Moving to Charlie's Diary. One Last Post From Bruges.

Merry Christmas, ya'll! I'll be posting on Charles Stross's Charlie's Diary for a week or two. I'll probably put my first post on Charlie's Diary today.

Where am I? Inside which reflection?

Before I go off into Christmas and Charlie's Diary, here's a Rudy's Blog post with images of Bruges.

Cool wires on the electric train lines in Belgium. Ambient abstract art.

One of the big things in Bruges is the canals. At one time, the town was linked to the North Sea via a river which then silted up, leaving the town as a literal backwater. And, ah, that early winter sunset over a canal.

I lover pictures of reflections. Imagine walking down these old stone stairs into the wobbly mirrorworld inside the ancient canal.

The upside of being a backwater is that Bruges was spared the brutal and destructive waves of war and redevelopment that convulsed the second half of the 20th Century.

The have a local beer called the Zot, or the Fool. Love it. Zot is like sot.

Lace is still big there, although one suspects that these days a lot of the Belgian lace is made in China.

Cool old Gothic banister that looks like a dog.

I love the God's eye icons you see. The eye in a triangle in a set of rays. I think I described one of these in Hylozoic. The point at infinity.

Great old fountains with lion's mouths. I like the medieval notion of turning everything into an animal. It's all alive. Our future form of computation. No chips, no biotech, just quantum computing things.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

I'll be back on Rudy's Blog in early January. Until then I'll be posting on Charles Stross's Charlie's Diary . And if you want more Rudy, don't forget about my new autobiography, Nested Scrolls.