"Why is San Francisco the way that it is?"

- the_status
^{Discussion Thread, Queen Hillary Publishing, October 15th, 2020}

Boy, am I glad you asked!

^{(but really...am I? I know I said "ask me again on Monday" back in October. I spent a little longer on this than I thought I would...Sorry bud.})
A brief note about me and why you should or shouldn't care what I think:
I was born in San Francisco*, California in the late 1980s (👴 lmao), and grew up there through the '90s and '00s.
^\No, not Moraga. Not Mill Valley. Not Sunnyvale. SAN FRANCISCO. You moron. You absolute dolt.)
I've worked for small startups and watched them become major publicly-traded tech firms.
I've worked for local government and watched planning professionals drive themselves insane from knowing how to fix things but not having the political mandate to act on that knowledge.
I've mansplained to more than my fair share of people who didn't really care why San Francisco is the way that it is today. And you can be next!
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Introduction: "The City" as Everything but a City

"It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world."

- Oscar Wilde

"Hey, Georgia! San Francisco just wanted to say "thank you!" We already have Nancy Pelosi as our Congresswoman, now you're gonna give us John Ossoff as our Congressman!"

- Congressional Leadership Fund Super PAC
Few cities carry as much symbolism as San Francisco. When you consider that San Francisco is a city of not even a million people, its outsize presence in our cultural zeitgeist becomes all the more notable.
For progressives, the city is a besieged bohemian mecca - at once quaint and visionary, and under siege by a looming neoliberal order.
For conservatives, it's an anarchic disastrous mess where unchecked liberal policies have produced a petri dish of societal failure and hedonism, all funded by extreme taxation.
For liberals, it's a hub of technological innovation paradoxically situated precisely where innovation seems most squandered, where byzantine regulations on business and development stymie America's best opportunity to advance into the next century on the backs of immigrant innovators.
All three would likely agree with the assessment of Paul Kanter of Jefferson Airplane:

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.

But how did it wind up that way?

Part One: Pre-Industrial San Francisco

Prior to European settlement, what is now San Francisco was Ohlone Indian territory. They were getting along pretty nicely until the Spaniards came up from Mexico with all their missionary bullshit, and that involved a lot of not leaving the Ohlone alone...Things kinda went downhill for the California native population from there in a big way. (Like in a genocide way.)
In the mean time these American people are super into this Manifest Destiny thing and so Alta California starts to have a big illegal immigrant problem from the United States. The San Francisco Bay is by far the best place to anchor a ship on the West Coast, what with the deep calm water and all, so all these illegal immigrants set up a little town called Yerba Buena*. Eventually they decide they're not content just genociding the native people, but also want voting rights and the ability to own the land they're genociding people on, so they go to Sonoma which is one of the only places the Mexicans have guns and they LARP a revolution.
^(\Funny story about the name change. I can explain in the comments if you're curious.)*
It's not the US military doing the LARPing at first but they're definitely super down with it so they decide get in on the fun too and, bingo bango, California's a state now.
Again, brief interlude, and I cannot stress this enough...this whole story REALLY sucks if you're an Ohlone Indian. Like, you're basically being shot and raped murdered by everyone else involved.
So anyway this statehood thing was perfect timing for the Americans because it was only a couple years later that this guy John Sutter sees something shiny in the water. Turns out people will basically crawl over a mountain range or get scurvy and shit themselves around Cape Horn just to get some of this cool shiny stuff, and that's exactly what they did.
So a metric shitload of people came to California starting in 1849. Most were from the Eastern parts of America, but many were from Mexico, Chile, the Philippines, France, and China. (The Chinese came to refer to San Francisco and the surrounding area as "Gold Mountain", and eventually, "Old Gold Mountain") These Forty-Niners were typically blue collar fortune-seekers. Ramshackle types from all over the world who thought they could change their fortunes with a dramatic change of scenery.
Basically right from the get-go, San Francisco was a mostly working class, pluralistic, multicultural and diverse place where people sought the next frontier of wealth, prosperity, and freedom. It was distant from the institutions and power structures that had established dominance in the East. A burgeoning independent metropolis and Capital of the Wild West.
This way of thinking about San Francisco is important because it basically still defines the San Franciscan identity, from the perspective of the people who actually live there, to this day.
TL;DR: San Francisco was:

• Ohlone land, until it was...
• Spanish land, but still mostly empty, until it was...
• American land, but still mostly empty, until it was...
• Still American land, but hella crowded all of the sudden, and now it was defined by...
• Pluralism
• Industriousness
• Innovation
• Freedom and independence from Eastern U.S. institutions
• Being a really shitty place to be an Ohlone Indian despite it being rightfully your land

Part Two: San Francisco as Western Industrial Powerhouse

What we're left with this point is a substantial, rapidly growing port city built around streetcars, horses and buggies, and shipping. It is the jumping-off point for any business endeavor pretty much anywhere in California's interior. And being so distant from the institutions of the East, it starts to develop its own institutions. Banks like Wells Fargo. The Southern Pacific Railroad. Levi Strauss Clothing Company. These dudes were ultimately the only ones to actually get rich from the Gold Rush.
Also still a really shitty place to be for an Ohlone Indian.
(By the way it was also a really shitty place to be Chinese pretty much from the Gold Rush onwards, too. Like, Supreme Court Case shitty....Not just once, either.)
The city caught fire and burned a lot, notably in 1851. This inspired the city to put a phoenix rising from the ashes on its flag. Then it all fell over in an earthquake and burned really good and properly this time in 1906. It rebuilt rapidly in time for the 1915 World's Fair.
This set the stage for what San Francisco would be for the next fifty years or so. An industrious, blue collar, capitalist metropolis. The gateway to the Pacific and the crown jewel of West Coast industry and innovation. A city dominated by organized labor, and, accordingly, progressive and sometimes even radical politics.
Then World War II happened and the U.S. was hella racist. They were hella racist against the Japanese people, to the point that they put them in concentration camps and made them abandon all their property. They were a little less racist to black people, and let them have jobs building planes and ships and stuff, but still too racist to let them fight in the war or live wherever they wanted. So a lot of black people moved to the Bay Area to help build planes and ships and stuff (plus it was still way better than staying in the South.)
With the limited places banks and neighborhood groups would let them live, a lot of them moved in to the existing working-class neighborhoods by the heavy industrial and shipbuilding facilities, and a lot of them moved into the place where the Japanese people had previously lived because, hey, I wonder why all these apartments are empty? Surely that's not a bad omen about how the government will treat minority communities, right?
So now the government has a black neighborhood on its hands and it's very inconveniently right next to some important stuff. Not to be racist (by the way just so you know one of my friends is black) but I think that means the neighborhood is "blighted" because of, you know...all that jazz. So they decided to do a Robert Moses all over the place and kick all the black people out and bulldoze their homes and stuff.
As you can imagine, a lot of minority community groups have wound up being pretty skeptical as a general rule of the vision laid out by mostly white politicians and urban planners for the future of San Francisco as it pertains to their communities.
So, in 1940, San Francisco was 95% white, but right after the war that number started falling steadily. It never stopped, and around the mid-1990s or so San Francisco became a majority-minority city, which it still is to this day.
Meanwhile the government was basically subsidizing suburban sprawl, building urban freeways and giving out super lucrative home loans to veterans ^{(minorities need not apply}). White people who were TOTALLY not racist but were just CONCERNED about the increasing diversity of inner cities started moving out in large numbers. In San Francisco they were largely replaced by immigrants. Overall the population began to decline around 1950 and wouldn't reach 1950 levels again until 2000. In contrast, the Bay Area was still rapidly growing by way of suburban sprawl. The population of the entire Bay Area almost doubles over this same timeframe, from 2.6 million to 6.7 million.
From an economic perspective, by the time the Vietnam War rolls around, the military figures out it can ship things a lot faster and cheaper if it miniaturizes the concept of a warehouse into a weatherized steel box, and then uses trucks and cranes in big lots by the water to load and unload these new "shipping containers" directly on and off ships.
Well, the problem is, the San Francisco isn't really set up for this. And it's not exactly a cheap, easy, or even smart idea to try to change that. So they do it in Oakland instead. And in only a few years, San Francisco loses its status as the primary shipping and industrial city of the Bay. American manufacturing declines generally, but even what little of it stays in the Bay Area doesn't stay in San Francisco.

The city of San Francisco lost twelve thousand manufacturing jobs between 1962 and 1972, the years when most of the Edgewater Homeless were adolescents. (Arthur D. Little Inc. 1975). The Edgewater Boulevard corridor, which had provided employment for most of the residents in the neighborhood up the hill, were particularly hard hit. Most of San Francisco's largest factories were located off Edgewater. It was also the hub for the region's transportation, communications, and utility sectors, including the Southern Pacific Railroad and, most important, the shipyards. Throughout the mid-1950s, the Hunters Point navy shipyard was the engine of heavy industry in San Francisco, with eighty-five hundred employees (Military Analysts Network 1998); but in 1974 it closed down.
...
Economists have shown statistically that high rents, high levels of income inequality, and low rental vacancy rates are the three variables most consistently associated with elevated levels of homelessness in any given city (Quigly et al. 2001; U.S. Bureau of the Census 2001). From the 1990s through the 2000s, San Francisco County ranked number one in the nation with respect to all these variables, and, predictably, its homeless population burgeoned.

^{- from Righteous Dopefiend\}, Phillipe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, University of California Press, 2009*)
So the city is pivoting away from being a blue-collar place where people live and work, and transitioning into a white-collar place where people commute to work, and otherwise pretty stagnant and kind of rife for the circumstances that bring the proliferation of homelessness. This defines the political order of the era. Planners and politicians are envisioning a new San Francisco, where it serves as the Manhattan to the Bay Area's New York, but with suburbs this time, if only they could stamp out all that blight.
TL;DR San Francisco is changing in the following ways in the middle of the 20th century:

• White people are leaving
• Immigrants and POC are moving in
• The city is shrinking in population overall
• The region as a whole is still growing because of suburban sprawl
• The city was rapidly losing its industrial jobs
• The people who depended on those jobs were suddenly unable to properly care for their families
• The city is not defined in any meaningful way as a haven for the rich, but is instead, from a residential perspective, in a state of slow decay and stagnation, populated by blue collar workers, people in public housing, and government bureaucrats
• Residential vacancy rates are low and rents are modestly rising but there is nothing at all like the housing crisis that we know of today occurring
• The planners and politicians are focused on remaking the city into a regional and global capitalist powerhouse, and using bulldozers and cranes to do it
• Conditions are shaping up to be pretty much ideal to drive an increase in homelessness (low vacancy, rising rents, rising income inequality)
• It was still a really shitty place to be an Ohlone Indian despite it being rightfully your land
• A bunch of weirdos were showing up and doing a lot of drugs. Oh yeah, about that, because it's kind of important...

Part Three: Flowers in your Hair

San Francisco's pluralism, its labor politics, and its independence from the hegemonic economic and cultural institutions of the regions to the East made it a mecca for free-thinking liberals and radicals well before the Vietnam War era. It was a working-class Catholic city, so in that sense it was fairly conservative, but it was also a cultural center of the Beat Movement. So when the counterculture movement gained steam across the Anglosphere in the 1960s, San Francisco was the place to be.
On January 14, 1967, a crowd of approximately 20-30,000 people gathered at the Polo Grounds in Golden Gate Park at what became known as the Human Be-In to suffer for fashion in the frigid San Francisco fog. In hindsight we understand this event to be the kickoff festivities of the Summer of Love.

The Human Be-In was the beginning of the story for thousands of people, many of whom would go on to take primary roles in San Francisco's revolution.
...
"When it started out, the city was antiblack, antigay, antiwoman. It was a very uptight Irish Catholic city," said Brian Rohan, [Michael] Stepanian's legal sidekick and another brawling protégé of Vincent Hallinan. "We took on the cops, city hall, the Catholic Church. Vince Hallinan taught us never to be afraid of bullies."
By taking on the bullies, the new forces of freedom began to liberate San Francisco, neighborhood by neighborhood.

^{- David Talbot, Season of the Witch (Free Press Publishing 2012})
As Acemoglu and Robinson repeatedly emphasize in this subreddit's bible, Why Nations Fail: Peace, Prosperity, Poverty, and Read Another Book (Crown Publishing Group, 2012), societies prosper when they produce inclusive institutions, and they collapse when they are subject to extractive institutions. But San Francisco progressivism, with its roots in the 1960s counterculture movement, sought a way out of this equation.
This movement believed the institutions of American culture at the time were extractive. But they blamed this on the very existence of the institutions themselves*.* They didn't try to replace extractive institutions with inclusive ones. Instead they imagined a society which was basically free of institutions entirely.

In this view one certainly couldn't trust the government or the church to dictate what experiences might be pleasurable or useful, so best to just allow or try everything. Some experiential and psychic explorers had wonderful insights and epiphanies, and they did break through to the other side, and some ended up with Jim Jones and the People's Temple.

^{- David Byrne, The Bicycle Diaries (Penguin Books, 2009})
This way of viewing the city was as a location for small, locally-grounded communities. Where interference from forces larger than the community brought only damage. This was fundamentally at odds with the global capitalist Manhattan-esque powerhouse that city planners envisioned for the place.
Where the planners were playing the role of Robert Moses, the new counterculture aligned with Jane Jacobs. They tended to believe, like her, that redevelopment, construction, change, etc...were threats. That in San Francisco's old 1800s construction there was community and culture, and that building over this old-ness would destroy that, as it had in the Fillmore when the city tried to get rid of all the black people...uh...blight. As Jacobs would put it:

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.
...
If a city area only has new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction.
...
If you look about, you will see that only operations that are well established, high-turnover, standardized or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts - studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of a seat and a table can absorb uneconomic discussions - these go into old buildings.

^{- from The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, Random House, 1961}
From this perspective, there was only one threat to what made San Francisco special, and it came in the form of a planning department permit.

To recapitulate the state of affairs circa 1970, the progrowth coalition had complete command of San Francisco's physical and economic development. The dream of remaking San Francisco into a West Coast Manhattan was rapidly taking solid form as skyscrapers went up, BART tracks were laid, and lands were cleared for redevelopment.
...
The progrowth regime accomplished much, for better and for worse. It changed the face of San Francisco. In doing so, however, it fostered resistance among those the regime threatened or whose own dreams of the city were ignored. In dialectical fashion, the progrowth regime created the conditions that gave rise to its nemesis, the slow-growth movement.

^{- from Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975 - 1991, Richard Edward DeLeon University Press of Kansas 1992}
So now we've got a lot of different coalitions in San Francisco. There's the new-age hippies, the Chinese immigrants, the black community, the El Salvadorians and the Mexicans. There's a new gay and lesbian community in the Castro. And they're all pretty much okay letting each other have their corner of the city, because the balance of power is split and balkanized. None holds enough power to threaten the other. But they all, to varying degrees, feel threatened by development. So they start to organize their opposition to the pro-growth regime.

Baghdad by the Bay is now the Balkans by the Bay. Everything is pluribus, nothing is unum. Hyperpluralism reigns. The city has no natural majority; its majorities are made, not found. That is a key to understanding the city's political culture: Everyone is a minority. That means mutual tolerance is essential, social learning is inevitable, innovation is likely, and democracy is hard work. Economic change has produced social diversity, and social diversity is the root of the city's political culture. One of the controlling objectives of the progressive movement has been to slow the pace of economic change to protect against threats to social diversity. The economic forces that helped create San Francisco's political culture could also destroy it. The first line of defense is the antiregime.
...
The ultimate function of the antiregime is to protect the community from capital. It is a regime with the "power to" thwart the exercise of power by others in remaking the city. The primary instrument of this power is local government control over land use and development. In San Francisco, these growth controls have achieved unprecedented scope in these types of limits they impose on capital. They are used to suppress, filter, or deflect the potentially destructive forces of market processes on urban life as experienced by people in their homes, neighborhoods, and communities.

^{- from Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975 - 1991, Richard Edward DeLeon University Press of Kansas 1992}
Since demand for housing in SF proper isn't really rising all that much due to suburbanization and white flight, shutting down this growth doesn't yet manifest in a visceral way in the form of rising housing prices. The paradigm of supply and demand is theoretical to this coalition because it does not have any tangible consequences. So they reject the theory and get to work passing new legal restrictions on development. They build powerful local interest groups to throw their weight around whenever a new development proposal arises for development in their communities. This policy and organizing infrastructure persists to this day.
But when suburban sprawl in the Bay Area hits the boundaries of the greenbelt and there's no more room to absorb new housing demand in the suburbs, and as the tastes of the American hipster return to the same kinds of cultural amenities Jane Jacobs described above, the equation shifts in a big way. Starting with the first tech boom in the 1990s.
TL;DR: In the postwar era, San Francisco blossoms culturally as an epicenter for radical liberal thought.

• In the stagnating ashes of the local manufacturing and shipping economy, the blue collar residences are taken over by a new pluralistic group of people from a vast array of demographics.
• Meanwhile, planners and politicians remake the city as an office hub to house the workforce of the suburban Bay Area as a whole.
• The radical populist pluralism of the residents of San Francisco proper clashes with this vision for the city and they build an anti-growth coalition to combat it.
• Because of the stagnating population this does not yet have consequences on housing costs - suburbanization is continuing to absorb regional demand rather than the city proper.
• These consequences are hidden for decades - long enough for these groups to re-write local development law and cement their anti-growth coalition into local institutions, a sort of Maginot Line against growth.
• Oh, and for just a split second, on Alcatraz, it looks like it might not be such a shitty place to be an Ohlone Indian, but then pretty much right away it is again.

Part Four: The Tech Boom and the Rise of the YIMBYs

A major impediment to a more efficient spatial allocation of labor is housing supply constraints. These constraints limit the number of US workers who have access to the most productive of American cities. In general equilibrium, this lowers income and welfare of all US workers.

^{- Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, "Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth," NBER Working Paper 21154, National Bureau of Economic Standards, Cambridge, MA, May 2015 (revised June 2015})
Jane Jacobs did a really good job explaining why, strictly from a cultural perspective, suburbs suck and cities are awesome. Weirdly for a long time a lot of people thought it was the other way around, but by the 1990s it wasn't cool to be all suburban anymore and it was way more punk rock to be in a city.
So people who worked in Silicon Valley - largely younger people, fresh out of college - started wanting to live in San Francisco and Oakland instead, because the rest of the Bay Area was (and still is) sterile and suburban.
When the personal computer became a household fixture and the internet started reaching the mass market, suddenly there was a lot more money to be made in computers. All of the sudden San Francisco's population went from slowly rising to rising pretty quickly again. In 1990 San Francisco's population was lower than it was in 1950. By 2000 it was higher. By 2010 it was a lot higher. Now it's over 20% higher than it was in 1990.
San Francisco has always been a pretty expensive place to live, but that was mostly because it wasn't that depressed economically, plus it was beautiful from an aesthetic perspective and the weather was pretty much the tits.
All of the sudden, though, it was still beautiful and the weather was still amazing, but it wasn't just "not that depressed economically" anymore. Suddenly it was a straight-up boomtown.
And it still only has a fraction of the population - and, crucially, housing stock - that the Bay Area as a whole does.
So this entire planning and political infrastructure had spent decades building in one direction, where people moving to the Bay Area for work would live in the suburbs. And in response this anti-growth regime of pluralistic populist left-wing hyper-local community groups succeeded in pretty much freezing development by law in San Francisco proper under the assumption that everyone would just go work in Silicon Valley instead. And then the cultural and economic inertia does a 180 on them. Now everyone wants to live in San Francisco even if they have to work somewhere else.
These shifts - some local, some national, some global - have concentrated themselves in an unprecedented way in a city of less than a million people, focused on the tip of a peninsula only 7 miles across. With so little room for these effects to manifest, they manifest with a vengeance. There is nowhere to spread them out across. They hit like a tall glass of Bacardi 151.
What this does to the housing prices is totally predictable.

California’s home prices and rents have risen because housing developers in California’s coastal areas have not responded to economic signals to increase the supply of housing and build housing at higher densities. A collection of factors inhibit developers from doing so. The most significant factors are:
- Community Resistance to New Housing. Local communities make most decisions about housing development.Because of the importance of cities and counties in determining development patterns, how local residents feel about new housing is important. When residents are concerned about new housing, they can use the community’s land use authority to slow or stop housing from being built or require it to be built at lower densities.
- Environmental Reviews Can Be Used to Stop or Limit Housing Development. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires local governments to conduct a detailed review of the potential environmental effects of new housing construction (and most other types of development) prior to approving it. The information in these reports sometimes results in the city or county denying proposals to develop housing or approving fewer housing units than the developer proposed. In addition, CEQA’s complicated procedural requirements give development opponents significant opportunities to continue challenging housing projects after local governments have approved them.
- Local Finance Structure Favors Nonresidential Development. California’s local government finance structure typically gives cities and counties greater fiscal incentives to approve nonresidential development or lower density housing development. Consequently, many cities and counties have oriented their land use planning and approval processes disproportionately towards these types of developments.
- Limited Vacant Developable Land. Vacant land suitable for development in California coastal metros is extremely limited. This scarcity of land makes it more difficult for developers to find sites to build new housing.

^{Mac Taylor, High Housing Costs, Causes and Consequences, California Legislative Analyst's Office, 2015}
Remember, this is all happening so fast that not only are the institutions built out of the antigrowth regime movement still exerting their power on development, the people who built them are. They're still alive and showing up to community meetings. Remember, if you were 20 in 1975, you're just barely at retirement age now.
It's easy to understand why these people aren't responding to the price signals that are ringing alarm bells to everyone else. If they're renting, they're protected by rent control - their rent price is fixed to a modest cost of living increase as long as they don't move. This means they are totally insulated from a rising rental market, even if the direct consequence of rent control is suppressing supply and causing prices to rise for everyone else.
And if they own instead of rent, wouldn't they be priced out from rising property taxes? Not in California they won't, thanks to Prop 13!*
^(\Prop 13 does not apply to forcible land transfers of tracts rightfully claimed by Ohlone Indians or their descendants)*
These economic incentives ensure that their interests remain the same as they were in 1975 - all upside for them to oppose growth, and no downside. And in the face of this economic incentive, even the Fern Gully fairy tale that developers are inherently anti-environment is hardly necessary to get them to support restrictions which have a negative consequence on the environment and the economy:

Not all change is good, but much change is necessary if the world is to become more productive, affordable, exciting, innovative, and environmentally friendly....At a local level, activists oppose change by fighting growth in their own communities. Their actions are understandable, but their local focus equips them poorly to consider the global consequences of their actions. Stopping new development in attractive areas makes housing more expensive for people who don't currently live in those areas. Those higher housing costs in turn make it more expensive for companies to open businesses. In naturally low-carbon-emissions areas, like California, preventing development means pushing it to less environmentally friendly places, like noncoastal California and suburban Phoenix. Local environmentalism is often bad environmentalism.

^{- from Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser, Penguin Group, 2011}
It's been long enough since the first tech boom, though, that today there are a lot of people for whom these incentives do not align.
If you have to move apartments for whatever reason, you lose rent control.
If you're a newcomer to the city, you never really got it in the first place.
If you're an environmentalist who understands how carbon emissions work, you want to see more sustainable infill.
Or, like me, if you're a native who has all these advantages but still wants the city to be a place where people can come and live and seek prosperity, regardless of their origins, you simply understand that this status quo must be broken.
This is where the YIMBY movement gets its start. The YIMBY movement is nearly global at this point, but the most well-publicized first-movers in the fight got started in San Francisco about 5 years ago.

In San Francisco...things get weird. Here the tech boom is clashing with tough development laws and resentment from established residents who want to choke off growth to prevent further change.
[Sonja] Trauss is the result: a new generation of activist whose pro-market bent is the opposite of the San Francisco stereotypes — the lefties, the aging hippies and tolerance all around.
Ms. Trauss’s cause, more or less, is to make life easier for real estate developers by rolling back zoning regulations and environmental rules. Her opponents are a generally older group of progressives who worry that an influx of corporate techies is turning a city that nurtured the Beat Generation into a gilded resort for the rich.
...
But the anger she has tapped into is real, reflecting a generational break that pits cranky homeowners and the San Francisco political establishment against a cast of newcomers who are demanding the region make room for them, too.
...
Many longtime San Franciscans view groups like [the San Francisco Bay Area Renter's Federation (SF BARF)] as yet another example of how the technology industry is robbing San Francisco of its San Francisco-ness. Far from the hippies of the 1960s, many of today’s migrants lean libertarian — drawn by start-up dreams or to work for the likes of Google or Apple, two of the world’s most valuable companies. They tend to share a belief, either idealistically or naïvely, depending on who is judging, that corporations can be a force for social good and change.
But BARF members are so single-minded about housing that they can be hard to label politically. They view San Francisco progressives as, in fact, fundamentally conservative. That is because, to the group members at least, progressive positions on housing seem less about building the city and more about keeping people like them out.

^{- Conor Dougherty, 'In a Cramped and Costly Bay Area, Cries to 'Build, Baby, Build', New York Times, April 16th, 2016}
All of the sudden a new coalition starts to form, drawing on the infrastructure of the old pro-growth urban regime and the influence of tech companies and young renters fed up with rising rental prices in the face of the demand.
SF BARF gives way to less eccentric and more mainstream organizations like YIMBY Action. These groups start releasing voter guides and organizing for pro-growth political candidates.
This shift is how San Francisco elected a YIMBY mayor, and how it elected, and then re-elected, the most YIMBY state representative in maybe the whole U.S.
Sen. Wiener's success at the state level has been a major turning point in the YIMBY fight. Escalating these reforms to the state level pulls small cities and towns out of their Prisoner Dilemma, whereby each individual city stands to benefit if everyone else builds housing, but stands to suffer a disproportionate amount of harm in the form of demand on their infrastructure and services if only they do.
He has built a pro-housing coalition with, among others, fellow Bay Area legislators Sen. Nancy Skinner (D - Oakland/Berkeley), Assemblymember David Chiu (D-San Francisco), and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D - Oakland/Berkeley). The YIMBY movement in Sacramento is now largely driven by urban Bay Area legislators, pushing against pro-suburb Republicans and substantial anti-gentrification coalitions from the Los Angeles area.
Housing development has accellerated in both San Francisco and Oakland on the back of new-found public support for housing supply growth. I have no reason to doubt this shift will continue as the grip of the old anti-growth regime loosens. It's inevitable once the incentives of the pluralistic components of the political coalitions shift.
Eventually the people with Prop 13 protections will stop owning their homes, one way or another. Eventually the people with pre-tech rents will move and the units will be rented again at market rate.
And when that happens to a large enough degree, the incentives driving the dominant political coalition will shift in earnest towards the evidence-based conclusions of economists and environmentalists. I'd go so far as to say we're past the beginnings of this, and maybe even past the turning point.
But in the mean time, San Francisco is a hotly contested development battlefield.
And to top it all off, if this sudden crunch wasn't already a recipe for capturing the national and global imagination, now it's happening right in front of the people who work at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit.
This makes the drama rife for all of us to watch unfold.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
^{Thank you for coming to my TED talk.}

Giants defensive lineman Leonard Williams dubbed Patrick Graham a genius after Sunday’s 17-12 win over the Seahawks. Here’s a closer look at the defensive coordinator’s brilliant game plan to shut down Russell Wilson, plus nine other thoughts on the statement victory: 1. There was one tenet of Graham’s game plan above all else: The Giants would not surrender explosive pass plays. But that’s easier said than done against an offense featuring Wilson and receivers D.K. Metcalf and Tyler Lockett.
The Giants mostly played Cover-2, Cover-3 and Cover-2 man, which has two safeties deep while everyone plays man coverage underneath. There’s nothing novel about that approach, but the Giants continued to do a good job disguising their coverages.
“They did a nice job of adjusting and changing the way that they played their coverages,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said. “They made it very multiple within the structure and gave us some problems.”
With the Giants taking away the deep shots that fuel the Seahawks offense, Wilson looked uncomfortable. He was forced to check down to tight ends and running backs as often as he targeted Metcalf and Lockett. That played into the Giants’ hands, as running back Chris Carson had a pair of drops, including one that deflected to cornerback Darnay Holmes for an interception. Wilson averaged 6.1 yards per attempt on Sunday after entering the game averaging 8.2 yards per attempt.
The Giants’ game plan could be described as bend but don’t break, but the defense didn’t do much bending. Though the focus was eliminating deep throws, the Giants swarmed to short passes as well. Lockett had a critical drop on Seattle’s final drive when he was drilled by safety Jabrill Peppers as a short pass over the middle arrived.
Every defense has a weakness, of course, and the Giants’ approach left them most vulnerable on intermediate routes. But those are the toughest throws for a quarterback to make, as he needs to get the ball over the first level of coverage and in front of the deep safeties.
Lockett paid the price for an intermediate catch on Seattle’s first possession, taking a bone-crunching hit from Peppers as he made a 24-yard catch along the sideline. Metcalf had a drop in traffic on a perfect pass from Wilson into an intermediate window in the fourth quarter.
There were other times that Wilson simply didn’t see open receivers (a good reminder that it doesn’t just happen to Daniel Jones). Part of that was because the pass rush kept Wilson guessing.
The emphasis on coverage prevented the Giants from blitzing much. When they did bring a player from the second level, they typically dropped someone from the line into a zone to minimize the holes in coverage.
Graham added a wrinkle when a player spied the elusive Wilson. Typically, that linebacker would bluff like he was rushing, which occupied an offensive lineman. The spy would then drop back to keep his eyes on Wilson, while the pass protection had been compromised. The spy recognized when to attack, with a delayed rush by linebacker Tae Crowder leading to a drive-killing sack by Williams late in the third quarter.
A tried-and-true method for combating Cover-2 defenses is to run the ball. It’s a simple concept: If a defense can’t stop the run in a Cover-2 shell, it will be forced to bring one of the safeties into the box. But the Giants’ personnel allows them to hold up better than most with a light box.
The Giants have stout, talented defensive linemen who make it tough to run inside the tackles. And linebacker Blake Martinez is a tackling machine in the middle of the defense who makes plays sideline-to-sideline.
The Giants had a few snaps with four defensive linemen on the field — Dalvin Tomlinson, Dexter Lawrence, B.J. Hill and Austin Johnson. That grouping wasn’t particularly effective, but it was a new wrinkle that highlighted the defensive personnel’s versatility.
The Giants spent the majority of their snaps in their nickel package. When safety Julian Love was the extra defensive back, he played deep, which allowed Peppers to play closer to the line.
Even with all of the configurations the Giants threw at Seattle, the run game was effective. Carson had 65 yards on 13 carries, but Seattle only had 15 hand-offs compared to 56 drop backs. Carroll surely questioned offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer about that imbalance, especially considering Carson’s success on the ground, the passing game’s struggles and the fact that Seattle led into the third quarter.
While Seattle ponders what went wrong, the Giants move forward with increased confidence after their defensive coordinator devised another genius game plan.
2. Carroll sounded genuinely perplexed by his offense’s struggles after Sunday’s game.
“I need to look at the film to see what the heck happened and why it was like that,” Carroll said. “I’m really surprised that this is how we looked against this game plan that they had. I thought we could do a lot of stuff that just didn’t happen for us. I need to see why and really break it down. I can’t tell you right now.”
Carroll wasn’t forthcoming about what he discovered after breaking down the game.
“These guys are going to be in the playoffs, too,” Carroll said Monday in explaining his reticence to share details about how the Giants stymied Seattle’s offense. “They look good. They’re going to make it, I would think. There’s some stuff I’m not going to tell you in answering your questions because I just can’t do that. That’s serving the media concern, but it’s not serving really the purpose. I’ve got to lay low on some of this stuff.”
If the playoffs started today, the Giants would host the Seahawks in the wild-card round, so Carroll’s caginess is understandable. It’s also telling about how far the Giants have come that the coach of one of the NFC’s best teams is wary of a playoff rematch.
3. Remarkably, Graham has had so much success this season despite not being able to play his preferred style of defense. Graham comes from the New England system that favors man coverage and that’s what he used heavily last season in Miami, but he has been forced to play far more zone this season.
James Bradberry has proven to be an elite No. 1 cornerback but questions at the other corner spots have deterred Graham from going man-heavy. The Giants have cycled three different starters through the No. 2 cornerback spot.
Corey Ballentine got two starts before getting benched and eventually released. Isaac Yiadom replaced Ballentine and was sent to the bench after two starts. Ryan Lewis made three starts before going on injured reserve with a hamstring injury, which gave Yiadom a second chance.
Yiadom has progressed to solid in his past five starts after being a liability early in the season. He’s one of many examples of a player performing above expectations this season.
Though Yiadom has become serviceable, this defense should make another leap if the Giants are able to acquire a bona fide No. 2 corner in the offseason.
4. Rookie safety Xavier McKinney played six defensive snaps on Sunday after playing five snaps in his season debut a week earlier.
Defensive backs coach Jerome Henderson explained last week the challenge of finding playing time for McKinney, who missed the first 11 weeks of the season with a broken foot.
“Each week we’ll try to ramp up his reps a little more, but you’ve got that fine line, quite frankly, because those guys that are playing are playing well,” Henderson said. “You don’t want to upset that, but then you definitely want to get him on the field.”
Graham has used McKinney as a fourth safety in defensive back-heavy packages on obvious passing downs. Those situations only occur so often, however, which explains McKinney’s limited workload.
It’s an understandable dilemma for the coaching staff. Though McKinney is likely a more talented player than Love, the second-year safety has far more experience and has settled in as a solid deep safety in three-safety packages with Peppers and Logan Ryan.
Judge hasn’t hesitated to play young players, but with McKinney having missed so much time and the defense playing so well, it’s hard to imagine his role increasing significantly over the final four games.
5. Longtime readers will recall how much I criticized former Giants coach Ben McAdoo for his over-reliance on 11 personnel (1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WR) in 2016. McAdoo used the three-receiver personnel grouping on a staggering 92 percent of the Giants’ snaps during that season, when the defense carried an offense that was fueled almost exclusively by explosive plays from Odell Beckham Jr.
With that in mind, imagine how refreshing it is to see the Giants mix their personnel groupings so often this season. Certainly, this offense isn’t perfect and mixing up personnel groupings isn’t a salve for all of the unit’s weaknesses. But the Giants’ variety shows that offensive coordinator Jason Garrett is willing to adjust.
The Giants used 10 personnel (1 RB, 0 TE, 4 WR) on three snaps in the first half on Sunday. That was the first time the Giants used a four-receiver package all season. They also frequently put backup quarterback Colt McCoy in empty formations.
The plan seemed to be spreading the Seahawks out to make reads clearer for McCoy. But it wasn’t effective, so the Giants pivoted to much heavier personnel groupings in the second half.
The Giants leaned heavily on 13 personnel (1 RB, 3 TE, 1 WR), which helped spring their run game for 190 yards. Darius Slayton was typically the lone wide receiver on the field in the 13 personnel groupings since the defense has to respect his deep speed.
Sterling Shepard played just 48 percent of the offensive snaps. The fifth-year receiver had never played fewer than 67 percent of the snaps in a game when healthy. He had just one catch for 22 yards on Sunday. Other than getting shut out in a game at Cleveland during his rookie season, Shepard had at least two catches in every game he finished during his career.
With McCoy at the helm, the Giants had to get creative. They even used a package on two plays with fullback Eli Penny at tailback and guard Shane Lemieux at fullback. Penny had eight yards on two carries out of that jumbo backfield. That package doesn’t need to become a regular part of the rotation, but it could be used for a play-action fake in a big moment down the road since teams will be keyed on stopping the run.
6. Judge outcoached Carroll, a Super Bowl champion, and is working his way into the coach of the year conversation. With that said, and in the interest of preventing Judge from getting a big head, what in the world was with the decision to use Dion Lewis late in the first half when the Giants were trying to run out the clock while backed up at their own 5-yard line?
It was mind-boggling to use a scatback in a clear run situation while leaving power backs Wayne Gallman and Alfred Morris on the sideline. And it’s not as if the Giants tried to trick the Seahawks into thinking they were throwing and then ran it with Lewis; they used 13 personnel on the first two plays of the drive.
Lewis ran it three straight times and gained 6 yards, forcing the Giants to punt from their own 11-yard line. Things took a disastrous turn when the Giants failed to pick up a stunt and Seattle’s Ryan Neal came free to block the punt as it left Riley Dixon’s foot at the goal line. The Giants were fortunate that the Seahawks botched the recovery of the loose ball and it squirted out of the end zone for a safety.
The blocked punt highlighted the puzzling decision, but it wasn’t a situation that required hindsight. Every coach gets a pass on the occasional brain fart, but that was a bizarre one by Judge and/or Garrett.
7. The special teams breakdowns in the past two weeks have been inexplicable. One theory offered in this comments section was that perhaps roster shuffling has caused some core special teamers to graduate to full-time roles on defense, leaving backups to take their place.
It was a plausible hypothesis but it isn’t supported by the evidence. Judge hasn’t reduced the special teams duties of players like Cam Brown and Carter Coughlin as their roles have increased on defense. For instance, the seven position players involved in the protection on the blocked punt — Brown, Penny, Nate Ebner, David Mayo, Devante Downs, Tae Crowder and Levine Toilolo — have all been core special teamers throughout the season.
Whatever the cause, it’s safe to assume Judge won’t have much patience with the special teams struggles. For all of the buzz about Judge getting more hands-on with the offensive line in recent weeks, the former special teams coordinator figures to get heavily involved in fixing the kicking game.
8. Judge gave the front office some love after Sunday’s win.
“I think they do a great job,” Judge said. “Really what I’m most interested in is just find us guys that we can develop. Find us a guy that has the skill set, tool set and the right mental makeup and attitude that we can work with. It’s important for us to be able to build a team that’s got that smart, tough, fundamentally sound scope that we’re looking to build with. We want to find guys who you can coach and you can do more than one thing. We want to find guys who are mentally and physically tough. I think they’ve done a good job of going out there and really digging and finding. We’ve got a lot of guys that maybe someone else may have thought was under the radar, but for us, they were right on our scope.”
Surely there will be debate over who deserves more credit for the Giants’ resurgence, Judge or Gettleman. But if they get along — and there are no indications they don’t — that shouldn’t be a concern for them.
Even the biggest Gettleman critics (ahem) have to acknowledge his strong offseason. Bradberry, Ryan, Martinez and Graham Gano were home-run free agent signings and the early returns on this draft class have been encouraging.
Now, that solid offseason doesn’t wipe out all of Gettleman’s questionable moves. None of his significant acquisitions from the 2018 offseason are contributing to this season’s success, which is bewildering considering the Giants had the No. 2 pick in that draft and made significant investments in numerous veterans.
But Gettleman got a reprieve when Pat Shurmur was fired after last season. So the evaluation will mostly focus on his time with Judge (with a heavy dose of Jones factored in). So far, that partnership has shown promise.
9. The Giants once again won the turnover battle, intercepting a pass and recovering a fumble on Sunday. A Colt McCoy interception that went through tight end Evan Engram’s hands was the Giants’ lone turnover.
The Giants are tied for third in the league with 20 takeaways. They have 10 takeaways and just two turnovers in the past four games.
The emphasis the Giants have placed on creating turnovers is evident. When rookie defensive end Niko Lalos recovered a botched snap on Sunday, Peppers gave an assist by preventing Wilson from grabbing the ball. The Giants forced two other fumbles that were recovered by the Seahawks.
Take note of how the Giants try to strip the ball when making tackles and how players are in position to capitalize on tipped passes. The Giants’ improvement in takeaways isn’t happening by accident.
10. Judge predictably didn’t make a definitive statement on Jones’ status for Sunday’s game against the Cardinals. But Judge said, “We’re going to give him every opportunity to go on the practice field this week and show that he can defend himself on the field properly.”
Based on the progress Jones made with his strained hamstring last week, all signs point to him being back in the lineup on Sunday. Judge just wants to see in practice that Jones’ mobility isn’t compromised.
The back injury that knocked Martinez out of Sunday game isn’t believed to be serious. Speaking generally about injuries coming out of the game, Judge said, “It doesn’t look like there is necessarily anything serious.”

2020 Hungarian GP Free Practice 3 and Qualifying Debrief - /Formula1 Editorial Team
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• FP3: UnmeshDatta26 and showstopperNL
  
• Qualifying: TheStateOfIt, Death_Pig, and showstopperNL
  

Results:

• Free Practice 3
  
• Qualifying
  

Discussion Threads:

• Free Practice 3
  
• Qualifying
  

FP3 - Rush Hour in Budapest

As is customary at the Hungaroring, traffic was an issue for the drivers, with almost all of them trying to run their hot laps in the same 20-minute window.
Lando Norris, who received treatment for bruising in his chest and back during the week, held up Lewis Hamilton on a fast lap, but he was hardly along, as many others had issues with letting drivers on a fast laps through. As of this writing, no penalties were assessed, but grid drops are always a danger for the Hungarian GP.
Mercedes continued to look impressive through FP3. Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton trading fastest laps, with Bottas topping the leaderboard at the conclusion of last practice, with Hamilton less than 0.1 behind. The car looks very fast and very stable, especially in Sector 3 — the W11 looks to be on rails this weekend.
The same cannot be said for the Red Bulls. The team even broke the overnight curfew to work on the car, as they search for answers. Max Verstappen and Alex Albon fought the car almost everywhere, highlighted by yet another spin for Max, identical to his earlier spins in Austria and winter testing. The car appears to be very hard to handle coming out of slow corners, as the drivers repeatedly lose the rear as they roll back into the throttle. The Dutchman has been noticeably unhappy this weekend, complaining about understeer even after his roll bars and ride height were changed.
Racing Point are looking poised to continue their strong start, even if their drivers ran the second-fewest laps for a team. Perez showed blistering pace on low fuel with a time of 1:15:598 midway through the session to finish as third best. Lance Stroll faced a few issues with controlling the back end of the car through the twisty turns of the Hungaroring, but still managed P5, behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.
For the Ferrari outfit, they had a surprisingly stable hour of practice, with the two drivers finding their form and groove around a circuit with lower power demands. Vettel looked to use the high downforce setup to his advantage at the high-speed turns especially. Overall, Leclerc looked to get the car on the grip, especially with a late tailwind heading into the main straight. The car looks decently paced as the Ferrari power unit’s lack of power hurts performance less, especially with the new aero package for this week.
Over at Williams, George Russell had a great practice, highlighted by a 1:16:847 lap on a low fuel qualifying simulation ending up P14. His pace on low fuel has been the talk of the town ever since his amazing run to qualify into Q2 at the Styrian GP, and he looks set to display that pace today.
Smooth operations were going on at McLaren as Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris look stable through Friday and Saturday practice. Lando Norris finished P7 and Carlos Sainz, P11.
The rest of the teams had fairly uneventful sessions, apart from Pierre Gasly reporting loss of power in his AlphaTauri.

Qualifying Predictions

The biggest winners today look to be the Ferraris. The car has shown some decent pace and stability in the cold conditions in FP3 and Vettel showed his trademark resilience in the wet yesterday. If the engineers and tacticians can give them the right strategies, Leclerc and Vettel could bounce back from a terrible visit to Austria.
The biggest losers going into qualifying have to be Red Bull. After a disappointing first race, a better Styrian GP result, and their usual great pace in Hungary, it was expected that they would challenge Mercedes here. Ultimately, the team broke curfew, changed Verstappen’s roll bars, but both drivers still reported vibrations, understeer, in addition to their oversteer issue coming out of slow corners, and seem to be off the pace of the Mercedes-powered cars at the front.
Taking a wild stab, George Russell will make it out of Q1 two weekends in a row, even if it is dry. His Williams looked good in the wet and has been looking solid in practice.

Qualifying

The competition was thick and fast in the high-speed track in the hills of Styria, but as we move to the valley near Budapest to tackle a twisty, technical racetrack, we can finally see a true test on how the 2020 cars machines manage double-digit turns (we all know you are compensating with your turn numbers, Austria).

Q1 - Go out at the right time

Everyone was thinking timing as Q1 approached, this section’s title being the most valuable tip for the first part of Qualifying. With a preposterous 90% chance of rain, teams bolted out of the pitlane to set at least one lap good enough for Q2 before an eventual rain ruined their day.
Verstappen set one of the first timed laps, but did little to dispel the fear of Red Bull underperforming on low-speed circuits, which have traditionally been part of their strength. Max’s time was duly crushed by Hamilton, the Mercedes quickly re-establishing dominance over the field.
Once enough laps were completed, Haas looked weak again, with their drivers being pushed into the bottom 5 right away.
That dreaded “90% chance of rain” forecast seemed to come true as Gasly reported a few drops here and there, while the FOM cameras caught Vettel wiping his visor. There were scary rumours of the track starting to evolve towards a wet session, not dissimilar to last week’s Styrian showers during qualifying as well.
This was going to be worrisome for some, most notably for Alexander Albon, whose complaints about Red Bull’s stability was broadcast for the world to hear. Other people looking in danger were the Alfa Romeos, both Haas cars, and Williams, with Russell’s Q2 hopes seemingly in danger. With a few minutes left to go, with rain most definitely imminent, Russell went out to attempt one last fast lap, before the track evolved into a river.
And by golly, did the track did evolve. With the rain not falling, the track evolved into a permanently active Mario Kart booster panel.
Russell’s “last gasp attempt” was good for third quickest. Yep, Williams was briefly third. It was a stunning lap, unquestionably, but all teams quickly realized the track was not going to be soaked, but rather it was going to be speedy.
Everyone took to the track in the final minutes to take advantage of the newfound fast conditions. Times tumbled so much that even Sebastian Vettel was on the bubble at one point. Sure, the Ferraris were struggling overall (though not as much as Austria), but this just showed how fast track conditions were evolving.
Things looked a bit iffy for Vettel, but he was able to maintain the pace in S3 and finished fourth. The losers of the track evolution game, though, seemed to be the usual suspects this year, with Haas and Alfa Romeo seeing all their cars out, with Daniil Kvyat being a rather ignominious inclusion to the Q1 dropouts in the AlphaTauri.
Yes, that means what you are thinking, dear reader: BOTH Williams made into Q2 for the first time since the 2018 Italian GP. The renaissance seems to be real, for the delight of their fans (and for anyone that loves F1’s history).
The winners, though, were not Mercedes. Hamilton and Bottas did go out in those final few minutes but took it very easy once they realized they were safe. The fastest in Q1, though, were their last year doppelgängers at Racing Point, with Perez carrying the hype of his fans (and nation) begging for his stay in F1 to the top of the time sheets.

Q2 - Stay Stable

The second qualifying stint started with the stewards noting an alleged incident between Sainz and Antonio Giovinazzi would be investigated after the session, the former being accused of blocking the Alfa Romeo driver (as of posting, no decision has been made, but both drivers were summoned to the Stewardsno further action on Sainz), as Russell was the first one out, seemingly eager to build on his incredible Q1 pace on an empty track.
From there on out, it was a straight-forward session for most teams, the exception being the Red Bull family.
Over at Mercedes, it was indeed a straight-forward affair. Both drivers took the track on Medium tires and both proceeded to obliterate last year’s lap record. It was a mighty display by the German team and it is hard to imagine that the team will not do the same tomorrow.
McLaren and Racing Point also had quiet session, comfortably putting their cars in Q3, setting up an interesting battle with the Ferraris, who got through to Q3 for the first time this season.
For the Red Bull teams, it was good news, followed by terrible ones. While Gasly took his AlphaTauri into the top ten, the man who replaced him at Red Bull, languished in 14th, 2 tenths away. Albon could only improve to P13 (at one point asking the team to not release him into traffic again, the Thai driver clearly unhappy with his day), knocked out in Q2 and likely putting a wrench into Red Bull’s plans for the race.
His teammate was reporting understeer but did manage to join the Mercedes drivers as the only ones to get into the 14s. That momentum would quickly vanish later, so it appears that whatever is troubling their car is not an easy fix.
All was not well over at the sister team either. Even if Gasly would ultimately reach Q3 (making his teammate’s Q1 exit even more ignoble), the French driver came into the pits reporting he was scared his engine would break, which ended his running for the day, while likely creating even more tension for the team going into the race.
Williams still impressed, with Russell ending the session P12, beating Albon, Ricciardo, and his teammate, which hopefully will serve as part of Claire Williams’ early birthday present.

Q3 - Mercedes 1-2-3-4

We headed into the final rung of qualifying with McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes, and Racing Point all with both cars in Q3, and Red Bull and AlphaTauri with one each, with Gasly not taking to the track due to his PU issues.
The fight for first was clearly going to be a Mercedes internal battle, as the Black Arrows were head and shoulders above the rest. Ultimately, both drivers went into the 13s (the only ones to do so), with Hamilton prevailing with 1:13.447, which is now the lap record around the Hungaroring, with Bottas managing a 13.530. Again stamping their authority over the field, Hamilton has now matched Michael Schumacher’s record of seven poles in Hungary and reaching 90 pole positions for his career. With the team almost a second ahead of everyone else, the question looks to be who will win the WDC this season, Lewis Hamilton or Valtteri Bottas.
As the Mercedes pair blitzed the track to go into the 73-second lap territory, Perez had his first attempt deleted for track limit liberties at Turn 4, while Stroll impressed with a 1:14.671 lap.
Verstappen was heard asking dejectedly if that was it for them. Ultimately, the Red Bull could only muster P7, so it seems the answer was “Yes” to his question.
With 5 minutes to go, the predicted rain threatened again, so teams scrambled to get out before a possible downpour. The Ferraris could not match Stroll’s pace, Vettel going 4th fastest, with his teammate 5th, but once Perez had a valid lap in, both were knocked back into P5 and 6 (from where they will start tomorrow).
It is another impressive result by Racing Point, but even more so for Stroll. The oft- maligned driver has now beaten his teammate twice in a row, with his best qualifying result since Italy 2017 with Williams. The Renault protest still looms, but for now, it is clear that Racing Point will be a tough nut to crack for the other mid-field teams.
McLaren was another team that could not contend with Racing Point this weekend. Although they have shown strong form so far this season, the same pace does not appear possible at the Hungaroring, with Norris and Sainz only managing 8th and 9th best above the stationary AlphaTauri of Gasly.

Looking back at our pre-qualifying predictions

Winner: Ferrari
Ferrari certainly looked better today, but still far off Mercedes, who are the big winners yet again. Ferrari does look better than Red Bull this weekend, so there is progress, but Racing Point has gone even further, so there is still a lot of work to be done at the Scuderia.
Loser: Red Bull
Oh dear, oh dear, Red Bull. The prediction turned out to be correct. Albon out in Q2, Verstappen only managing P7. Both drivers were very annoyed at the team and the car. Their plan to be the main challenger to Mercedes seems all but impossible here, as they can barely contend with Racing Point and Ferrari.
With Red Bull going backwards on a track they usually excel, Gasly facing engine issues, and Kvyat and Albon not anywhere near their usual or expected pace, heads must be scratching inside the Honda and Red Bull family. With a shortened season, it looks like they challenge to Mercedes is quickly fading.
Wild Stab: George Russell to Q2
OH MY GOD!!!!!!! They actually pulled it off. Not only with George Russell but also Nicholas Latifi making it out of Q1. What an excellent performance for Williams. The race will be tough, obviously, but hopefully the team can (with or without the help of a spot of rain) score points on merit here.

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Hello again! Midterms are finished for the moment, so I have some time to write again. I tried to tie together a couple of the ideas I've been batting around, please let me know what you think, y'all's comments are INCREDIBLE and always make me think about these issues in a new way. You people are fantastic!
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Dear Ranger—
Ever so good to hear from you, we do enjoy trying to keep up with the social whirl of your community.
If you can spare a moment, we haven’t heard from our turtle-keeping friends down the lane in the littlest bit, and we’d love to have a chat with them if it should prove convenient.
Do tell us who else has been attending your lovely parties, the conversation is simply sparkling and the guest lists dazzling!
All our love,
Felicity and Rose
“What’s it say, Skipper?” Ramirez asks from the table, where he’s sitting pretending to look unconcerned with fifteen other conspicuously-nonchalant prisoners.
“They want us to look for tanks,” I answer, folding the scrap paper Dawson had transcribed the message on and popping it my mouth.
“X-13s, specifically,” I mumble as I chew. Our assignment causes a cascade of speculation, as everyone rapidly proposes and discards increasingly outlandish reasons for the movement of the rare weaponry. X-13s were fearsome beasts—well armored and better armed, and faster than vehicles so large had any right to be. The Russian infantry that first encountered them called them Reapers.
They were also apparently extraordinarily expensive to manufacture, and as Russian infantry destroys anything it gets within ten feet of, the Z’lask now deployed them only for the most strategically significant engagements. If we were being instructed to look specifically for them, that meant a big planetside confrontation was imminent.
A feeling of furious frustration welled up with the thought, everything in me bellowing to get out of this fucking camp and back in the fight. A heavy cruiser with a good crew and tritium-tipped railgun rounds could lay down an orbital bombardment to make the Devil cower.
But we’re needed here. You think you’ll help anyone by letting those tanks go unlocated?
Right.
The Z’lask, bound by the Code that I’d come to decide was more vanity than honor, had even less concept of espionage than they did of escape, and so had plonked their POW camps down right where the prisoners were brought in: close by major staging areas that received traffic from multiple sectors. In just our short time playing spies, we’d caught divisions on the move, scouting patrols resupplying, and once even a heavy dreadnought sneaking around—so large she was visible in orbit from the ground.
We had stolen radio components from the almost pathetically clueless Z’lask our second week in camp, and our comms officers Dawson and Xi had rigged up between them an Albatross call—a transmittereceiver that could send old-fashioned scrambled radio signals to one of the fleet of wandering listener probes the espionage-savvy humans maintained—nicknamed Albatrosses—which could then convert the message into an FTL signal and boost it to the UN datanet, whence it would be routed into military intelligence channels, unscrambled, and make it to an analyst’s inbox in time for their breakfast muffin.
For their part, the spooks sent us plain-word coded messages telling us what to be on the lookout for, and we did our best to oblige them. We’d gotten the impression that we were good at our strange new assignment, and every so often they even sent us care packages. The best had come three weeks after we’d spotted the dreadnought. We’d received relief boxes containing chocolate-chip cookies and, concealed in one of the box’s liners, a newsite printout detailing a successful ambush over a key Z’lask mining planet, culminating in the destruction of the heavy dreadnought Honor of the Code, enabling the taking of the world by combined American and Chinese forces.
The Houston sends her love.
It is weird, though. X-13s on the move…an ominous sign. I wonder where they’re headed, if they’re going to defend a Z’lask stronghold, or to attack a human one.
Well, we could go looking tonight.
“OK. Stinger, it’s your turn as spotter, right?” At the fighter pilot’s enthusiastic nod, I continue. “Great. Dawson, you bring the radio. Ramirez, pick two friends and come cover us. I don’t have to tell y’all how important this run is. X-13s mean something big in the wind, and it’ll be a huge advantage for our buddies up there if they know how many are coming.”
The meeting breaks up, prisoners drifting back to writing letters, playing cards, or napping. Some go outside to resume the fanatically rough games of soccer, football, rugby, or an unholy hybrid of the three that provide cover for the disposal of dirt from the tunnels. We’re no longer allowed to play baseball, when the batters ran out of windows to target Petty Officer Hilts displayed his prowess by hitting what would have been an easy triple—if it hadn’t connected with a guard’s head. The guard was still in the hospital and Hilts was still in solitary.
The day drags. There’s little to do in a prisoner of war camp, even one in which the prisoners are running an underground spy operation. It only takes around fifteen minutes to receive, transcribe, and decode our orders, and less than an hour to compose, encode, and transmit our reports.
Then nothing.
To be fair, we have to maintain the tunnels, plan our sightseeing trips, and be on guard every second for hints we’ve been discovered, but the days here are 27 hours long. For people used to standing watches on a warship amid the frantic ebb and flow of combat, solving problems and having new ones instantly arise, the steady, slow burn of unrelieved stress is uniquely wearing. No one is really in control of their fate in the Navy, whether it’s war or peace, but that’s nothing compared to being property.
I hadn’t realized how lucky I was to have always lived free, the same way you don’t realize how lucky you are to breathe until you’re choking. Being captured was a constant grind of helplessness and humiliation.
The Z’lask don’t exactly mistreat us, though they can be nasty if sufficiently provoked, preferring instead to act as though we’re invisible. Some days I can’t decide if the silent treatment might not actually be worse—nothing to break the smothering monotony. I know that what we’re doing is fighting back, that we are substantially, materially helping the war effort, but that doesn’t change the fact that I feel completely powerless.
But, I have to keep reminding myself, I have nothing I can justifiably complain about. I’m out of the danger my friends faced daily, I’m being treated well, and I’m running an important surveillance operation. And you know, not being able to complain might just be the worst of all; bitching is a way of life in the Navy.
And so, as we wait for the planet’s ugly sun to set, no distraction can hold the attention, or alleviate the crushing, cutting, stinging tension and anticipation. It’s like waiting for the first shot to be fired as battle groups close, only permanent, unbroken.
My God, you’re whiny.
But, as it inevitably does, darkness falls, and we’re locked in for the night. The lights in the barracks cut out and the lights at the fence blaze on, and Stinger and I jump for the tunnel connecting the women’s barracks (the Z’lask sharing male/female biology, and being more than willing to apply Article 25 of the Geneva Convention) with Barracks #6, from whence we stage our little excursions, given its privileged view of the guardhouses and proximity to the fence.
We meet up with the marines and Dawson at the other end, and after a quick word with Carter, who watches the entrance, we dive down into darkness again, crawling with agonizing, arduous slowness through the narrow tunnel. My way is made even more difficult by my “backup plan” that I push in front of me—it needs to stay cushioned from shock, if possible. At least I don’t have Ramirez’s problem, I can hear him grunting and cursing ahead of me as he struggles to fit his six-foot-eight, 250-pound frame through the tiny tunnel.
Yay being short!
Nope. Being short still sucks. Especially when the commandant’s eight-foot-ten*.*
Damn lizards. Anytime I say something stupid, he literally looks down on me.
Getting through the tunnel feels like eternity, and I’m always surprised when I emerge that what seems so long is over so quickly. We come out in the woods (deciduous, thick-growing, lots of underbrush, kinda like home…) about twenty yards into the treeline. Without speaking, we form up and slide off into the shadows, moving silently under the incentive of discovery. It isn’t a terribly long hike to the staging area, and we stop at the top of a hill that drops off sharply to the cleared ground before the base's fence. We hang back in the brush, choosing a thicket and spreading out into our positions: Stinger up a tree to observe, Dawson below her to record what she sees, the three marines into the darkness around us, tuned for any whisper of detection. I sit with my back to a rock, cradling my backup plan.
“OK, so, tanks….I see a bunch of shuttles, Whiskey-class, yeah, they’re being loaded…something bulky, can’t really make it out, could be the tanks….can’t one of you fuckers take off those tarps?” Stinger subsides into profanity-laced muttering.
Minutes—or maybe it’s years—go by until Stinger abruptly speaks again. “Yep, those’re the tanks, someone just took the tarp off one, it’s an X-13 all right, I’d know that silhouette anywhere. So there’s gotta be one, two—” Stinger continues counting, and with every number my heart sinkers farther. Eventually she determines that all of the shuttlecraft crammed onto the base’s sprawling launchpads are carrying them, and gives a final tally of a full division aboard.
That’s somewhere’s death warrant.
Dawson wastes no time, powering up his equipment and making a terse, urgent report. Our analysts should get a nasty surprise about 24 hours from now.
Can this day get any worse….
I shouldn’t have had that thought. I should never, ever have that thought, because as I do, it does.
I hear the first high, throaty whine of an engine spooling up. We watch with horror as the shuttlecraft—loaded heavy with deadly cargo intended for our species—come to life, exhaust ports glowing with ghastly, beautiful menace in the night. The whines rage into roars as the first thunders into the air, bellowing with power as it throttles up and burns hard, followed by its fellows, one after the other after the other, almost endless.
They’re terrible as they roar into the atmosphere, stretching out long and evil as they pitch for orbit. Wherever they’re going, these ugly machines represent the effort of an entire species to break my own.
And I’m stuck on the ground, out of the fight.
It’s an eviscerating feeling, and for the first time, I despair.
For the first time, I understand why prisoners lose their minds in captivity. From this hideous helplessness, insanity would be a release.
I can’t do this…I can’t take this anymore….
And a memory comes up unbidden in my mind.
The evening before the First Earth Expeditionary Force sailed, Admiral William C. Fletcher had addressed all 500,000 of us. I remember what he said.
“Gentlemen,” he’d begun, turning slowly to survey everyone assembled. “Good evening. I wanted to speak to you tonight, before we embark, to make sure you all know what we are going to do. This is a historic day for humanity: for the first time in our long and bloody history, we go to war not against each other, but united. We go to war not because of our own well-known greed, stupidity, or hatred, but because of the inscrutable motives of an alien race. Evidently, the Z’lask do not have a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, or perhaps they did not care to submit their reasons to a candid galaxy.”
Smirking wryly, he starts to pace, hands clasped behind his back.
“However, while we do not know their motives, we do know their intentions. They are all too familiar: the Z’lask march to subjugate us. They wish to conquer us, control us, and if necessary, exterminate us.”
He lets the silence hang, then drives ahead.
“Stakes such as these are, unfortunately, not unfamiliar in human history. Many times before tyrants of one kind or another have wished to dehumanize the human race. Some would have had us returned to animals, to be unthinking, brutish, and brutal. Some would have had us converted to machines, to walk the earth without our hearts. Then as now, these small-minded, cowardly beings began their assaults by attacking that which they most fear—our rights, the rights you now defend: life, freedom, peace.”
He stops, surveys his audience, and continues.
“It’s natural, before a fight, to compare yourself to your opponent, to look for strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages. With an enemy so alien, such a study becomes a comparison of birthrights—what each species is fundamentally, innately capable of.
“Humanity’s birthright is pursuit. Pursuit of happiness, pursuit of progress, pursuit of peace.”
He pauses to grin. “And as we say in the Navy, pursuit of all who threaten it.”
The he’s off again. “And in all its millennia-long pursuits, humanity has shown that its distinguishing endowment—what we possess which no other species can match—is endurance. Endurance past all reason, endurance beyond all hope, endurance through all adversity. And that is why we will win.”
He’s moving faster now, head lowered and eyes shining.
“The Z’lask, as you know, adhere to their Code. They cannot live, act, or think without its strictures. They have lost all capacity for adaptation or innovation. They are static. You will find them doctrinaire enemies, unimaginative in their tactics and predictable in their movements. They will not know how to react to chaos like us.”
He grins wickedly.
“And they will not be able to endure. They are brave. They are strong. They will be a formidable adversary—well equipped, trained, and led. They will fight viciously. However, they will tire, as they suffer the losses inherent to war, and meet those old friends of humanity: pain, death, and defeat.”
He stares us down to be sure we understand.
“Their Code tells them that these great teachers are shameful; to be avoided, ignored. They will not be able to overcome them, hone them, turn them into weapons, as we do. As you will do. And so they will collapse under the weight of the same misconceived Code that appears to have driven them to this conflict. In my opinion that’s justice, and the armies of humanity have sworn to deliver justice.”
His tone becomes somber.
“Many of you here today, about to embark on this great undertaking of humankind, will not return. Many of you will not return in one piece. None of you will return as you are today. All of you will have to endure blood, pain, grief, suffering—and continue giving it back worse to your enemy!”
He’s thundering now, striding about the stage.
“These lizards don’t know what they’ve done! They don’t know what they’ve done going to war with the race born to pursue. We’ve pursued our rights through millennia of ignorance, centuries of intolerance, decades of delusion, and depths of oppression and tyranny and misery these posturing scaly bastards couldn’t begin to imagine. No matter what the challenge, always we have found somewhere within us the capacity to persevere, to adapt, to triumph. This is your heritage, gentlemen. Your rights, your capacity, your pursuit—and the limitless endurance with which we will win this war.”
He comes to a stop, sweeps the spellbound audience once with his eyes.
“Good luck, gentlemen. Remember that the hopes and dreams of countless earthbound ancestors, and the prayers of every human being wherever they are in this galaxy, sail with you. Dismissed.”
As the roar from the engines fade, so too does the memory.
I take a deep breath, feeling steadier than I have in a long time. It’s easy to lose your way in the dark, to forget what you’re fighting for. But being reminded somehow makes up for the desolation of being adrift.
Well? You’re in command here. What are you going to do?
“All right, guys,” I say, hearing my voice in the low snarl it sinks into when my ship is heeling to bring her broadside to bear, target falling into my sights. They look around, and I see them responding, remembering what we’d all forgotten, and bracing up stronger for it.
“We’ve called this in, they’re in the fleet’s hands now. But since we’ve completed our espionage for the evening—”
I feel my old grin unfurl.
“Who’s up for a little sabotage?”
​
So how'd I do? Any criticism is welcome!

I had always been a shy kid growing up. I got teased a lot because of my thin frame and slender appearance. The kids used to call me Sticky Freddy because of this. Even the teacher joined in and would always make jokes from time to time, making me even more less interested in engaging myself with people. There was one kid named Gerard Pouevront who always picked on me and made High School feel like hell on earth. For some unknown reasons, I was his favorite punching bag. The other kids were too afraid of him that they would not dare stand up to him. His father was the richest man in town and their family had a bad reputation of dealing with nuisances their own way. There were rumours circulating at the time that the Pouevronts hired a gang of mafia to guard their house and properties and to deal with their enemies. Everyone in town was scared shitless of them.
I remember thinking that one day when I grow up, I am going to leave this shithole of a place and move somewhere else. Then I am going to be super smart and super strong and I am going to return to avenge myself. I am going to make Gerard Pouevront pay for torturing me in High School. But of course, life is not that predictable. I did move out of town after High School and continued on my journey to adulthood with mental scars from my early adolescence. After many years living in the city, I gradually became more confident in my own skin. Soon the name Gerard Pouevront had ceased to evoke fear in me to the point I no longer felt a sudden pang of nausea at the mention or thought of it.
I took various jobs to pay for my tuition fees at university and I did very well. When I did return to my town, I was told that Gerard had got killed in a horrible kayaking accident many years ago, only a few weeks after our high school graduation. His parents moved away after the death of their beloved only son. And later I found out that Gerard had enrolled at the same university in the same city I had been living in and had already been accepted.
Ironic, isn’t it? If the accident had never happened, he would have continued on his bullying terror and driven me mad. But now come to think of it, I realized something. A delicate thread in this complicated and vulnerable scheme of the universe. A thread of fate whose end had unintentionally latched on to Gerard’s brief lifetime because of me.
The accident that had claimed Gerard’s life would have never happened if I had not decided to go fishing before my departure to the city. He had overheard me telling a friend that I was going to spend time with my cousin down at the lake. Of course, he thought it would be a good opportunity to kick the shit out of me for the last time when nobody else was around. But at the last minute I changed my mind about it and decided to spend my last days in town helping my uncle’s at the dairy and earning some more money for my forthcoming journey. Gerard of course, being ignorant and always thirsty for bloodshed, showed up at the lake waiting for me. But I never did.
I had never really planned on hurting him physically if I ever returned to this town. The worst would have been me calling him out on his bullying in public, like at a school reunion event or something to humiliate him. But life works in a mysterious way.
I still come to visit my parents from time to time but I have never really made any effort whatsoever to reconnect with my high school friends. They are merely a painful reminder of a miserable childhood I don’t wish to revisit.
Bullying transcends the boundary of time and space. Indeed, people like Gerard Pouevront are everywhere. I still have to deal with them from time to time in my life. But I am much stronger and smarter now. Though I have to say what I experienced in my early years of adulthood are still affecting me until today. Gerard Pouevront may be long gone, but the same terror that he brought with him wherever he went still persists. For me, it was in the form of a horrible and mean-tempered man who also happened to be my boss at work.
I loved doing my job. But his tendency to lose his cool so easily was making it hard for me to do it. I dreaded going to work every morning. I dreaded answering every phone call just in case it was from him. He would call you names and shout at you for simply ‘not being quick enough’ or letting the phone ring twice before answering it. One day I decided I had had enough. I confronted him during a meeting and called him out on his shitty behaviours and walked away. It felt so good. For the first time in my life, instead of running away or letting myself being walked over, I decided to stand up for myself and face my bully.
And this was how it all started.
After I quit my job, I started to go back to my old hobbies and I even visited my parents a few times before my trips to various places across Europe. Then I impulsively purchased a two-way ticket to this beautiful island in the tropics. As soon as I got there, I started to feel like being born again. Rows and rows of green trees and beautiful beaches with white sand glittering in the sun as far as the eyes can see greeted me everywhere I went. The fresh clean air made me feel so alive and happy.
For the first time since I graduated from university, I was genuinely happy again. Genuinely free. I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted. Maybe it had all been what I needed all this time. To escape from life for a while and enjoyed time with myself.
The following day after my arrival, I was already soaking up the sun by the pool at this inn where I was staying with a bottle of cold beer in my hand. I befriended two German tourists named Johannes and Nadine on my first day at the inn. I initially thought they were a couple but Nadine told me they were only second cousins though the way they kept touching each other was making me suspicious of it.
On my third day, as we lazied around the pool soaking up the sun, Johannes informed me of this strange place deep in the forest the locals considered a sacred place.
“There is a secret pool behind the hills. Not too many people know about it. We often go there to meditate and to clear our minds.”
“Just the two of you?” I asked.
“There would be the three of us, if you decided to join us.” he flashed an enigmatic smile on his thin lips.
“Uhm… I don’t know…” I hesitated. “How do we get there?” I tried to sound indifferent though in my head I was actually considering his invitation.
“We know the way.” Nadine chimed in.
“Yes, it is a sacred place. You have to take all your clothes off before entering it. They normally do not let strangers in there. But… lucky you, you’re with us. So no problem there.” Johannes raised his eyebrows.
My thoughts went straight to this beautiful hidden paradise in the middle of the forest where I could see Nadine’s naked body lying down in the grass that made her beautiful tanned skin stand out starkly against the green.
“Come join us tomorrow!"
“Err, sorry… what?” I asked, in my head Nadine and I were already wrestling hard in the grass.
“It’s called Lembah Tidur.”
“What is?”
“The secret place behind the hills over there. Right beneath the waterfall.” He pointed towards the direction of the gigantic hill formations behind me that looked menacingly tall yet beautiful.
“Well it sounds like a really cool place but… “ I paused indecisively for a bit. “I am not sure…”
“I’d be happy if you can come, Fred!” said Nadine suddenly. Her voice sounded deep and sweet. And I particularly enjoyed how she pronounced my name rolling the R like that. Also, the fact that she used the word ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ was already making my heart beat faster. If joining them meant that I got to see her naked, then I had no other choice.
“I mean I don’t know you guys. Things happen. No offence.”
“We’re regulars here. Ask the staff if you don’t believe me.” Johannes shrugged, obviously not wanting to let me go that easy.
“I am kidding. Ha ha ha. Oh my god. Yes sure. When are we going?” I burst out laughing.
“Then we’ll see you tomorrow. We should get going now. We’ve been swimming all morning.” Johannes stood up and patted me on the shoulder gently.
“You’re gonna love it.” Nadine winked and then she surprised me by suddenly giving me a big hug and kissing me on the cheek. Her body smelt of faint green apple.
“Wir sehen uns dann. Schönen Tag…” she whispered, her lips almost touching the tip of my ear.
“Errr… merci?” I stammered nervously, prompting them both to burst out laughing simultaneously
“Meet us tomorrow morning near the small creek in front of the inn. 6 AM. Don’t be late. You’re not gonna regret it, we promise!” Johannes tapped me gently on my back again and then they both started running back towards the pool and jumped together with a loud splash for the last time.
The next morning, as I walked out from the lobby, I saw them both already waiting for me on the other side of the small road. They waved enthusiastically as soon as they saw me. I looked up and saw thick blanket of fog descending from the hilltops above us. The hills looked creepy with weird forms of protrusions poking out randomly to every direction.
I stroked my arms hard repeatedly to drive off the cold.
Johannes was wearing a thin safari t-shirt that he had left unbuttoned, to show off his muscular chest and abdomen. His surfing pants matched his orange sport shoes making him look like a professional hiker.
As soon as I got closer, I could see that Nadine was wearing nothing under her tight maroon t-shirt. Her perky nipples were poking out through the fabric.
“Bonjour!” I greeted cheerfully, walking closer to join them. Both started giggling.
“Oui, monsieur!” Johannes played along, still sneering. “What’s that you got in your backpack there? It looks heavy.”
“Oh nothing just some stuff. Just in case we get lost and can’t find our way back.”
“Great! How was your sleep?” Nadine took my hand and gently stroked it up and down, sending a chill down my spine in excitement.
“It was okay. Like a baby. I guess good sleep is good for your mood, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s this place giving off positive vibes all around. I am usually a very grumpy person in the morning.” I said.
“Not with me, dear.” said Nadine.
“You’re ready?” asked Johannes, eyeing me and Nadine intently before grinning wide. His blue eyes lit up as he looked around us.
“Let’s go!” I shouted raising my hands up in the air, making them laugh again with my enthusiasm which I myself had no idea where it had come from. “What’s it called again? Lebby what? The secret place?”
We started walking towards the creek in front of us with Johannes leading the way.
“Lembah Tidur!” Johannes shouted his answer. “It literally means Sleeping Valley in the local language.”
My eyes were constantly fixed on Nadine who was walking only a few feet in front of me. We had been walking for almost two hours among rows of tall trees, weaving in and out through heavy vegetations while trying to make our way around the gigantic rocky formation which now looked breathtakingly picturesque under the glimmering sunlight. Then I finally found out why it was called the Sleeping Valley. As soon as the path took a sharp turn northward and met the foot of the hill, I saw dozens of dark rectangular-shaped things poking out from holes on the upper side of the rocky hill.
“Are those… “ my voice trailed off as I realized what I was looking at.
“Yes, coffins. Hundreds of them.” said Johannes matter-of-factly, as if there weren’t bodies perching high up on the hills above us. Some were even simply left to rest horizontally on uneven rock protrusions on the face of the hill, almost dangling dangerously over the cliff.
“This side of the hill is sacred to the locals. They have performed this hanging tombs thing for centuries.”
“Hanging tombs?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes. According to their belief, burying someone in high places like tops of mountains or tall trees can help the transition of the spirit of the deceased to the other side. Technically speaking, it is to prevent thieves from stealing precious belongings buried with their owner. You know? Like the Ancient Egyptian. It is also a sign of respect to the dead. You see?” Johannes pointed up towards the weathered-looking coffins on the highest rows. “The higher it is, the more respectable the person was when they were still alive. Pretty awesome, huh?”
“How do you bury someone in a tree?” I asked again, still amazed and horrified at the same time.
“Well not technically a person. Stillborns, mostly. But babies as well. Babies who are no older than a few weeks, who haven’t grown teeth. They dig a hole in the trunk of a huge living tree, put the body inside and cover it with palm fibers. It’s quite beautiful actually, but also poignant. They believe that by burying their babies in the tree, those poor kids would continue to grow with it since they never had the chance to grow old in real life.”
“What if the tree falls? What if… what if.. the coffins fall?” I asked, making sure to keep my distance from the hillside.
“Yes, it has happened, of course. But they always come back here once or twice a year to make sure it doesn’t happen, you know? They change the coffins, put the bodies in new ones.”
My head was filled with horrible ideas that involved hundreds of coffins falling off the cliff at the same time, shaking the ground on impact with a loud cracking sound.
“Creepy!” I said.
“Not creepy. Weird and uncommon yes. But I personally think it’s cool. They used to only wrap the bodies in a makeshift covering made of dried palm fibers woven together before putting them up there. Imagine what happened days after the decomposition process had already started… it’s a drippin’ nightmare!” Johannes started to laugh, seemingly amused at the sight of my pale face.
“Stop it, Jon!” Nadine rolled her eyes at him. I shook my head trying to get rid of those nightmarish thoughts in my head. If a zombie apocalypse was real, zombies falling from the sky would be the last thing you would ever want to encounter.
“But then the European missionaries arrived and they started to use wooden coffins.” Johannes continued but I was not listening to him at all.
The path took another turn around the hill on its north-side before gently curving towards a small clearing. I started to feel a bit relieved now we could no longer see those coffins. Then we arrived at the edge of a basin which gently sloped down to a grassy path overgrown with trees and bushes. I looked down and saw tree tops as far as up north glimmering in the sun. Right in the middle of the basin in the distance there was a waterfall which poured into a turquoise pond that looked so inviting and enchanting.
“Wow! This is amazing!” I blurted out, looking around to take in the beauty that laid before my eyes. The blue sky right ahead only enhanced the greenish golden
sheen like a beautiful painting with vivid colours, dreamy yet real at the same time.
“Come on!” Johannes started taking his clothes off. Nadine threw a glance at me, a smile on her face, and then followed suit. I could only stare at them nervously, unsure what to do.
“You can only enter Lembah Tidur naked.” they both urged me, not a single thread of yarn covering their bodies now.
“It’s okay….” said Nadine softly, walking towards me. I found myself struggling hard to focus on something else but her naked body. Her platinum hair glistening in the sun. She stroked my cheek gently and landed a kiss on it. I shivered but the cold had got nothing to do with it. They started making their way down to the basin carefully but excitedly, leaving me alone with my own thoughts on the edge. A little hesitant I began undressing slowly and then I followed them down. They had disappeared behind a thick curtain of greens that blanketed the whole valley. I could still hear them chattering and laughing heartily a few feet before me. Then I heard something else as soon as I arrived at the bottom of the basin, the gentle roar of the river flowing hidden among the trees somewhere.
“Come on up, Fred!” shouted Johannes. His voice sounded distant and distorted. “We want to show you something!” Then a loud splash that reverberated through the forest, followed by sounds of laughter and excitement.
I quickened my pace as I tried to thread my way through the bushes, careful not to catch my skin on the dangerous looking thorns and found them soaking wet sitting under a huge tree whose branches and twigs twisted and coiled down towards the water like snakes. They were staring at me and there was a weird look on their faces. I looked around and saw these red and curious-looking mushrooms poking out of the ground everywhere.
“What is this place?” I asked them. My voice sounded different. Distorted by its own echoes that were bouncing around in the air.
“Lembah Tidur…” answered Nadine in a whisper. She was standing on a rock a few feet before me on the other side of the river now. But her voice sounded so clear as if she was right next to me. She raised her hand and gestured me to come closer. On her head was a wreath of green made in imitation of a crown. Strands of her hair flying into her face as the cold morning breeze blew around her.
Then they led me into a rather large clearing among the trees, with the sunlight peeking through the leaves. And I could see decaying bodies scattered about everywhere. Some of them had already been reduced to piles of dried bones, half buried in the ground. The others still looked fresh in the middle of decomposition, bloated and disfigured. Those weird-looking mushrooms grew in clusters around these bodies. Like swarms of maggot.
Strangely enough, I did not find myself disgusted by the sight of this symbiotic relationship. They all looked … peaceful?
“What is this place?” I asked again when they came closer to hold my trembling hands.
“The Sleeping Valley... the resting place of the dead” whispered Nadine, her lips brushing against my ear.
“The locals bring their dead here to lay them down in their forever resting place. Those plants accelerate the decomposition process by absorbing fluids from the body and leave only the bones. The process triggers a chemical reaction that produces some kind of gas that cancels out the stench of decay.” Johannes explained. “Nowadays, it is not the locals only who bring their dead here. People from all over the world who are aware of the existence of this place, come to find peace. Those who are terminally sick, and dying of a disease, come here to lie down and these plants help to ease their way to… the other… side…”
I started walking around the clearing. I felt a mixture of emotions rising up in my chest. This place looked peaceful yet dangerous. Like a poisonous frog. Only beautiful when viewed from a distance, but deadly upon touch. A wide calm ocean that is hiding a lurking danger beneath its dark surface.
“Nature has given us so much… It is time we return the favour…”
I looked over my shoulder and saw Johannes and Nadine walking towards me, their naked bodies glistening in the sun. A look of a thousand indescribable desires painted on their faces. Then they led me to one of the bodies and we stood around it for a while. Johannes nodded and Nadine nodded back. Then he bent down and picked up one of those mushrooms that grew out of the body’s rib cage. Upon closer look, I could see the plant was emitting this reddish mist of sweet scent that made my head feel light and relaxed.
He gave it to Nadine, who was looking expectant. She pulled its round flat head off the stem and brought it closer to her mouth. Before I realized what was happening, she started eating it with her eyes closed. We watched her for a while in silence. Streaks of red dripping down her nakedness from chin to her breasts.
Then she opened her eyes and I could see her dilated pupils opened up even wider to conceal the bright blue. She proceeded to give the mushroom to Johannes, who immediately started to take a huge bite before handing it to me without a word. But I knew what to do. I brought it to my mouth. Now I could see it clearly. There were delicate vein-like structures covering its smooth shiny skin. Like human blood vessels.
They were both watching me closer, waiting. Then without a doubt, I put the rest of the mushroom in my mouth and chewed it. As soon as it touched my tongue, I started to feel this wave of ecstasy and coolness that was pulsing throughout my body. I looked around and things were already changing. Colours started to merge and they looked more radiant than before. I could hear the whisper of the wind from up above the top of the hills far away descending down the valley to the basin.
I looked ahead and saw myself engaging in intercourse with both Johannes and Nadine. We were one. Our bodies knit together, like a flower to its stalk. Like delicate fabrics braided together to form the first form of life ages ago. I touched the deepest corners of their heart. Their mind. And their humanity. And they to me. I latched hard onto their existence, and theirs to mine. Our tongue was dancing down our throat. Our fingers were prancing between our legs. The lines that divided planes of existence were becoming blurred. We were one. I no longer saw me. I saw us.
Our nakedness was sprawled before my eyes on the grass. A smile on our face. We kissed. I kissed. We felt our desires entangled together. And then I felt them moving away from me. I saw them running happily towards the river, leaving me alone.
For a moment I was brought back to reality. I opened my eyes and I saw Johannes and Nadine lying on the ground before me with their eyes open. Strands of colours were still billowing at the edge of shapes around me. I looked down and saw the reds merging with the green around them. I could not find where things started and where they ended. I bent down and picked two mushrooms off the skeleton and put them in my mouth with a gulp.
And then things started to change again. My senses became one. I tasted the sweet flow of the river. I heard the gentle touch of the grass beneath my feet. I saw the curtain of the wind billowing among the trees.
The universe was wide open before me. The veil that draws the line between life and death was drawn. I could see and touch the edge of the sky. Stars were dancing in my hands. Time was flowing like a river around me.
And then I heard someone calling my name in the distant. Then again. And again. I looked around but I did not see anyone.
“Johannes? Nadine?” I called out. Then I found myself back at my apartment. But I was also up here. And there in Lembah Tidur. And then at the pool where I first saw Nadine and became increasingly infatuated with her. Time and space were nothing to me. I moved back and forth at ease. Then before I realized what was happening, I felt a very strong force pulling me back to the ground.
I opened my eyes and found myself lying in the grass, a beautiful face hovering above me. She was sitting right next to me, placing her hands on my chest and on my head that was still spinning.
“You okay?” she asked softly. She was naked as well I realized. There was a thin silver mesh necklace around her long neck, with a little flower-shaped turquoise stone dangling from it.
“I… I am okay. Just a bit light-headed.” I answered honestly.
“You fainted there for a moment. You shouldn’t have eaten it like that. Just a small bite should do. You’re lucky you’re still alive.” she warned me. “You could have died.”
I squeezed my thigh and tried to get up in a sitting position. My whole body was trembling like crazy. And then a very beautiful smile curved on her lips.
“What time is it?” I asked, stroking my head as if trying to shake off the effect of the mushrooms.
“6 am.”
“That’s impossible!”
“What?”
I glanced at my watch and was surprised to see that it was indeed 6 AM. But how?
“We started our journey then exactly at around 6 am. It must have taken us 3 or 4 hours to get here. So why is it still 6 am? Unless time has stopped all of a sudden.”
She rolled her eyes.
“What day do you think it is now?” she raised one of her eyebrows suspiciously.
“Errr…. “ I tried to think. “Wednesday?”
She burst out laughing while tossing her dark red hair back and exhaled. “Then you’ve been unconscious for two days. Because today is Friday.”
“What? That can’t be true!” I protested. “Is this a joke? Are you pranking me or something?”
“You’re not the only one who has ever been under the influence of these things. The effect is really strong yeah. It can change your perception of time.”
As we were making our way back to the inn (fully clothed), she told me her name was Lisa and that she had visited Lembah Tidur a few times with her friends before and I was the first tourist that she had ever encountered there.
She said she had seen me trashing around on the ground as if suffocating and decided to help. And that’s when I had woken up to see her.
I was still feeling rather light-headed when we finally arrived at the inn. She offered to make me a cup of strong tea and asked me to lie down on the couch in the lobby.
“I’ve never been that high in my entire life before!” I admitted to her, stroking my face that still felt numb and cold. Suddenly it dawned on me that she had found me trashing around like a mad man naked in the wilderness and that made me feel so embarrassed.
“You should be careful there. Don’t eat too much of it. It’s dangerous. If I hadn’t woken you up you would have probably been trapped in your own head under the influence of that plant forever.” she said, handing me the cup of tea.
“F-fforever?” I stammered, feeling a chill down my spine.
“Well at least not in a literal sense. Like I said before, it alters how you perceive time. In your own mind, time will stretch and expand wider and wider, years and even ages will pass. When in reality only a few days have passed.”
I gulped, imagining my body lying down in the middle of that place for 2 days. No wonder I felt so tired and sick.
“When I was under the influence of that thing, I saw… things…”
“Of course.”
“It was like in a dream, but it also felt so real. Everything was so beautiful and perfect.”
“Oh don’t hang on to that!”
“What do you mean?”
“Those people there… those bodies… they are not entirely dead, you know?”
I was already sipping down my tea and paused when I heard her saying that. “Not entirely dead? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Their consciousness is still there. They’re still trapped in there. Physically they may have been long dead, their bodies reduced to only bones and ashes. But their minds are still intact. They are living a fantasy, unaware of their surroundings. That plant is preserving their self-awareness in the form of illusion that will go on and on forever. They may look dead to us, what with their decaying bodies. But their self-awareness goes on in another plane of existence beyond this life.”
I shook my head, taking in the horror of what she had just told me. It was a close call for me. I almost got trapped in my own mind for good. A form of existence I did not want to be in.
“But that’s…”
“Impossible yes I know.” she guessed my skepticism.
“But how did you know all this?”
“My father… he is one of those bodies you saw there.”
“Oh, I am sorry.”
“It’s okay. He was one of the few people like you who had seen what it was like on the other side and figured out how it worked. And he decided to return to reality only to say goodbye to me. After my mother passed away, he felt that he had nothing else to hold on to. And to top things off, he said…. He said he had heard her calling his name when he was lying down unconscious on the ground under the plant’s influence the first time. He was sure he would see her again. And there was nothing I could do to stop him. But if it was the only way for him to be truly happy again. Then I had no choice. It was already killing me slowly seeing him shutting his life off like that after my mother’s death.” she said, glistening streaks of tears rolling down her cheeks.
“I am so sorry…”
“Thanks. I still come here to visit him from time to time.”
“Do those tourists know about it?” I asked again.
“Some do. Some don’t.”
“Those who know, why do they go there anyway?”
“They want to end their own lives. What else? They are disappointed. Bored. Depressed. And leaving this plane of existence to depart to another sounds like a chance of a lifetime.”
I remembered what Johannes had told me earlier. Those poor people came to Lembah Tidur with the knowledge that those plants will ease their transition to the other side. I had caught a glimpse of what it was there, on that other plane of existence. Though I have to admit it was an amazing place, I still don't want to end like that. Forever trapped in my own head. In a distorted version of reality. My whole body started to shake when I thought about what might have happened if Lisa had not found me.
It was true that at one point in my life, I had been bored and depressed, to the point where I had felt almost suicidal.
But to live in a pale imitation of life like that? No fucking way.
“Lisa…” I took her hand and hold it tight. “Thank You for saving me.” she smiled and nodded her head, strands of her red wavy hair falling into her face.
I still had a few days on that island but I decided to return home earlier than I had planned. As soon as my plane landed, I decided to visit my parents, which was something I had not done in months. My mother looked really surprised when she opened the door only to see me standing there watery-eyed. If there was something positive I got from my experience in Lembah Tidur, it would be the fact that deep in my heart, I knew that I wanted to live. I loved my family.
Loneliness is a deadly disease that is slowly eating away at the soul and the mind and forcing us into exile estranged from the people who genuinely love and care about us.
A few weeks later I found another job offered by a friend of mine and with a new perspective in my life, I started to hold on to only positive thoughts. I no longer considered my job and routines as something boring or time-consuming. I did everything with a different approach and point of view. I realized we can never have everything in life. But we can make our own happiness by being thankful for every little good thing that makes us smile and feel that we have a purpose.
I still kept in touch with Lisa. We would talk on the phone for hours and the closer we become, the deeper I found myself falling in love with her. The way she was always trying hard to be positive without complaining about every thing that did not work out well for her made me fall head over heels in love with her. All my life, I had never met someone who really loved life more than anything else. She opened my eyes and made me realize it was all just how I saw things. That every cloud has a silver lining.
I was lost for a moment. And then I met her. And in her, I found the reason I loved life. We were having a long distant kind of thing for two years and I would visit her in her hometown several times a year. And likewise. Then one day, I found the courage to ask her to marry me. She said yes.
A happy surprise came by the end of the summer that year. Lisa had a job offer in the city I was living in and she decided to accept it so we could finally move in together. We got married in December. My parents were there, so were her brother, cousins, and two aunts. Our lives were complete. I really enjoyed my new role as a husband. My mother was right. A family was the answer to my loneliness and depression. And then William, our first child was born. We loved being parents more than anything else. By the time William was finally able to walk, Lisa gave birth to our second son, Nelson. But of course, life is not always rainbow and sunshine.
Only a few days after our 20th wedding anniversary, my father passed away from a heart attack. I was crushed. I loved my father so much. He was my hero. My best friend. I fell back into depression and started to use drugs and drink alcohol. Lisa had always been there for me. But there was nothing she could do to ease the pain. Every night, I would come home drunk, crying, shouting, feeling angry and bitter. Lisa tried her best to help me, but I was too deep in my grief that I began ignoring her. Our marriage fell apart.
She filed for divorce a week after the 2nd anniversary of my father’s death. I did not say anything. I just nodded my head and walked away. I was lost again and this time she could not save me. I had given up. Now I had nothing to be happy for. And in the middle of my own destruction, this voice… that had been pretending to be lost for years, nagging me in my dreams, started to emerge. It wanted me to be happy again. Yet in my situation, there was only one way to do that.
I had to go back to Lembah Tidur.
I flew back there the following day after our divorce was finalized. I did not tell anybody where I was going. Not even my mother and my kids. They did not deserve to miss a loser like me.
It only took me a few hours to find it. And it still looked exactly as I remembered it.
Beautiful and serene. Peaceful. The surface of the river was glistening in the sun. The leaves were fluttering in the wind as I walked down the slope into the mystic world, naked and hopeful, unseen to the rest of the world. As if they had all been waiting for this day.
A soft bell-like sound was heard in the air. This is it, I thought. I am here.
It was calling me.
I walked to one of the bodies on the river bank. It was a woman. It looked like only a few hours had passed since it was laid down to rest. Her naked pale skin had already started to turn bluish. Her upper torso was partially submerged in the water. Her long dark hair, gilded with the redness of the afternoon sky, was billowing out around her like silk. She was beautiful. Like a sleeping water nymph.
I walked to another corpse half-hidden in the bushes. It was a skeleton of another woman, lying peacefully both arms clasped together like praying, with those mushrooms poking out of her rib cage and barely there stomach. As soon as I got closer, I realized that I recognized her long straight platinum hair even though it had bits of dirt and grass clung to it,
Her pretty face was long gone. Her body was almost completely reduced to bones. But there was no doubt. It was her.
I reached down to touch her disfigured face. Is she still in there somewhere? Far beyond this plane of existence. How many lifetimes has she spent while her body was lying here rotting away?
Maybe I was about to find out.
I picked one mushroom off her rib, closed my eyes and without hesitation I took a huge bite and started to chew it. It tasted weird, I realized.
I had not had time to remember how it tasted like the first time since the effect was already kicking in the second it touched my lips.
But this time, it was different. I was aware of how it tasted like a mixture of different fruits that left a very strong tangy aftertaste.
I inhaled deeply and waited.
Nothing happened.
I waited again.
30 seconds had passed and I could still feel my body.
I opened my eyes and saw nothing had changed.
I took another bite and waited.
Still nothing.
I swallowed the whole thing in frustration and waited.
Nothing.
I sighed and picked some of the biggest mushrooms poking out of the body and started to eat them all greedily.
And then I felt a sharp throbbing pain piercing through my chest as my breath seized up. And I lost control of my body.
The pain was too much.
I fell backwards and landed hard on my back, trying to catch breath. The last thing I saw as I writhed in agony on the ground was the dark canopy above me.
I thought of Lisa and my kids and my mother. How much I loved them.
I thought of my father. How much I missed him.
I should have never come here the first time.
I should have never come here now.
​
***
​
I opened my eyes and immediately regretted it. The blazing sun overhead was hurting my eyes, burning my naked skin. I was sweating all over. My body was shaking hard.
A face appeared above me, blocking the sun. Her platinum hair glistening in the sun. Her face looking pale.
“Fred?” she gasped. “Oh God. You scared me for a moment I thought you’re dead. You weren’t breathing at all.”
“Where am I?” I tried to get up but a splitting pain at the base of my skull made me recoil and before I could lay down a wave of nausea washed over me. I turned onto my side and threw up.
“Get it all out of your system. Good!” Nadine patted me gently on my back. “Jesus, Fred. How many did you have? That’s stupid. You could have died.”
“I don’t kn –“ I threw up again.
“Come on let’s get somewhere cooler. You can walk?”
I forced my body to stand up and followed her under a huge tree whose branches were touching the water next to me.
“Where’s Johannes?” I asked her as I bent down to wash my face and body. My pale and sick-looking reflection stared back at me.
“He’s going back to the inn to find some help. What the fuck were you thinking. A single bite is enough to get you high. And you had how many? Twenty?” she reproached, frowning at me. The deafening silence that had hung in the air earlier was gone. I could hear the roaring waterfall in the distance.
“I saw something.”
“What?”
“What time is it?” I looked up at the canopy above us as a cool breeze started to blow in our direction. The sun was peeking through the trees, casting fluttering shadows around us.
“I think it’s already midday.” she answered.
Those mushrooms had messed with my head and affect my perception of time. In reality, only a few hours had passed since we had come. But under its influence, I had spent a huge portion of a lifetime in which I experienced the ups and downs of life, in which I fell in love and grieved over my personal losses in life.
It had poisoned my mind and soul and tricked me into living a life that had never been there.
Lisa… my kids… they had never been real. Just fragments of my hallucination.
Now that I was back in the real word, it all just seemed like a dream, or a distant memory almost forgotten. For a few seconds after I had come to, I had felt a sense of longing for them. I had been frantically reaching out to hold on to my memories of them.
“You said you saw something? What was it?” asked Nadine.
I told her what I had seen and experienced and she looked at me with a rather disheartened and shocked look on her face.
“Oh Fred. I am so sorry to hear that. I know it’s not real. But still, to live a long life only to have it erased just like that in a blink of an eye is horrible even though it only happened in your head.” she sympathized. “I would have been depressed.”
“Yeah because… you know… I kind of… miss them…”
She nodded and put her hands on her cheeks, looking miserable.
“Now I can’t even remember how they looked like. It’s fading away. Funny I know. Missing people I have never even met.”
She got on her knees and put her arms around me. We hugged there for what felt like minutes. Our naked skins touched. I could feel her heartbeat.
“Let’s get out of here before sunset or we will have troubles finding our way back.” she stood up wiping her eyes.
“Yes. You’re right.”
We got on our feet and started walking along the river bank when something shiny on the ground caught my attention. I paused and walked closer and then I saw it. A skeleton half buried in the sand. Around its bony neck was a silver mesh bracelet, with a flower-shaped blue stone latched to it.