note to self

Having established that my own Photo Friday page is a 404, I went looking for it in the Internet Archive, and rather a lot of it’s still there. So I have spent an evening pulling it back.

What the archive had

The site was a separate little Movable Type install at 8letters.co.uk/photofriday, with the byline “world”, which I assume was me not understanding the concept of an author field. The first entry, on the 16th of January 2003, reads in full: “New Blog. Coming soon. Not sure when but soon.” I admire the confidence.

Then eight actual entries survive, one a week, each one the challenge word and a photograph:

• 4 April: spring
• 11 April: skin
• 18 April: water
• 9 May: urban
• 16 May: candy
• 23 May: overlooked
• 30 May: transportation
• 6 June: packaging

The March archive page was never crawled, so there may be more. Those are the ones I can prove.

What survived, and the annoying pattern of it

Of eight photographs, three are still in the archive: candy, transportation and packaging. The other five were never captured, so spring, skin, urban, overlooked and water are gone as images.

Here is the irritating part. The three surviving photographs had no accompanying text at all, just the word. The five lost ones are precisely the entries where I wrote something. So what I have is a set of pictures with nothing to say about them, and a set of sentences with nothing to look at.

April, for instance, is entirely text now. On skin I wrote that I love coloured skin, that tattoos are cool and that I couldn’t bring myself to get one. On water: “Okay I had two for today one of me in the shower this morning and then this one. I thought I’d spare you me in the shower ;)”. Both photographs are gone. The offer, I should stress, has expired.

The three that made it

I have republished them here, properly, at their original dates:

• candy, which is a vending machine drawer. Everything in it costs 35p.
• transportation, a London station from above, tracks fanning out into the haze.
• packaging, a heap of padded manila envelopes, several torn open.

None of them is a good photograph. That’s not the point and it never was.

The bit I didn’t expect

The files still carry their original metadata, and it’s more revealing than the pictures.

All three came off a Canon Digital IXUS v2, processed on Mac OS X 10.2.6. And the timestamps are the thing. Candy was taken at 12:29 and posted at 12:32. Transportation was taken at 12:34 and posted at 12:40. Packaging was taken at 09:47 and posted at 09:48.

One minute. I wasn’t selecting from a body of work. I was reading the week’s word, looking around, photographing whatever was in front of me, and putting it up. The vending machine was presumably in whatever building I was standing in. The envelopes were on a shelf. Twenty three years later the metadata makes it obvious that the entire practice was improvised in the ninety seconds before the deadline, which I had forgotten, and which explains a great deal about the vending machine.

That’s also why it worked. There was no bar to clear. A word arrived, you photographed something, you posted it, and several thousand other people did the same on the same afternoon. Nobody was building a portfolio.

Three of eight isn’t a good survival rate, and the only reason it’s not zero is that somebody else archived my site for me. I have spent this year moving things back onto a domain I pay for. Same job, just backwards.

Dinner in a hotel restaurant here, a group of us, plates cleared, that pleasant stage of the evening where nobody is in a hurry. The waitress comes over, entirely friendly, and says:

You’re all gay though, right?

Well. Yes. Obviously yes. Demonstrably, visibly, audibly yes.

I can’t remember what any of us said back, which tells you it can’t have been anything clever. What I remember is the delivery. It wasn’t a nudge, or a bit of banter, or a waitress being daring. It had exactly the tone of somebody confirming that the table wanted the bill split.

A British waitress would sooner walk into traffic. She might spend the whole evening being certain, and would take that certainty to her grave rather than say it out loud at the table. The information would be established entirely through inference and never once acknowledged, which we would all agree afterwards had been the polite way to handle it.

Here it was just a thing that was true, said out loud, on the way to the till.

It’s not the first time

The all time champion remains the makelaar. This was back when I had moved over and my husband was still in London, and I was going round apartments on my own trying to find us somewhere to live.

So I explain the situation. Married, husband still in the UK for now, looking for a place for both of us. And the estate agent asks, with no edge to it whatsoever, whether we’re in an open marriage.

Reader, I laughed. Partly at the question and partly at the total absence of any sense that it might be a question you wouldn’t ask a client you had met twenty minutes earlier.

And in fairness to her, from a housing point of view it wasn’t entirely irrelevant. Two names or one, two people living here or one, is a legitimate thing for a makelaar to want settled. She had simply gone at it directly instead of circling for ten minutes hoping I’d volunteer it.

I have written before about how long it took me to stop hearing Dutch directness as rudeness. These are the two exchanges I think of whenever it comes up, because neither of them was remotely rude. Both were somebody establishing a fact they wanted, in one sentence, and then moving on with their day.

Nine years in and I still couldn’t do it. But I’ve stopped flinching, so that’s something.

I’ve been telling myself for years that I used to run a link blog on Fridays and that the habit died when link sharing moved onto timelines. I went and looked. That’s not what happened, and the real version is more interesting.

There were nine of them, between the 28th of March and the 6th of June 2003. Ten weeks. Nine posts, for something I’ve been calling an era.

What it actually was

Not links. A prompt.

Every Friday a site called Friday Five posted five questions, and thousands of unrelated blogs answered them on their own sites on the same day. Alongside it, Photo Friday set a single word as a photographic challenge, and you posted your response to that word. Water. Packaging. Glass. That was the whole mechanism.

Reading the one from April 2003 now is odd. The questions that week were about celebrity, and my answers include the fact that I used to work for Danny La Rue, that I’d like to be rich but absolutely not famous, and a small amount of information about my privacy that I’d probably not volunteer today. None of that was written because I wanted to record it. It exists because somebody I have never met asked five questions on a Friday.

That’s the part worth noticing. The format produced a kind of writing that nobody sets out to do. Left to my own devices I write about what I have opinions about. A prompt from a stranger gets you the other material, the stuff that turns out twenty years later to be the only surviving record of something.

I checked the links

Each of those nine posts ends with the same two credits, which is what you did then. So I put all of them through a resolver this week, and the results are a neat summary of what happens to the web.

The original Photo Friday address, at a subdomain of somebody’s personal domain, no longer exists at the DNS level. Not a 404. There’s nothing there to return one.

Friday Five still resolves. The domain is registered, it redirects politely to its secure version, and then it serves you an entirely empty response. Somebody is still paying for that name and there’s nothing behind it, which is a more melancholy outcome than simply going away.

And Photo Friday, which moved to its own domain at some point, is still running. Twenty three years later, the weekly photo challenge is there, working, answering with a page. I didn’t expect that.

The fourth address in those posts is on my own site, a page I had at /photofriday/ for my entries. That one is a 404. So of the four links in the series, the only one that still does its job belongs to somebody else, and the broken one is mine.

What replaced it, and why it’s worse

The prompt didn’t die. It moved.

Every platform now runs the same mechanic continuously. A hashtag, a trend, a reply-with-yours thread, a question posted by an account that exists to ask questions. The instinct is identical and the participation is enormously higher. What changed is where the answers land.

In 2003 the prompt was hosted in one place and the answers were hosted in a thousand places, each on its own domain, each the property of whoever wrote it. Now the prompt and the answers are hosted in the same place, and it’s not your place. The aggregate is the valuable thing, and the aggregate belongs to the company.

Which means the modern version produces the same writing and then keeps it. My daft answers about celebrities in 2003 are still here because there was nowhere else for them to be.

Bringing it back

So, Fridays again. Some rules, mostly to stop me from quietly abandoning this in ten weeks like last time.

1. Fridays. If it misses Friday it goes out Saturday, and if it misses Saturday it’s skipped rather than delayed.
2. Three to six things. No quality bar beyond whether I’d send it to a friend.
3. One line each, two at most. If something needs a paragraph then it wants its own post.
4. Nothing whose only address is a post on a platform. If it doesn’t have a URL of its own it doesn’t count.
5. Credit where I found it. “Via” was everywhere on the old web and it has more or less been abolished.

The one thing I can’t rebuild is the bit that made it work. A shared prompt needs other people answering it the same day, and there’s no Friday Five any more to organise that. Photo Friday is still going, so there’s at least one place still doing this properly.

If you have something odd, well made and unmonetised, the comments are open. That’s roughly how this used to work.

A year ago I wrote a post about Bluesky and what happens to the things you leave on other people’s platforms. Twelve months on, the conclusion I have reached is duller and more useful than I expected: the fix was never a better network. It was a worse one.

Not worse in quality. Worse in ambition. Slower, smaller, less interested in showing me things I didn’t ask for.

What actually changed

I read most things through a feed reader again. That’s all of it. RSS wasn’t resurrected by anybody clever, it simply never died, and at some point in the last couple of years the effort of maintaining a list of sites I like became obviously smaller than the effort of being served an algorithmic timeline and pretending it was a choice.

The difference isn’t that a feed reader is better designed. It’s not. The difference is that it has no opinion. It shows me everything from the people I picked, in order, once, and then it stops. There’s no “you might also like”. There’s no second scroll. When I have read it, I have finished, which is a sensation the modern web has spent fifteen years engineering out of existence.

The federated bit

I set this site up to federate a while back, using ActivityPub, which means the posts turn up in the fediverse as posts rather than as links to somewhere else. I wrote about doing it at the time and expected it to be a novelty.

What I didn’t anticipate is how much it changes the incentive. When your own site is the thing being distributed, the site is where you put the effort. The alternative arrangement, where you write a good post somewhere rented and then advertise it on your own domain, always had it backwards.

A word about scale, because there’s a lot of triumphalism written about the fediverse by people who imply otherwise. The numbers are small. Almost nobody is following this site that way. I don’t especially mind, but “I own my distribution” and “I have distribution” aren’t the same claim, and I notice a lot of posts eliding the two.

Why the domain is the point

I’ve been through this cycle enough times to have stopped finding it interesting. A platform arrives, everybody moves in, the platform decides what it wants to be when it grows up, and everybody discovers that their archive was a tenancy rather than a possession. I have written the small version of that post about Google Plus, about Instagram, about Twitter. It’s the same post every time and the only variable is how much came out with me.

Keeping a personal domain alive isn’t a statement about decentralisation. It’s much more boring than that. It’s the only arrangement where the thing that decides whether my writing still exists in ten years is whether I paid an invoice, rather than whether a company changed strategy.

Nobody should call that sovereignty. It’s just the bill being in my name.

The honest caveat

Doing it this way is more work and fewer people see it. Both of those are true and neither is a reason not to do it, but I’m not going to pretend the trade is free. If what you want is an audience quickly, the slow option is the wrong option, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

What you get instead is that nothing you write disappears because somebody else got bored. Twenty-five years in, that’s the bit I actually wanted.

I was going to write a comparison of British and Dutch beaches and then realised I’m the wrong person to do it. I grew up by the sea. That means my British beach isn’t a beach, it’s a childhood, and nothing gets to compete with it on fair terms.

So this isn’t that post. This is about how I actually use a coastline now.

Twice a year

Summer, or New Year. That’s the pattern.

The summer version is obvious enough. The other one is Zandvoort on the first of January, if we’re in the country, which we often are, for the specific purpose of clearing our heads. There’s no swimming involved. Other people do the New Year dive and they’re welcome to it. This is a walk into a cold horizontal wind until the previous evening has been removed from you, followed by something hot, and it works every single time.

An October promenade in the rain sounds like the more literary choice and I want to be honest: I’m not there in October. I’m there when the year has just turned over and there’s something to be walked off.

We did see all of them, though

During covid we had a car, which we no longer do, and that combination of a car and a great deal of nothing else to do meant we worked our way along most of the Dutch coast. It’s a small country with a lot of edge. You can be at a completely different beach every weekend for a summer and still not be doing anything ambitious.

That period did something useful. It taught me that the Dutch coast isn’t one place with regional variations, it’s a series of quite distinct decisions about what a beach is for, sitting within an hour of each other.

Kibbeling wins

This isn’t a close contest, and I have an emotional stake in fish and chips.

Kibbeling is better because of the geometry. Bite sized chunks means more surface area, which means more batter, and the batter is the entire point of the exercise. A piece of battered fish the size of a shoe has a poor ratio and gets worse as it cools, because you’re eating your way inward through something that stopped being crisp several minutes ago. Kibbeling never has that problem. Every single piece is an edge.

It also comes with sauce as standard and in a paper tray you can eat from while walking, which is the right way to eat any of this. Zandvoort is where we go for it. I have no interest in defending this position, and I’d like it on record that I gave up ground on the fish of my own homeland without being asked.

What the buildings tell you

There are promenades here, and some of them are perfectly good, but the promenade isn’t the organising idea the way it’s in a British seaside town. What you get instead are the beach bars and the terraces, and those are a different institution.

A British seafront is largely Victorian, built when the sea itself was the attraction and the done thing was to walk along looking at it in a coat. The infrastructure is therefore permanent and pointed outward. Here, a good number of the pavilions are seasonal and simply disappear for the winter, and the ones that stay are set up so you can sit in them facing the weather rather than enduring it. The structure exists to let you stay, not to let you pass through.

And you don’t need the coast anyway

The thing that took me longest to understand is that the beach is optional. We use local swimming spots far more than we use the sea. There’s an urban beach at Marineterrein in the middle of Amsterdam where people swim in monitored water on a weekday lunch break, which would be regarded as an eccentric act of trespass in most cities I have lived in.

So the answer to which coast I prefer is the Dutch one, and the reason isn’t the sand or the water or even the kibbeling. It’s that there’s something to do in any weather. A British seaside town in bad weather is a town waiting for the weather to improve. Here, bad weather is just one of the conditions the place was built for.

I have a certificate from the Dutch state saying I’m integrated. I can’t reliably tell you what time it’s.

Both of those things are true at once, and the gap between them is the whole subject of this post.

Wine Tuesday

I did do lessons, after a fashion. Friends who are Dutch, patient and generous offered to teach me, and for a while we called it a class. What it became, with the inevitability of water finding a drain, was Wine Tuesday.

This isn’t their fault. It’s the structural flaw in learning a language from people who like you. A paid teacher will make you sit in the discomfort of getting it wrong for a full hour. A friend will let you off, because letting you off is what friends are for, and because the alternative is watching somebody you’re fond of struggle with a sentence about a bicycle while the wine gets warm.

So the conclusion, arrived at expensively over several years, is that I need to put money aside and pay a stranger. Obligation is the product. Everything else is a nice evening.

The certificate

I did pass the inburgering exams, which I mention partly out of pride and partly because it demonstrates something about exams. They’re a test of whether you can pass them. There’s a real amount of Dutch in there, and there’s a whole section on how this country works, which I’d recommend to anybody who lives here regardless of paperwork, because a surprising amount of it’s not obvious from the outside.

What the certificate doesn’t certify is fluency, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’m at the basics. I rarely use it. Seven years after arriving, I’m not remotely good enough to hold somebody in Dutch for a conversation, which is the only benchmark that actually matters.

Why everybody switches

The charitable reading is also the correct one. They’re saving time. Their English is superb, mine is native, and there’s a conversation to be had about a deadline. Nobody is protecting my feelings and nobody is showing off. They’re simply routing around a bottleneck, and the bottleneck is me.

I used to find this mildly deflating and now I find it entirely reasonable. If a colleague were struggling through English while I sat there knowing we could do this in a third of the time, I’d switch too, and I’d think I was being kind.

My one small pleasure is that I can occasionally confuse a work colleague by answering in Dutch when they have spoken to me in Dutch. There’s a half-second of recalibration that I enjoy more than I should. Then I usually go back to English, because the meeting has to end at some point.

The two things that defeat me

Separable verbs. A verb which appears to be one word, and then the front of it detaches and flies to the end of the sentence, sometimes a considerable distance away, and you’re expected to have been holding it in your head the entire time. You know the sentence is finished when the missing half of the verb lands. It’s a grammatical structure with a punchline.

And telling the time, which nobody warns you about because everyone assumes numbers are the easy part. Half seven here doesn’t mean what it means in England. It means half of the way to seven, so half past six. The whole system is oriented towards the hour that hasn’t happened yet, which is either a profound insight into the national character or a trap, and after seven years I still do the arithmetic out loud and still occasionally arrive an hour early.

Am I going to fix it

Probably, and not with an app.

One honest factor: previous roles came with language classes, and this one doesn’t. I’m not blaming an employer for my own vocabulary. But there’s a real difference between a language you learn on a Tuesday afternoon because your job has decided it matters, and a language you keep meaning to learn in the evening after a day that was conducted entirely in English. The first one has a structure. The second one has Wine Tuesday.

There’s a specific kind of website that only makes sense in a country like this one: a site that tells you, hour by hour, which terraces the sun is actually hitting. Sunsipper is one, and there are others, and the existence of the entire genre tells you everything about how seriously this is taken.

I’m firmly on the sun side of the argument. Shade is for people with a plan for the rest of the day.

Where we actually end up

Despite all the research, we almost always end up at the same place. Nate, which we still call Brug34 and probably always will, because it sits on a bridge and gets guaranteed sun. It also has the full set: canal on one side, boats going past, a road, and a steady supply of people to watch doing things you wouldn’t do yourself.

That’s the specification for a good terrace, and it has nothing to do with the drinks list. You want sun, you want water, and you want traffic of some kind, ideally several kinds at once. A terrace with a beautiful view and nobody walking through it’s a waiting room.

What gezelligheid isn’t

I have stopped fighting this word and now use it constantly, which I take as a sign of something. The English translation offered is always “cosy”, and cosy is wrong, or at least badly incomplete. Cosy describes a room. This describes a situation.

A brown bar in November with the right three people in it’s gezellig. A sunny terrace in July with a bottle of wine that has just arrived is also gezellig, and those two things share no physical properties whatsoever. What they have in common is that nobody is trying to get anywhere, and the thing you’re doing is the thing you came to do.

So it’s not comfort. It’s the absence of the next appointment. You can’t buy it, you can’t schedule it reliably, and it evaporates the moment one person checks the time.

Boats

We never do a boat on Koningsdag or for Pride, which I have written about elsewhere, and this leads people to think I’m against boats. I’m not. We recommend a boat to everybody who visits, and every so often we hire one and give somebody our own tour.

The reason is slightly embarrassing. From the water you see a great many parts of the city that we simply don’t go to any more, because we aren’t tourists here and our lives have contracted into a set of routes. An hour on a boat is the most efficient way I know of being reminded that I live somewhere quite remarkable and have stopped looking at it.

The etiquette question has an obvious answer that I don’t fully believe. Yes, the rental boats full of people who have never steered anything are a menace. But the worst behaviour on the canals isn’t incompetence, it’s entitlement, and entitlement isn’t a tourist trait. It comes with a good sound system and someone who knows exactly what they’re doing.

The pub garden comparison

British pub gardens and Dutch terraces look like the same institution and aren’t. A pub garden is somewhere you go to drink, and the sitting is a facility provided to help with that. A terrace is somewhere you go to sit, and the drink is the rent you pay for the chair.

You can see it in the glassware. The beers here are small, deliberately, because the unit of the afternoon isn’t the pint, it’s the hour. Nobody is pacing themselves against a pint. You order another small one when the conversation reaches a natural gap, and four hours later you have had a perfectly reasonable amount and are still making sense.

The other difference is supply. A sunny beer garden in London is a rumour. When the weather turns there are about eleven of them for nine million people, and every one is three deep at the bar with a queue for a toilet designed in 1904. Here, the entire city is set up on the assumption that people will want to sit outside, so when the sun arrives there’s somewhere to put everybody. It’s not that the Dutch enjoy sunshine more than the British do. It’s that they planned for it, which is a very Dutch way to enjoy anything.

I appear to have been writing obituaries for social networks for the better part of a decade, one at a time, without noticing it was a series. So here they’re together, with what each one actually cost me.

Google Plus, October 2018

I wrote about G+ when the shutdown was announced. What strikes me in hindsight is how little I minded. Google Plus was the only one of these where I never really moved in, so when it closed there was nothing to get out.

Lesson, such as it’s: the platforms that hurt when they close are the ones you were productive on. Somewhere there’s a version of me who put real effort into G+ and lost it, and the only thing separating us is that I couldn’t be bothered at the time.

IFTTT, February 2019

The smallest entry and by far the most instructive. I published a post titled, in its entirety, an observation that the IFTTT link had broken.

What had actually happened was that an automation quietly stopped working and a chunk of this site stopped receiving things it was supposed to receive. No announcement, no shutdown, nothing that warranted an obituary. A service simply changed and my site was collateral. There was no drama at all, which is exactly why it took years to appreciate that this was the important one.

Instagram, April 2021

The post was called “Ugh Instagram” and I stand by the analysis.

This is the one that eventually did real damage, but not in the way I expected. It wasn’t the algorithm or the ads. It was that the plugin I had used to bring photographs onto this site had never actually saved the photographs. Years later every one of those posts was an empty box. That has its own post and I won’t repeat it here, except to note that the platform didn’t have to shut down to take my content with it. It only had to change a URL.

Twitter, March 2023

I downloaded the archive. That’s all the post said, and it turns out that was the right response too.

Twitter is the only one where I acted before rather than after, and the difference is enormous. I have the file. I haven’t looked at it once, which is fine. The point of an archive isn’t that you read it, it’s that the decision about whether you can is yours.

Bluesky, November 2024

Which brings us to the current one, written while it’s still alive, which feels like tempting fate.

I don’t think Bluesky is about to collapse. I thought that about the others too, at the equivalent point. What I have changed is the assumption underneath: I now treat every account on a platform I don’t control as a broadcast channel with an unknown expiry date, and I keep the original somewhere I pay for.

The pattern

Five entries, and only two of them involved anything actually shutting down. The rest were services that carried on existing while quietly breaking the thing I was relying on.

That’s the part I got wrong for years. I was watching for shutdown announcements, which are loud and give you notice. The real risk was never the funeral. It was the maintenance window nobody told me about.

So the rule I now use, which cost me about fifteen years to arrive at: if the file isn’t on a disk I pay the bill for, I don’t have it. Everything else is just a link to a decision somebody else gets to make.

I own two bikes, which is one more than I need and one fewer than most people here seem to have.

The first is the going-out bike. I bought it second hand when I moved over and it’s now rusty, unlovely and slightly wrong in every dimension, and I still have it, which is the remarkable part. Everyone will tell you that your bike in this city gets stolen. Mine has survived years of being left against railings outside bars, and I’m completely convinced the reason is that it looks like something already stolen twice and abandoned. Ugly is a security feature. Nobody wants it, including me, and we have an understanding.

The second is the nice one, for daytime and for anywhere I’d rather not arrive covered in chain grease. It has gears and it has hand brakes, both of which count as luxuries in a country where the default is one speed and a pedal you shove backwards. I inherited it from a friend who moved to the UK, which is how a lot of decent bikes change hands here. People leave, and their bike stays behind and joins somebody else’s household.

The jacket

The gear question has exactly one honest answer and it’s not a brand. It’s length. My rain jacket comes down to the knee and has zips up the sides so your legs can actually work the pedals. That’s the specification. A short waterproof keeps your shoulders dry and delivers all the water directly onto your thighs, which is worse than being straightforwardly wet, because now you’re wet in a way you paid for.

Everything else people buy for this is optional. Overshoes, no. Waterproof trousers, technically correct and socially unbearable. A hood under a helmet, if you wear a helmet, which almost nobody here does and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What I don’t do

I don’t commute by bike, which feels like a confession. The office is south of Utrecht, and there’s no version of that journey where a bicycle is a serious proposal. So my saddle time is entirely social and errand shaped, which I think is actually the better relationship to have with a bike. It’s transport for the parts of my life I chose, rather than the part I’m contractually obliged to.

I also drink and cycle, as does everybody, and I should be clear that there’s a legal limit for cyclists and I have certainly been the wrong side of it. It remains one of the last pieces of mild collective lawlessness that this country has quietly agreed not to look at directly. I assume that will change. I assume the change will be entirely correct, and I will be irritated by it regardless.

What it did to cars

We don’t have one any more. That wasn’t a principled decision, it was arithmetic: it sat still for most of the week, cost money continuously, and the city had already made every trip under five kilometres faster without it.

The remaining reason to drive is the office, and driving to the office taught me that I’m a bad fit for Dutch roads. The A2 between Amsterdam and Utrecht is six lanes of motorway with a hundred limit on it, which my brain refuses to accept as a serious instruction, and the cameras were entirely unmoved by my reasoning. Twenty years of British motorway habits don’t survive contact with a country that both builds enormous roads and means it about the speed.

Which is the lesson, and it’s not about bicycles. Build the bike lane properly and I’ll use it without ever deciding to. Put a hundred limit on six lanes of motorway and I’ll argue with it every morning and lose every morning.