iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 30/10/2026

i was writing a proposal for a talk about dumb railway stuff. one of the things i find colossally stupid is railway departure boards that have URLs that lie to you - you copy the URL and end up on a different page to the one you were on then i realised that […] [Original post on masto.ai]

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 29/10/2026

great map by the European Correspondent on café opening times www.instagram.com/p/De9Qw1GkdKU/?im…

A map of Europe with coffee shop opening times drawn by cluster. Generally Mediterranean coffee shops close later

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 24/10/2026

New map for you all: sunset in local time for the winter solstice. As always, uniform population shown on the left - each square is about 150k people. I think Brest in Belarus is the only real howler in Europe - otherwise the map mostly shows you that we should […] [Original post on masto.ai]

A map of local sunset times across Europe and Africa

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 23/10/2026

Another day, another departure board gets fixed by On Voie Tous. Version 0.12+ will run on pages like www.adif.es/w/65000-val%C3%A8ncia-e… As always, I recommend using dpartu.re to actually get to the departure boards without having to […] [Original post on masto.ai]

Valencia Estacio del Nord with platform predictions shown in the far right column

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

fixed a #fahrtle issue which added 60 second timeouts before you could take each train (!) and updated the transitous data. so now China is full of trains compute.olie.science/fahrtle new league using the new data will start tomorrow. this version also […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a screenshot of fahrtle showing Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau. they are now covered in railway stations and bus stops

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

[llms] very funny that anthropic is using the number of FIXMEs in code as a measure of LLM code quality writing FIXME next to some code is a very human thing to do and not something i have ever seen any AI code do (and seems to be one of their flaws - an inability […] [Original post on masto.ai]

claimed productivity and quality metrics at anthropic when employees start using AI

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

Just updated On Voie Tous to add platform predictions to the old (and best) RFI departure boards for Italy. Existing users will have to accept new permissions to run on RFI (and Adif, which is currently down) over the next few days to update […] [Original post on masto.ai]

A screenshot of an RFI departure board open in two windows: on the left, platform predictions are shown in the platform column. On the right, most platforms are missing

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

[LLMs] what is the point of PRs like this the account seems to have no human involvement at all the code at first glance seems mediocre, so they're probably using a cheap model and what's more it has picked an issue to work on where i last said "i need to think […] [Original post on masto.ai]

Closes #5535

New reader articles are stored in Firefox's session-only storage through the background script, so article text is not written to persistent extension config or synchronized. The reader consumes and removes the session entry after loading, while caching it in sessionStorage for same-session theme reloads. Existing UUIDs in legacy reader_articles config still load with awaited cleanup, and Sync strips that legacy key from both outgoing and incoming data.

Validation:

yarn run build --quick passed after a temporary local workaround for this Windows environment's bundling of an unused Node-only source-map helper; the original helper was restored afterward.
yarn run tsc --project tsconfig.json --noEmit passed.
ESLint passed on the five changed TypeScript files.
src/lib/config.test.ts: 259 tests passed.
Firefox 156 WebDriver verification passed: session write, absence from persistent config, article rendering, and removal after rendering.
src/excmds.test.ts could not run in this Windows environment because ts-jest rejects the generated file under the repository's outDir configuration.

I could not obtain a separate human tester. Manual verification: run :reader on an article, confirm it renders, check that its pending UUID is in extension storage.session and absent from userconfig, then verify the UUID is removed after rendering. Closing Firefox before opening the reader should discard the pending article.

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

@cycling_on_rails reluctantly i have added a high-effort mode that adds guesstimated connection times between different services based on cell size and Paris falls to 9 million and Bern to 2.5 million but so much for my realtime cartesian product router. it now […] [Original post on masto.ai]

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

@cycling_on_rails yeah on a higher resolution grid - so you can teleport less far - bern falls to 1.2 million people accessible and paris only falls to 9 million accessible darned swiss running too many trains and breaking my approximations

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

@cycling_on_rails hmm fair cop, thanks. the hour isochrone i have for bern goes well past the borders. i'll do some digging to work out why it's so optimistic - currently you can teleport instantly between different services within a cell, which when you have three […] [Original post on masto.ai]

an isochrone for bern. you can get to freiburg in ~45 minutes rather than the true ~1h30

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

messing with animations for my maps and have a fun factoid for you all: for much of the day, people in Bern (urban population approx 130k) can access more people within one hour of travel by public transport - they can get to 19 million people - than people in Paris […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a uniform-population and cartogram and map of europe showing the accessible population for one hour travelling by public transport with the clock starting at 12:30 local time.

koln/brussels/liege are extremely well connected, london reasonably so. the extremities of europe - madrid, rome, do poorly

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

@moof ooh ooh ooh I've got a good one for this - don't require passengers to type their passport numbers into the worst touch screens on the planet when they want to buy a single train ticket Who was it who said that the trick to a market-beating product was to […] [Original post on masto.ai]

Renfe wants people to hack on solutions that improve ticket purchasing

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

oh and if you want a laugh here's europe on the same scale as north america's famous 'north east corridor' where i keep hearing that the trains are kind of ok and public transport sort of works. they're broadly as doing as well as hungary, which is pretty heavily […] [Original post on masto.ai]

the same three hour map as before for all public transport but with a frozen legend

the same three hour map as before for all public transport but with a frozen legend, and the camera pointed cruelly at north america, where they don't understand that trains can be good

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

should probably show all public transport vs just train-like (including ferries which are honorary trains) and the cartograms too

the same 3 hour map as above, but with a uniform population cartogram on the left. you can see that france and spain only manage to serve about two thirds of their population with trains

a similar 3 hour map to above, but with a uniform population cartogram on the left. this one includes all public transport (except aeroplanes, sorry). france does much better at serving more of its population but spain and italy still struggle to reach 100%

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

messing more with my large-scale accessibility maps to try to get a feel for the right parameters. one fun thing is that once you go over twelve hours travel time, the countries that run night trains (and to some extent, where they run them to) start to crop up […] [Original post on masto.ai]

an accessibility map of europe by train. each hexagon is coloured by the total population living in the area you can visit within 15 hours, given that you leave from that hex at the most optimal time and travel by train or other train-like modes of transport. which includes ferries in my definition because i felt sorry for ireland

most of europe in a large radius around germany is well connected. spain and portugal are notably badly connected. portugal worse than ireland, which is kind of impressive

an accessibility map of europe by train. each hexagon is coloured by the total population living in the area you can visit within 3 hours, given that you leave from that hex at the most optimal time and travel by train or other train-like modes of transport. which includes ferries in my definition because i felt sorry for ireland

london, paris, brussels and the corridor to frankfurt are extremely well connected. lots of the rest of europe is not

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

I'm getting more and more convinced that one-size-fits-all won't work for this because places have such different policies about public transport For example, if you want to travel half an hour at any time between 8am and midnight, you find that even in big cities […] [Original post on masto.ai]

An accessibility map of Bristol, 8am-midnight within half an hour by public transport. The core is ok. the suburbs are very bad

An accessibility map of Cardiff, 8am-midnight within half an hour by public transport. Almost nowhere is accessible

An accessibility map of Bristol, 8am-8pm within half an hour by public transport. It looks almost unchanged from the previous map

An accessibility map of Cardiff, 8am-8pm within half an hour by public transport. There is reasonable public transport across much of the city

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

in the previous version i had said that anything reachable at any point during the day should be plotted, but i realised that was very misleading now i am only showing things that can be reached within the travel time budget at every sampled departure during the […] [Original post on masto.ai]

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

so i hacked on it some more and now i have an isochrone router that can take the average across 24 hours in a few milliseconds and it's fun to play with... but i have forgotten why i started doing it (no public link for now. mostly posting this in the hope of remembering what it was for)

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

i know it's only supposed to be used zoomed out but i am enjoying how distorted the equal-earth projection makes iceland labs.maptiler.com/equal-earth-web-m…

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

@Jonas_Bostrom @AngbarerAlchimist @stefanlindbohm i guess if you normalise the station calls per capita (and then take the population weighted mean for the cartogram) you can see that switzerland has good trains. who knew

the same maps as in the previous post but with population per unit area as a denominator. i also ungarbled the legend

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

@stefanlindbohm i had made one a while ago but here's one hot off the press for you with updated data compute.olie.science/expo/?data=ser… i think because the cartogram is already uniform population […] [Original post on masto.ai]

total station calls per day for heavy rail for europe (and other bits of the world if you click the link). blue = lots, red = few. the pixelated map on the left is a uniform population cartogram. the map on the right is, well, a map

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

social-connectedness.org/cgfr this is so cool map of Facebook friendship data showing cross-gender friendships (blue = more equal, red = more gender segregation)

a map of Europe and north Africa showing gender split in Facebook friendship networks. generally NW France, northern Spain, east Germany have more gender mixing than other places

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

[llm] i don't really want to dunk on people doing cool things but it is kind of funny to accidentally dedicate your entire codebase to the public domain and then change your mind afterwards without scrubbing the public domain commit

a screenshot of a git log to be read from bottom to top. the user initially asks claude to license the repository under MIT. they get scared by the big licence and ask it to give it a more permissive licence, which it does. then they realise that that removes all requirement for credit and ask it to go back to MIT

crucially this means that the repository at the time of the middle commit is licensed under the public domain forever - a key part of licence law is "no backsies"

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

@pglux.bsky.social it was a comfy MD train but the branding on the departure boards and adif was all rodalies but even if that were the case it doesn't make it OK ticket machines should sell a superset of the company's train tickets. not some tiny superset based […] [Original post on masto.ai]

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

RE: mastodon.online/@Pepijn/11699087730… i saw one of these the other day claiming that ArcelorMittal near Martigues was on fire and i was like holy shit that's horrific, why haven't i seen that in the news? but no, it's just the biggest¹ single […] [Original post on masto.ai]

ArcelorMittal outside Marseille. it's a huge steelworks and the pollution it emits is easily visible by satellite.

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

New map for you all: population weighted tree cover from Copernicus 100m land cover data Europe: compute.olie.science/expo/?data=tre… World […] [Original post on masto.ai]

$A map of Europe with population-weighted tree cover fraction shown. On the left, a uniform population cartogram where each square contains the same number of people, and on the right, a standard mercator projection map.$ $A map of the world with population-weighted tree cover fraction shown. On the left, a uniform population cartogram where each square contains the same number of people, and on the right, a standard mercator projection map.$ $A map of Africa with population-weighted tree cover fraction shown. On the left, a uniform population cartogram where each square contains the same number of people, and on the right, a standard mercator projection map.$

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2026

Getting a bit worn down by the constant stream of people being angry about things in my feed so in a rare departure from my usual posts complaining about the SNCF, here are some fish I have taken photos of hanging out in the Baie des Anges in Nice over the last few days

Some saddle bream swimming away from me with a big pipe in the background

Some (I believe) white seabream. One is swimming in the wrong direction

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026

Inspired by www.ft.com/content/e67f40b6-48d6-40… (£) which is a great article but maps like the one attached where approximately _zero_ people live in two thirds of it remind me why I started working on these uniform population projections […] [Original post on masto.ai]

An FT chloropleth map of China showing the decrease in air pollution (left) and the current annual level of air pollution (right)

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026

New map for you all: mean annual PM2.5 weighted by population compute.olie.science/expo/?data=pol… Stuff that jumped out at me: 1) by global standards the 'western […] [Original post on masto.ai]

A uniform population cartogram (top) and chloropleth map (bottom) of PM2.5 concentrations. red = lots, blue = not much. This one is of the planet and, roughly, the US/Europe/Japan/Australia does well, mixed picture elsewhere. China and India very bad. Parts of Africa very bad

A uniform population cartogram (left) and chloropleth map (right) of PM2.5 concentrations. red = lots, blue = not much. This one is of Europe. Roughly, Europe north west of the Alps does well and south or east of the Alps does badly. The Po valley in Italy is particularly bad.

A uniform population cartogram (left) and chloropleth map (right) of PM2.5 concentrations. red = lots, blue = not much. This one is just of the UK. London does pretty well, the 'northern' cities of Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds etc. do very badly. Scotland, Ireland and Wales do OK

A uniform population cartogram (left) and chloropleth map (right) of PM2.5 concentrations. red = lots, blue = not much. This one is of Africa and the Middle East. East and north west africa do well; west africa and egypt do badly, as does the middle east

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

Some initial experiments with UK walk-up fares priced per straight-line kilometre between origin and destination for short and long distance journeys short distances […] [Original post on masto.ai]

A chloropleth map of the United Kingdom with locations coloured by the median per kilometre anytime rail fare for all straight line distances below 10km from each location. Red = expensive, blue = cheap.

A chloropleth map of the United Kingdom with locations coloured by the median per kilometre anytime rail fare for all straight line distances above 60km from each location. Red = expensive, blue = cheap.

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 12/07/2026

you've surely heard all the excellent¹ security advice about forcing people to use characters they can barely read and limiting password lengths to 19 characters and disallowing repeated characters and, of course, blocking paste but are you aware how much more […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a photograph of the new carte vitale password creation screen because obviously they block screenshots

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

I've just updated the #fahrtle timetable, six months of Transitous updates included 😎 I haven't dug too hard into what is newly available because I like surprises. Same janky link as ever: compute.olie.science/fahrtle For web map nerds: I also changed the […] [Original post on masto.ai]

A screenshot of fahrtle. Sea depths are now smooth rather than cartoonishly quantised

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2026

i finally got round to re-importing transitous data for the first time in six months and 1) it's great to see how much coverage has expanded and 2) hahahaha serbia has more of a regular takt-style timetable than most of france trains only […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a cartogram plot of timetable regularity - whether headways cleanly divide the hour and so repeat predictably

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2026

@Lyle these articles always annoy me because they imply that density is the problem but really the problem is roads and particularly wide roads and on-street parking, because they eliminate shade (haussmann ruined paris) pre-car cities in hot areas know that shade […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a random side street in Bergamo, Italy, perfectly shaded by the buildings on either side

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026

@stefanlindbohm it looks like your trenitalia bookings are down again :( www.railfinder.eu/search/trips/new?… (no rush here i was just curious about what routes you'd offer)

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

github.com/bovine3dom/population-ca… changing the colour scheme did make it look less meaty i particularly like the lightning streaking across the uk. and at this resolution monaco pops up

another uniform population cartogram showing population density, this time at a higher resolution but only showing europe

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026

[it's just a map but for some reason it looks like meat] since i spent all day chipping away at performance, obviously what i should do now is use that performance to get higher resolution cartograms here is germany. you can even pick out where GHS World Pop has […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a uniform population cartogram plot of germany showing the median population density of the people who live in each square

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 28/06/2026

got it down to 20MB compressed and added a loading bar to make opening the page more bearable compute.olie.science/expo/?data=202… feedback welcomed. if your feedback is "red and blue should be the […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a screenshot of a uniform population cartogram and a chloropleth map showing median population densities across a chunk of europe

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026

the matching algorithm still fails in a few dense cities, and now that it works for the UK London pushes the north of england well into scotland, but there's not a huge amount i can do about that. london is really very big. this image shows you places where the […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a cartogram coloured by the population contained within the supposedly uniform population cells. yellow = 150k people, blue = excess population, red = deficit of population

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026

more progress on my uniform population projection maps. have fixed the holes in the previous ones this is showing population density as experienced by people - every square is approx 150k people, and the colour of that square tells you the density they live at […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a uniform population projection of the planet, using max roser's layout. the squares are coloured by the population density that those people live at. blue = high density, red = low density. so paris covering ~1/3 of france means that 1/3 of the french population lives there, and the fact that it is dark blue means that those people live densely, and so don't take up much physical land area

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

my uniform population cartograms are coming on nicely this one shows population density (blue = dense, red = sparse) in africa, and because it's a uniform population projection you can see the population density as experienced by people rather than land i love how […] [Original post on masto.ai]

a uniform population projection cartogram of africa showing population density

there are big holes in the map that are due to mysterious bugs in my code. the holes probably also mean lots of the rest of the map is nonsense too so don't take it seriously

there is no legend on the map because i haven't got round to making one yet, and, as above, the map is probably buggy nonsense so i don't want it to get reshared. but blue = dense and red = sparse

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

Leg 16: Lugano -> top secret tiny town that i feel a bit weird revealing to the entire internet (-> Luzern) This line is really one of the amazing things about Switzerland Single tracked, electrified, two stopping services an hour per direction, with extra express […] [Original post on masto.ai]

A gironomo? set. I can't remember the name, sorry.

They're ancient by Swiss standards but work great and have lots of character

The interior because I was really struggling to take pictures

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

Leg 15: Lugano -> Arth-Goldau This is almost entirely in the astonishing Gotthard Base Tunnel. so not much in the way of pictures. The train from Milan was delayed and happily (very happily) SBB held back the service by a few minutes to guarantee the connection […] [Original post on masto.ai]

The table doubles as a kind of simple board game

The train waits at Arth-Goldau after I alighted

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

Leg 14: Milano Centrale -> Lugano Two top tips here: 1) you can avoid the fairly steep passholder fare on the Eurocity services by taking a TILO service instead and 2) they can get pretty full but arrive ~20 minutes before departure on the platforms slightly to the […] [Original post on masto.ai]

Pour un flirt, avec toi, je ferais n'importe quoi

Accidentally artistic shot of ... I don't actually know what lake this is. Before Paradiso

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Oliver Blanthorn @bovine3dom.masto.ai.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

Leg 13: Verona Porta Nuova -> Milano Centrale I only had a couple of minutes to check out Verona, so didn't get far past the city walls, but I am fully in favour of cities using their walls to block out the noise of traffic. What I saw seemed pleasant enough. The […] [Original post on masto.ai]

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