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A travel-focused Friday Five.

1. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? If so, where? Did you like it? If you haven’t stayed in a hostel, would you?

Yes, once, in Glasgow. We hated it. We’re clearly not the target audience.

2. What is your favourite airport that you’ve been to? Why?

Airports are such a liminal space, catering to a specific set of functions for a specific set of people, which makes them more or less all the same. But we were forced to hang out on the Nagoya airport when we missed our connecting flight to Japan from Helsinki. Despite the setbacks, I enjoyed the atmosphere and the shops there. They even had a display with dorodango that won at a competition!

3. What is the best museum you have visited on vacation?

Probably the Victoria & Albert museum in London. But that’s one of the big ones. Of the more obscure museums I’d have to go with the Edo-Tokyo museum because it shows so much of daily life in Edo.

4. Have you ever made friends while traveling whom you keep in touch with on a regular basis?

I don’t think I have.

5. Have you ever had a conversation with a seatmate on a plane?

In 1999 I flew to San Francisco for the SIGIR conference in Berkeley. I had a window seat. When we were flying over the west coast of the US, he started pointing out things to me. Turns out he owned a company making conduits for airconditioning and he had done a tour of Europe for the past six months in order to sell his product. He asked me where I was going, and he offered to bring me to the BART station with his car. In the end, he drove me to my hotel in Berkeley (I paid for the toll). So friendly to make such a detour for a total stranger, delaying his return home to his family after all those weeks.

And in 2015 we flew to Kyuushu (one of the main islands of Japan), leaving from Dusseldorf with a stop-over at Schiphol. We were sitting in the back in a row of 3 seats. The man sitting in the remaining chair also came from Dusseldorf and he was visiting his Japanese girlfriend in her hometown on Kyuushu. We compared notes (we were going for a tour of Kyuushu) and then we said goodbye as we arrived. And we met him again at the gate on Schiphol waiting to board for Dusseldorf — he had been in the exact same plane as us! We shared photos, it was fun.

It’s been a while since I did one of these. luna-puella asked me these questions:

1. You have picked up a lot of hobbies over the years. Which was your favourite?

I will have to go with tabletop RPGs here, because it’s the most long-lived and thus seems to be the best fit for me. I have been playing ttrpgs for 35 years now, and there are no signs of slowing down. My tastes have changed (a lot!) but that’s what keeps it fresh.

2. What do you think is the keyIf behind a successful marriage?

Ultimately, I think it is respect. It is in the many, very mundane, ways you can make your partner’s life better by cooperating with them. What that looks like depends on you, but for us it’s doing our share of chores, working around (or with!) our respective neuroses and supporting each other.

Of course, love is a prerequisite — but respect makes marriages last.

3. What’s your pet peeve in the design of social media sites?

I was going to protest that I haven’t really used all that many social media sites, but then I realized that I have been using systems that would be considered social media today, even before the term ‘social media’ existed…

If we’re talking about interface design, then my requirements are simple: I want the content I am interested in, delivered in a constant stream. So I want smooth scrolling by keyboard, something that the web interface of Mastodon has a bit of trouble with, for instance. If you interact with a toot (favouriting or boosting, for instance), then that toot is ‘selected’ and the arrow down selects the next one. Which is fine, but on my little 10″ laptop not every toot fits on the screen in one go, and it is annoying to have to click outside of the list of toots in order to be able to scroll with the arrow keys again.

If we’re talking about the algorithmic design (which content the site is delivering), then I think it is safe to say that corporate-owned social media is a blight upon mankind and must be completely eradicated. It was a very bad idea to leave our public discourse in the hands of a privately-owned company.

4. If you were absolute king for a day (not encumbered by democratic legislative processes), what law would you push through?

Universal Basic Income. I can’t think of a single thing that would improve the lives of… basically everyone more than UBI.

Maybe a 100% tax on anything over 1 billion (or maybe even 100 million) could be a part of that? There’s enough money, it’s just not distributed in a way that maximizes its effects.

5. If you could pass on one recommendation (book, movie, life lesson), what would it be?

World Peace Is Possible.

There’s nothing magical about world peace: if everyone stopped fighting, we could achieve world peace within an hour! The trick is, then, to create the circumstances in which people do not fight, and everyone, every day, can make choices that bring us closer to world peace. But for that to happen, people need to realise that world peace is achievable and desirable — and now you know, so now you can start making those choices.

(Example: I work in Enterprise Content Management, in order to bring world peace closer. Because things like agreements and contracts are written down and stored in ECM systems, and having that information available and trackable reduces the number of conflicts people have about whatever was agreed upon — thereby reducing the number of reasons for people to fight. Is it a stretch? Perhaps. But it’s true, if you think about it. And everyone can make choices like that, every day.)

Thank you for the thoughtful questions, luna-puella! And if any of you want to play too, comment and I’ll give you five questions to answer!