Scattered bits
Nothing beats the feeling you get after you search for the best cheese shops in a new city, and you find out #1 is 700 feet away from you.
“Cold” is relative. People wear hooded, fur-lined parkas in 64º here. They call 64º cold. They apologize. I tell them what the weather was like where I came from and they look at me like I just grew six heads.
Lots of grifting around here in 2022. Billboards. People convincing their friends in coffee shops. None of that now.
Tech has spent the past 12 years inventing basically nothing. I recently saw a blog post that provided a history of user experience design. It stopped in 2012 and then listed “natural language interfaces” in 2023. Goodness, who are we kidding?
When I first visited here, it was still emerging from the worst phase of the pandemic, and a lot of stuff was closed. Now things are still closed in a lot of places, but the city has bounced back quite a bit.
The world is still broken, of course, but we lose perspective. People try to make stuff, build, rebuild. Optimism hits different these days.
In the middle of this apartment is a very cursed artwork. It is large, ugly, JPEG-dithered, uncanny valley nonsense, and it is both too large to store anywhere and too heavy to safely remove from the wall.
My partner links up with me in two days from this writing, and out of respect for their psyche I have not yet mentioned the artwork to them. Maybe we throw a thin sheet over it? Maybe we name it and mock it the whole time? Unclear what to do.
One encounters this issue in hotel rooms from time to time. I once stayed in a place where there was a wallpaper of people checking their phones in a crowd. A different kind of cursed. This is different. Someone chose it as part of their personal expression. Who made it? Where did it come from? No, I will not take a picture of it.
Field notes from the ongoing pandemic.
I would maybe not upgrade. Related.
My friends don’t believe the pics I’m taking and they don’t believe that it’s possible to just get on an airplane and end up in a city where people are psychically open and friendly, who actually talk to you, who want to connect. Those cities exist! Another world is possible and it is there.