I have to admit that I wasn’t super looking forward to this gig. I had bought my ticket months ago when they went on sale, and because Ticketmaster had blocked resale through their site, the cost was already sunk. The venue was the Ziggo Dome, which is not my favourite. I’ve been feeling burned out and exhausted lately, and a whole evening of Ziggo Dome including travel there and back was not appealing. I’d enjoyed the lead singles from In Times New Roman, but I didn’t feel the rest of the album was their strongest material.
I’m nothing if not a merch fiend, so I made sure that I got to the Ziggo dome when doors opened. Indeed, the merch was very good. I bought a poster by artist David D’Andrea and a T-shirt, stashed them in a locker, and went and sat myself down for the next four and a half hours. It was still super early, and I’ve never seen the Ziggo dome so empty.
British band Deep Tan came on at 19:15 and played a hypnotic half hour set. After a short break, Australian punks The Chats speed-ran twenty songs in thirty minutes, each one exactly the same as the last. The baby mosh pit in front of the stage seemed to enjoy it, but it seemed awfully bland to me.
The Queens of the Stone Age started their set a little later than expected at 21:20. They opened with some strong crowd-pleasers, and played more songs from the new album than I’d expected based on their North-American set lists. The band were in good form, but the crowd felt lukewarm. Maybe the energy would have been better down on the floor, but up high the mood felt a bit distant. The biggest reception was for their thundering fan favourites like “No-One Knows”, “My God Is The Sun”, and “Little Sister”. “Better Living Through Chemistry” was a hypnotic slow burn to start with, followed by a colossal crashing wall of guitars to end the brooding pause in the middle of the song. Worth putting up with the Ziggo Dome to hear some of my favourite songs live and up close like that? Yes.
A new thing I tried at this gig was to use my Apple Airpods Pro (second generation) as hearing protection instead of the usual foam earplugs I bring with me. The “transparency mode” feature of the Airpods is better than anything else I’ve tried, and in household or office situations it sounds almost like I’m not wearing anything at all. In high noise situations the transparency mode applies a cap on loudness, but does it in a smart way, such that the music still sounds clear rather than muffled. It’s still loud, but not deafening. Throughout the gig I tried listening with the pods in and out, with transparency mode and noise cancelling, and processing off entirely. Transparency mode is definitely a winner.
There are some processing artefacts: sometimes they have trouble keeping up with rapid loudness changes, and sometimes the processing in my left and right ears would be slightly different, leading to a wobbly flicker effect. But overall it sounded good in a way that gigs don’t when I’m wearing foam plugs, and at the end of the gig I had no ringing in my ears at all. I’ll be doing this more often from now on, and I’ll be interested to see if this gets even better in future generations of the Airpods.
Also: was I the only person in the whole crowd of 17,000 wearing a mask? Yes, I think I was.
Via Trung Phan’s SatPost newsletter, Brian Potter’s article “The Story of Titanium” is a great read about how Titanium metal’s use as a lighter alternative to steel is a relatively recent, and still quite expensive thing:
Titanium is also a story about the importance of serendipity in scientific discovery and technology advancement. Titanium’s biocompatibility, and its usefulness for medical implants, was discovered purely by chance. Studying biocompatibility led to another chance discovery, that of bone conduction of sound. Both of these discoveries led to the development of important medical technology, implants and hearing aids.
Finally, titanium is also a story about the critical role that manufacturing plays in technology development. The knowledge required to turn titanium into a practical technology came from the research lab, but it also came from the factory floor. Using titanium meant understanding its chemical properties, but it also meant figuring out how to forge it, weld it, press it, turn it into fasteners, design parts effectively with it, designing tools to machine it, and a million other shop floor discoveries that came from actually building things with the metal.
I’ve used an iPhone X since 2017, but 2023 is finally the year for an upgrade. (6 years is a good run for a phone.) The X is no longer compatible with the latest version of iOS, and although Apple still does provide some security updates for older phones, I’d prefer to be inside the standard support window.
Also, the battery is turning into a spicy pillow. It’s visibly bowed. (This is not the original battery. I got the battery replaced at our local phone repair shop, which kept it going for a few more years.) A couple of weeks ago I had to replace the battery in my Magic Trackpad 2 as well. (It’s a gooey mess inside that thing.) Abi describes my devices as being “pregnant. Pregnant with fire.”
The iPhone 15 Pro boasts of using a titanium frame, but the amount of titanium in the phone is actually relatively small (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_W73ouKtjU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNLEXAwpCsE). It’s a very strong material, lighter than steel, but potentially also more brittle, and as the article above describes it also has different properties when it comes to corrosion. Nevertheless, it’s pretty cool to have a frame that won’t melt until 1668°C. (The rest of the phone woud be slag by that point.)
The other thing about titanium that for some reason sticks in my mind is that there’s a massive factory just outside the port of Calais that makes the white pigment titanium dioxide. The company is called Tioxide. I remember seeing the brightly lit name of the factory when I was a kid, and we would take the channel crossing back from England to France, at the start of the long drive back up to the Netherlands. Just as the Little Chef diner just outside Dover is a marker in my mind for “we’re in Britain now”, so is Tioxide a sign for me that “I’m back on the continent.”
Three gigs in two weeks, wow, it’s been a while since I’ve been that active. There were a couple gigs I had to miss earlier in the summer because of circumstances (Maggie Rogers, The Heavy), but I’ve been catching up on activity.
Where 65daysofstatic was a gig, TWRP was a show. Alex has been a fan of theirs for years, and he’s the one who introduced me to their music. This is the first time I’ve seen them live, but I understand that this is what their shows are like: to match their costumed on-stage personas, they weave a scripted narrative between their songs, heavy on jokes and interaction with the audience.
This is their “International Business” tour, which is sponsored by “International Business Systems”. The crew wore blue IBS t-shirts, styled like the classic IBM logo. Of course, IBS can also mean irritable bowel syndrome, and they played on this double meaning with this throughout the act. The story line involved a new IBS prototype called GROBB (Good ROBot Boy), who turns evil (or at least very misguided) part-way through the show, and has to be defeated by lead singer Doctor Sung hacking into the mainframe. The masks that the band wear hide their expressions, but Doctor Sung makes up for it with his larger-than life antics on stage. It’s playful and terrific fun. The audience was 100% nerds, and totally on board for every second of it. The encore absolutely brought the house down.
In their music they often collaborate with other artists (Ninja Sex Party, Electric Six), but on stage Doctor Sung takes the vocal parts for himself with his talkbox. I was close to the stage, but way on the right, where I didn’t have a view of GROBB, but I did have a great view of the musicians themselves. In their recordings I hadn’t spotted quite how bass-led many of their songs are, but that came through very strongly on stage. Commander Meouch the bass player makes it all look easy.
Alex was there with his friends Rafael and Wim. I don’t think they’re as much fans as Alex is, but they all came out of the gig beaming, looking like they had a great time. Alex was positively bouncing off the walls. None of us particularly enjoyed the opening act (Jazz Emu), but the main event made up for it in spades. Very highly recommended!
Merch haul: an IBS t-shirt for me, as well as a tour poster and a couple of stickers. Alex got at least one t-shirt, probably more.
Set list (in collaboration with Alex and setlist.fm, because I didn’t recognize all the songs):
Birth of the Blues (followed by introduction to GROBB)
Second time seeing 65 in two weeks! This time I was back on home turf. Alex came along as well. We had both been somewhat nonplussed after their 2018 Decomposition Theory gig at the same venue, but this would be more like a “classic” gig. (In hindsight, I actually enjoy listening to Replicr, the album that Decomposition Theory evolved into, and I like listening to the Wreckage Systems livestream. But it wasn’t what I’d been expecting going into the gig.)
Abi dropped us off at Tolhuistuin. Alex was suffering from a blocked ear, so he’d be experiencing the music partly in mono, and partly through the heavy bass vibrations. Neither of us was super excited about Sugar Horse as the support act, so we showed up late.
It was interesting to compare the two gigs so close together. Tolhuistuin is a larger venue than St. Luke’s. The sound quality was also much better here: not nearly so harsh, and with much greater separation and clarity of the instruments. I did have earplugs with me this time, but I didn’t need them squeezed in to their absolute maximum capacity.
The band seemed much more relaxed up on stage, which is perhaps not surprising. The St. Luke’s gig was the opening night of the tour, and the first time they’ve played a full tour for quite a while. The times I’ve seen them they’ve never interacted much with the audience, but they had a little bit more chat in Glasgow than in Amsterdam. The break between the two halves of the set was much longer. In Glasgow, they left the stage for just a couple of minutes, while in Amsterdam they took a full 15-minute break. Alex and I watched the first half from the balcony, but we had time to queue up for a drink at the bar, along with a hundred other people.
After the break we found a spot downstairs and watched the second half of the set from there. Just as in Glasgow, they played the whole of Wild Light in the first half, and a collection of bangers for the second half. They didn’t play “Supermoon” in Amsterdam, but they did leave the stage and come back for an encore of “I Swallowed Hard, Like I Understood”.
The crowd seemed warmer than in Glasgow, but maybe that was because there were just more people in the venue. And as at the Decomposition Theory show five years ago, there was a dude who shouted “Radio Protector” before they played it… and after it as well.
Merch haul: a grey Wild Light t-shirt for me (L is a good size, but I don’t think the vinyl printing on the front is going to last well) and a black Specialists t-shirt for Alex.
Set list:
Heat Death Infinity Splitter
Prisms
The Undertow
Blackspots
Sleepwalk City
Taipei
Unmake the Wild Light
Safe Passage
Break
Debutante
Install a Break in the Heart That Clucks Time in Arabic
My friend Graham at work is an enthusiastic concert-goer like me. Last year he told me about a gig he’d been to at St. Luke’s in Glasgow. The venue, a small converted church just round the corner from the Barrowlands, sounded like exactly my kind of thing. Because I’m still over in Scotland regularly, I kept my eye on their “What’s On” page in case anything interesting came up.
And it did! Back in January 65daysofstatic announced a tour for the 10th anniversary of their album Wild Light, and they would be kicking it off at St. Luke’s. They would also be playing Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam. Because I wasn’t sure what my travel plans would be that far ahead, I just got myself a ticket for the Amsterdam gig. But as we got nearer the time, the circumstances lined up for me to be in Scotland just at the right time to catch them in Glasgow as well!
I even persuaded Graham to come along as well. (He didn’t take much persuading.) I was in Edinburgh for the day, and I drove over to Glasgow after work. I had a hard time figuring out how to pay for my parking at the Spoutmouth parking nearby, because I didn’t have any coins and I didn’t have a UK parking app downloaded and set up. But I got to the venue eventually, and we had some dinner (a nice pizza) at the bar/restaurant. We missed the opening act, Chipzel, although we heard quite a bit of it through the walls. As we were chatting over dinner we also discovered that we both have tickets to see Melanie Martinez at the Hydro in November with our daughters. Concert dads stick together 💪🏻.
The gig was good. The venue is pleasantly sized, maybe around 300 capacity? It wasn’t full. I didn’t have earplugs with me, and we were standing right in front of the speaker stack. My watch was giving me all kinds of alarms about being in a noisy environment, and it was right to do so – at the end of the evening my ears were ringing and the world sounded flat. In not sure if it was just proximity to the speakers, but the sound quality did seem quite harsh to me. (Perhaps the sound system is more suited to less noisy and distorted acts.)
The band played through the whole of the Wild Light album, then took a couple of minutes for a break, and came back on and played a selection of fan favourites. The last time I saw them was in 2018 on their Decomposition Theory tour, which was very different. This time they had the whole band plus Frank (whom they talk about on their Bleak Strategies podcast). The crowd was enthusiastic, but not exactly wild. Maybe a factor of age.
About four tracks in, I had the sudden notion that in my fluster around paying for parking, I’d left the rental car unlocked with my laptop and camera in my backpack in the boot. This was distracting, because I kept playing through scenarios in my head of what I’d have to do if they got stolen… In the end it was fine. I had locked the car, and no break-in occurred. But I didn’t perhaps have my full attention on the music at all times. Graham seemed a bit blown away by the end – I’m not sure if he had been expecting it to be quite so noisy…
Set list:
Heat Death Infinity Splitter
Prisms
The Undertow
Blackspots
Sleepwalk City
Taipei
Unmake the Wild Light
Safe Passage
Debutante
Install a Break in the Heart That Clucks Time in Arabic
At the end of my marathon walk in April last year I was limping and in pain. A blister on my foot about two-thirds along the route had caused me to shift my gait, and the uneven gait caused stress on my knee. The short-term muscle pain faded after a couple of days, but my knee didn’t fully heal for months. When we were on holiday in Scotland in August I felt it strongly on the descent stretch after walking up Cruban Beag. In September I was in New Jersey for work, and I walked from my hotel near the Holland Tunnel north to the George Washington Bridge, and the knee started hurting about 13km along.
I think it was probably a tendon injury. I remember ending up with tennis elbow in both my arms back in 2013 when I was doing a lot of bouldering and I had pushed myself too far too fast. Just because your muscles can handle a particular kind of exertion doesn’t mean that your tendons have strengthened enough yet. It look me about a year to fully recover from that, and by that time I’d got out of the habit of climbing, and I never really went back. (I do miss climbing sometimes.)
By the start of this year my knee was doing better. I was able to do longer walks without any twinges at all. I was also enjoying putting on a bit of pace, rather than just going for a leisurely daily stroll. I started to figure that I was working myself up to another marathon walk, and this time I wanted to do it differently. Specifically, I wanted to see how fast I could do one.
My previous marathon walks have been about just doing the distance, regardless of time. I’ve taken breaks to rest and relax along the way, stopped to take photographs, and just generally taken it easy. But since January my “brisk” daily walks were clocking in at 6.5km/hour or faster. Could I keep that up over the whole distance? At that speed I’d cover a marathon in about 6.5 hours. That seemed fast to me. I was curious.
So there were a few things I did to prepare for this. First of all, I tried to keep in training – continuing the habit of a fast daily walk of at least 4-5km. Longer at weekends. I wanted to give my muscles and tendons a chance to get used to the idea, and avoid a repeat of last year.
Secondly, I bought some new shoes. I’ve enjoyed Asics Patriot shoes for several years now. They’re comfortable, breathable, and great value. But they’re also “entry-level” shoes. In March I bought myself a pair of Asics Gel-Pulse 13 shoes (€68.95 at Plutosport felt like a bargain), and I broke them in over the course of a few weeks. (Note to self: I got them in size 44, and they felt big when I got them, but after adjusting the laces and wearing them in, they feel fine.) Maybe I’d used up the elasticity in the soles of my old pair of Patriots, but this new pair felt genuinely bouncy. I like them!
As well as shoes, I’ve also paid more attention to my socks. I’ve been wearing dedicated walking socks rather than generic sport socks for “proper” walks. They’re tight, and they reduce rubbing. They make a difference.
Third, I found that walking with music rather than with podcasts made a difference to my ability to keep up a good pace. Listening to a podcast is fine when I want to listen to a podcast first of all, and want to be doing something purposeful at the same time, rather than just lying in bed. Listening to music of the right tempo keeps me walking on the beat. Sticking to the groove becomes its own purpose. Rather than finding it boring to “just walk” without anything else to keep my brain occupied, I find it helps the kilometers pass by more easily.
Meute is great for this. Most of their music falls in the 123/124 bpm range, which is my “brisk walk” comfort zone. 120-122bpm feels good for warming up, or for slowing down a notch if I’m feeling tired. 125-126bpm is for when I’m up to full pace. Anything beyond that is fun for pushing myself for a while, but — at my current fitness level — isn’t sustainable over long distances.
I found myself using the website taptempo.io to gather tracks manually for a while, until I found Spotify’s own “advanced playlist tools” site http://sortyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com/. If you log in with your Spotify credentials, you can pick a playlist and sort and filter the songs in it by BPM, and then save it as a new playlist. I gathered a ton of my favourite albums and tracks into a mahoosive mega-playlist, and then created new playlists for every BPM from 116 to 135 (LOL). I ended up with at least 20 tracks in each one. Most of them had around 60, but 120bpm had 138 – shows what a popular groove that is. This was enough to give me hours of variety even if I stuck to a single pace.
Finally, I bought myself an Apple Watch. This was a nice-to-have, not a necessity. I’ve had an entry-level Fitbit since 2019, mainly for sleep tracking and peripherally also for keeping an eye on my resting heart rate and daily walking distance. It does this very well. But the Fitbit ecosystem doesn’t integrate nicely with Apple Health, and I’m pretty well bought in to the Apple ecosystem.
The Apple Watch is a replacement for the Fitbit’s sleep, heart, and step tracking. It integrates better with MapMyWalk, which I use for walk tracking. It comes with some more sensors, such as ECG, fall detection, LOUD NOISES, though unfortunately not blood pressure, which I still have to measure and enter manually. It has some nice features, like being able to start, pause, and resume a “walk” workout from the watch, rather than having to pull my phone from my pocket. I can see my bpm/walking cadence and average speed easily with a glance at my wrist. If I want to skip to the next track in my playlist, I can do that from the watch as well. It occasionally unlocks my phone for me when I’m wearing a mask and Face ID doesn’t work, but it’s not 100% reliable at that.
I’m sure I could do all of these things from a more advanced Fitbit as well, and the Fitbit would run for longer on a single battery charge. I had worried about the stated “18 hour” battery life of the Apple Watch, because I want to keep it on at night for sleep tracking, not to take it off and leave it on a charger. But there are a number of features on the Watch that I explicitly do not want, such as notifications and an always-on display, or a voice assistant always listening to me. With all of these things turned off, it’s basically just a shiny black pebble of sensors strapped to my wrist, and I find it easily goes for 36 hours between charges. If I’m doing a “workout”, it polls the sensors to track things like position and heart rate more frequently than when I’m at rest, but even so I’ve never had a problem getting a whole day out of it. I’d thought that charging it so often would be annoying, but it’s fine. I’ve got used to it.
Also, it’s nice. It’s a nice object.
So on Saturday 8th April I got up early and set out on my chosen route, which was basically “north and then turn left”. One other thing I had decided to do on this walk was to travel light. I wore my Kühl hiking trousers, a T-shirt, and a light hoodie. I didn’t bring a backpack or bum bag. Just my phone, watch, headphones (my over-ear Sony WH-1000XM3, because they have better battery life than my Airpods), some painkillers and loperamide (because IBS-D), blister plasters, and some cards and cash. It’s Noord-Holland. Even walking through the polder, there’s population everywhere, and I could buy water or food along the way.
I left the house at 07:00, and headed out through ‘t Twiske just as the sun was rising. It was beautifully scenic, and I could have spent a long time taking pictures, but that’s not what the day was for! I took a couple of snaps, but I didn’t stop to compose them – I took them on the go.
On previous long walks I’d noticed that after a couple of hours on the go my fingers swell up. Apparently this is pretty common. One way that I’ve found to reduce it is to clench and unclench my hands a bit while I’m walking. Unfortunately the morning was also pretty cold, and my hands and arms were chilled, and I think I over-did hand clenches. Ironically, I think I accidentally gave myself a forearm tendon strain. A month and a half later my right forearm still hurts. (At least I’m not climbing.)
I set a good pace, well under 9 minutes per km for the first 10km, and then took a very needed toilet break when I hit Purmerend. (The AVIA petrol station on the other side of the Melkwegbrug was just opening.) (Even preventive loperamide has its limits.) I also grabbed a snack and a drink there.
I continued with a good sub-9-minute pace to the TOTAL petrol station just past Oosthuizen, where I took another toilet break and bought another snack and drink. A little beyond that was my “left turn” in the general direction of Alkmaar. I noted, but did not stop at, the cheese vending machine (“kaasautomaat”) at the Roos family farm just outside Oudendijk. (Abi and I would return there the next day.)
I hit 30km around Kathoek just past Oudendijk, and started to feel the distance. The dyke between Avenhorn and Ursem was pretty, but seemed to go on forever. This is also where I saw some blue-billed ducks on the canal. Blue seemed a weird colour for ducks? I snapped a photo of them with my phone just as a reminder to look them up when I got back home, and resolved to maybe come back with my long lens for a better look later.
At Ursem, about 35km in, I stopped for another snack and drink at Cafetaria Eethuis Jem. I didn’t need to use the toilet, but I really needed the blood sugar, and a little sit down to gather my energy for the last stretch. In hindsight, I should maybe have got some frites with a bit of starch rather than another snickers bar, but I didn’t have much sensible appetite.
The last 7km to Alkmaar were a slog. Although I’d kept my average pace below 9 minutes per km up to that point, it was over 9 for the remaining distance. I hit 42.2km in the Park van Luna on the south side of Heerhugowaard at 13:48, claiming my marathon distance in just under 7 hours overall, with an average pace (including breaks) of 6.2km/hour. Very nice. Could I do it in under 6.5 hours? With a bit more training, and perhaps some more sensible snacking along the way, maybe. But I was very pleased with a sub-7 time.
Very serious. Not much smiles in me at that point.
Also: no blisters! The combination of training, good socks, and good shoes seemed to have done the trick. Sure, my feet were sore, but other than a slightly numb toe they weren’t damaged. I wasn’t even feeling completely exhausted. I walked on through the park a bit further to the Strand van Luna where I waited for Abi to come and pick me up. Then we even stopped at the Kingloopwinkel RataPlan in Alkmaar where Abi had seen a nice bedside table earlier in the day, and we hauled it back to the car.
Abi drove us back, and we picked up McDonalds on the way home.
Epilogue: blue-billed ducks.
I was curious what they were, and I wanted to go back to see if I could see them again. Were they just passing through on their migration? Were their bills only blue during mating season? Was this the only week I’d be able to see them?
Also, the walk had taken me past the bridge at Oudendijk, where Abi and I had stopped briefly several years ago. There was a café just on the water that had been closed at the time, but we said that it looked like a nice place to come back to. So the next day we did go back there.
We drove along the dyke between Avenhorn and Ursem. We saw the derpy Unicorn on the banpaal. We saw some geese, coots, and cormorants, but no blue-billedducks. It was, however, later in the day, and ducks are often most active in the mornings and evenings. I figured I’d have to come back at a different time of day.
We drove back to Oudendijk, stopped at the bridge, and had a lovely lunch at the Café Les Deux Ponts there. The morning had been cool and cloudy, but as soon as we got there the clouds burned off and it was warm enough to sit outside on the terrace overlooking the water. We saw some mallards, but again no blue-billed ducks.
I finally caught them when I returned to the dyke on the following Wednesday evening. I’d had a shitty day at work and wanted to get out of the house and out of my head. I drove back north, parked at Avenhorn, and walked along the dyke just as the sun was setting. I found one pair just past the bridge near the banpaal. They were sleepy at the end of the day, but not so sleepy that they were unaware of me. As I got closer to the water, they casually swam to the other side of the canal. And when I crossed the bridge to try to get closer again they just casually drifted to the other side again. I got the message.
I found a second pair just short of the bridge as I was walking back. These two were a little more active. It was cold and the light was starting to go, but I managed to get a nice photo of them.
Turns out they’re tufted ducks. They’re not rare at all. I’ve probably seen them before, but I’d just never paid attention. Now I know.
