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I like to go on easy, well-manicured hikes. My general rule of thumb when people ask if I want to go on a hike with them is I'm happy to for up to about three miles and a few hundred feet of elevation gain. I wish that I had the motivation to go on more of them and get better at longer ones. Too often, I find myself focusing on my own breathing, my nose running, my muscles aching, where I'm placing my feet, or how much I wish this type-2 fun was more type-1. But when I was hiking in Aotearoa New Zealand, I found it wasn't quite as bad as other hikes I've been on, and part of that was finding a new thing to preoccupy my senses: listening to birds.

Along the Northern Edge of the South Island is the Abel Tasman National Park, named after Abel Tasman, the Dutch explorer credited with mapping out Aotearoa from his ship. There are a handful of hikes by the coast, and we selected one of the easier ones: a "seal view and beach walk" that we assumed would be a walk along a beach, perhaps in view of some…

As someone who went to Aotearoa New Zealand for the first time, and as someone who grew up with the books and movies, I had to visit Hobbiton.

Or, rather, I should say I had to visit The Hobbiton™ Movie Set. When J.R.R. Tolkein died, his intellectual property (the books he wrote, the characters he created, and the settings therein -- including Hobbiton) were all overseen by the Tolkein Estate. We were surprised that none of the tour guides were wearing any styled cosplays or in-fiction costumes of any kind -- just matching, red-and-white checkered button-downs to help them stand out from the crowd. If this place was being called Hobbiton, if there was a Hobbiton sign, and if everyone was coming here because of having seen the movies, then why not dress up to sell the experience the way another theme park might?

On the Hobbiton Movie Set's website, there's a disclaimer at the bottom reading:

SHIRE TOURS, SHIRE’S REST, MIDDLE-EARTH, GREEN DRAGON, HOBBITON, THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS and the characters, places, items and events therein, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Middle-earth Enterprises, LLC and used under license by Rings Scenic Tours Limited…

I keep saying "New Zealand has a lot of unique birds" but to really understand why, we have to go back prior to any humans living there. Sure, birds like the Eurasian Blackbird and the House Sparrow were eventually introduced, but there are plenty more species that are native to the area.

This post, I'm going to start with the bird photo instead of ending with it. Here's a Pūkeko | Australasian Swamphen (endemic to New Zealand and parts of Australia) with two of its chicks that we saw walking around in a public park in Rotorua:

I'm no expert on this history, but from what I've read and heard from tour guides, the real history of Aotearoa started back when the Zealandian continent and the Australian continent both broke off from Gondwana some 80 million years ago and then subsequently began breaking apart from each other, finishing around 50 million years ago.

During that time, the K-T major extinction event wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs. Elsewhere in the world, some mammals were able to survive the event, but the story goes that bats were the only surviving land-based mammal of Zealandia.^[1] All other mammals found today on the…

I arrived in Auckland at 6am local time and was determined to not sleep the first day of my trip away. After checking out the waterfront and the Sky Tower, it began to drizzle, which timed pretty nicely with our plan to visit the Auckland Art Gallery (AAG), a moderately large, public, free art gallery that's open every day in the heart of the city. The closest I've come to this level of convenience in going to museums was when I lived in NYC and could go to the Met for free.^[1]

From my experience with art museums, especially on the East coast of the US, I was expecting to see art from old Europeans chronicling the first times Europeans had interacted with the land or with the people who were already there. I planned on rolling my eyes at language around "tradition" and nationalism, the same way I would about portraits of the founding fathers in the US.

I remember visiting the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle in mid 2018 and finding an exhibit full of Native American art from local tribes that was tucked away in the basement where it seemed like the…

I just recently returned from an 18-day vacation to New Zealand (Māori: Aotearoa). The goal was to celebrate being with my partner for over ten years and also try our best to learn and experience as much of the country as we could in that time. Our trip began in Auckland, and largely consisted of driving to new places, adventuring in and around them, and then driving or otherwise traveling to the next one.

To help make the scope of NZ easier to grasp for a USAmerican, I also looked up the population size, rough geographical area, and latitudes for the Northernmost (Auckland) and the Southernmost (Dunedin) cities we visited. I'm using latitude because that helps define a feel for the length of days and nights, seasons, etc:

1. New Zealand is roughly the population of Colorado^[1]
2. Its area geographically is very similar in size to Colorado^[2]
3. Auckland is located at 36.8509°S, which is about as far from the equator as the southern edge of Colorado^[3]
4. Dunedin is located at 45.8795°S, which is about as far from the equator as Portland, OR^[4]

Throughout the trip's downtime, I often read the Timeline of New Zealand History for a…

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Phinks, member number 5 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: [...] Next to them is a fellow in a racing [unintelligible] outfit.

Sylvi: [laughs]

Jack: Green racing driver's outfit, uh, uh, white shoulders on his jacket, red stripes, green sort of track jacket, almost. Now, next to this person, this is interesting. This is a character I have seen before. I, I don't know anything about —

Jack: We have Phinks! With a P-H. P-H-I-N-K-S.

Keith: Yep. [Sylvia laughs]

Jack: Who is a grumpy racing driver. He’s a man in a sort of racing driver.

Sylvia: Oh, okay. That’s an interesting— I didn't get racing driver from him. I always got, uh, Chris Moltisanti.

Keith: But I get it from the jacket though. Sorry, you get who?

Dre: Yeah, I totally get it.

Sylvia: Chris Moltisanti from The Sopranos?

Keith: Oh, it is.

Jack: Oh, yeah. [Dre laughs]

Sylvia: The, like, tracksuit vibe?

Jack: Yeah, totally. It’s absolutely that tracksuit vibe. I also saw it as, like, a racing jacket or, like, racing colors.

Keith: Yeah. Yeah.

Sylvia: Yeah, no, absolutely.…

I like reading about what other folks find interesting, but I often forget to write down what I myself have found. I've been meaning to talk about this first link ever since I came across it, but I kept forgetting to make time until now. I figure a new month is a good a time as any to make a link-retrospective post.

Video Games

This video is not only impressive on a technical level for being able to accomplish what it set out to do, but the animations and ways that the information is conveyed is on par with a pannenkoek video in terms of making complex ideas become understable.

• Beating every possible game of Pokemon Platinum at the same time

Movies

I had never heard of this and it became the first RSS feed post that I've bookmarked since making the transition over from cohost to inoreader as my means of internet browsing.

• Laura linked to a well-creafted treasure trove of (especially Lucasfilm) behind-the-scenes info

Fashion

I had meant to share this CJ video because I think it does an incredible job of explaining fashion through the lens of "conversation with community identity," and I was reminded that I…

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out for the Xbox 360 on March 20, 2006 -- almost two decades ago. It launched during an era when there weren't really game wikis to google, which meant that most of the bugs and strange discoveries in the game for me came from word of mouth in my social circle.

Beyond the more widely-known "horse-armor" DLC launched in April of 2006, there was a number of other DLC items. The only relevant one to this story was the Frostcrag Spire quest for the "Wizard's Tower". I did not buy it, but my friend did and we would regularly hang out. We found that if my friend logged in while he was at my house, then I was able to download and play the DLC on my console. However, either because of limitation in the storage of our hard-drives or because you could only associate your Xbox Live account with so many Xbox 360s at once, we got into this mess where I kept having to re-download the DLC every time he visited if I wanted to play it.

This went on for a few weeks until one of us accidentally tried to load…

I was walking down the street to get some takeout tonight, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a huge stuffed animal sitting in the front window of a toystore.

And it reminded me of an old friend.

Until I looked again more closely.

While cohost's users were mourning the loss of the website online, Natalie (and Liz and Zandra) organized a Seattle Cohost Wake that happened last week. Additional wakes popped up in Boston, Philly, and a few other cities. Today, I attended the San Francisco Bay Area Wake, cohost-(heh)-ed by Damien, Nicky Flowers, and Diane in Oakland.

We met, N95+ masks on, by Lake Merritt under the shade of a giant tree and sat in fold up chairs, on blankets, and generally about the grass. I brought my fish picnic blanket and an id I had printed out at the library the night before because I was worried people wouldn't know who I was without the swirly profile picture.

There were a solid 40 people at least, though I didn't get an exact count and it varied over the hours. It was nice to get to see people, but my biggest takeaway was just how tall everybody was. I don't know why but I had imagined everyone on cohost being just barely taller than Jae, when in actuality, many people there today were several inches taller than that.

It was nice to hear people suggest turning this into a…