 40 minutes away by train. Touristy, but I felt okay about it, somehow, knowing that it was a thousand-year-old pilgrim site and that many of the tourists had walked a long way to be there.

After the conference I took a night train to Madrid (cramped, overheated) and whatever the Spanish equivalent of a TGV is to Cordoba, in the southern part of Spain that had been Islamic during the middle ages. I loved Cordoba, its narrow streets and white-and-ochre houses with their courtyards and fountains. The cathedral-inside-a-mosque (or “mosquedral”, as I like to call it) was mindblowing. The city was hot and quiet and empty, as all the locals had gone on holiday, but I spent a few pleasant days wandering around and sitting in parks and eating tapas and drinking cheap wine. I’d love to go back to Andalusia and spend more time exploring its other cities and its architecture and its food.

On to Barcelona, which I hated. Crowded and unpleasant and I spent the whole time worried about people trying to steal my bag. To be fair, the Gothic quarter is pretty cool, and the Barcelona History Museum is amazing, especially the parts of the Roman town that they’ve dug up and you can walk around in the basement. The bits that fascinated me most were the dyeworks with the stone troughs still stained blue, and the place where they made garum (fermented fish sauce) in enormous round pots. I’m not much into Gaudi, so though I went past some of his works (the Sagrada Familia, etc) I didn’t get off the tourist bus to actually go in. I did try to go to Parc Guell, on the recommendation of many friends, but I’d somehow got the impression that it was a park, with, you know, green space. Actually it was a pile more building-sized Gaudi blobs, crammed full of tourists, and it made me angry. I got straight back on the tourist bus, and two stops later found myself at a 13th century convent (Pedralbes) which was operating as a museum, free on Sundays, and had a beautiful courtyard with fountains and grass and trees and no more than a handful of tourists, none drunk. I spent half a day there.

I’d heard that the food in Barcelona was amazing, and it was the best I’d had so far on the trip, but I don’t think it was enough to make it worth the unpleasantness of my visit. I suspect I would have enjoyed it more if I had been with friends and we’d been able to sit around and drink and eat and enjoy the nightlife. As it was, I found some delicious tapas that actually contained vegetables, which after a couple of weeks of subsisting on not much else than ham, and not seeing anything greener than an olive, was lovely. I had a wonderful dish of spinach, chickpeas, and some kind of pork that pretty much made my week. At a pinxtos place in El Gotic, I had a tartlet with some kind of sweet fruit paste, goat cheese, and fresh mint, and another where a sort of fish salad was topped with fresh dill and tiny slivers of candied lemon peel. They were delicious. And yet, I have lots of delicious food at home. Coming from Melbourne, it takes a lot to blow my mind, and Barcelona didn’t manage it. Sorry.

On to Avignon, which I was using as a stopover and to have a quick minibus tour of Provence because, well, if I’m going to pass through I may as well take the time to look around. It was, as expected, very scenic. I visited a lavender farm where I saw sweat-sheened young men exerting themselves heaving bales of lavender into a still to make lavender oil (they were well aware of their decorativeness, and posed for photos; there was also a tip jar for them by the exit), any number of medieval villages full of gift shops, where I wondered how or indeed whether anyone actually lived there full-time; and the Pont du Gard, an ancient Roman aqueduct, which was pretty awesome — you actually walk across it, or rather across a modern footbridge set up right next to it, close enough to touch. For the most part, though, Provence rubbed me the wrong way. I think I associate it too much with the sort of people who use it as a style of home decoration, and the result was that it all felt terribly twee to me. It didn’t help that the place was packed full of gift shops that seemed dead set on promoting that sort of thing: “Provençal” table linens made in China, and whatnot. Ugh.

Then the TGV to Lyon, and then a local train from there to meet Anatsuno who lives in an adorable little village, in a house that’s about 500 years old and is right on the village square, next to the bakery. We spent a lot of time sitting around, knitting, and eating cheese. By this point I really needed a few days of downtime, and especially of not walking on cobblestones in barefoot shoes, as bits of me were pretty achey. One day, though, we went to visit the Romanesque church at Anzy-le-Duc, which was gorgeous, and filled with amazing medieval frescos. My last night there, we went into Lyon and stayed over at another friend’s house, where there was a cluster of fangirls and pizza and watching Vividcon vids and then, in the morning, a visit to La Droguerie (the famous French button mecca) before the train.

My next stop was Strasbourg, or rather Mutzig, a little town just outside Strasbourg. I stayed with some people from AirBNB, who turned out to be an ex-sysadmin-perl-guy-turned-professional-origamist, and his wife who’s a guild-trained painter who does things like restore Medieval churches. They were completely delightful, as was their village. On my first full day I went back into Strasbourg, which was an interesting architectural and cultural change from the more southern areas I’d previously been in: definitely more German, with lots of steep-roofted half-timbered houses and sausages and the like. On the second day, my hosts offered to take me for a drive up into the hills to sample some of the local food and wine, which was utterly delicious. I had some kind of pork thing in a creamy sauce with mushrooms, and spaetzle, and the local pinot noir, Rouge d’Ottrott, which is unusual because Alsace mostly goes for white wines. Anyway. Strasbourg and environs: surprisingly awesome!

After that I went to Paris, but I’ll save that for a subsequent blog post. I’m glad to have caught up this far, at least.

Fresh links for July 27th through August 31st

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