Fall Update

In my last one of these I alluded to there being a final stretch of travel ahead of me. I was, you will be shocked to learn, foolishly overconfident on that front. I am, once again, coming off of a month of being out of town at least every weekend. It is likely no coincidence that I am completely fucking exhausted, but one of my goals for this year was to crank out at least one blog post a month, so here's a low-effort recounting of the last couple of months to keep that promise to myself.

Things I Did

• Spent 10 days in Southern Africa with my family. It was an absolutely lifechanging experience, and one I highly recommend if you have the opportunity. It is pretty wild to get to the point where you see a herd of giraffes and are unimpressed, but the biodiversity in the area is unthinkable. I learned a lot about history, birds, and how wild the whole concept of safari is. There's hardly any real downtime, at least as I experienced it - you're either eating, looking at animals, or sleeping the entire time. I am rethinking how I travel after this trip, and hoping to focus a bit more on "seeing natural wonders" and less on "going to a city that is much like other cities" in the future.
• Went to HOPE '26, albeit briefly. I was still pretty wiped from Africa and only made it to a few talks. I have mixed feelings about what I saw - there were some super cool technical talks, but mixed with a fair amount of old-school hacker ideology that feels dated at best. Getting yelled at about how great dial up was or how I should be using Veilid just doesn't hit for me, man, I don't know what to tell you.
• Sailed some more! In between all the travel I managed to make it out on the Hudson a couple more times, and am hoping to keep building my skills towards getting certified as experienced crew (and, eventually, a skipper).
• Went to atproto nyc community day. Had some pretty interesting conversations and regained some of my enthusiasm for doing tech stuff that has been lacking ere these last months - under the mistaken impression there would be a show and tell, my friend Sam and I hacked out a demo project that they gave a talk about at Chinatown JS, and that we intend to make public in the near-ish future, so keep an eye out for that. I am still pretty bullish on atproto in the long run but I want more creative people to engage with it, so I guess I have to be the change I want to see in the world.
• Went back to Canada to close up my mom's cottage, and got to spend some time with some family and friends I hadn't seen in a while. I am starting to conceive of it as my own place, and as a 5 or 10 or 20 year project to slowly work on, rather than just "something I inherited from my mom", which is an exciting place to be. I have visions of building my dream shed someday, but it'll have to wait til next year.

• Planned my friend Matt's bachelor party, which involved a bunch of dudes in a cabin upstate and a visit to Plantasia, a delightful ambient festival in Kingston. Matt's favorite band is Radiohead so we made custom Matt-themed versions of all their album covers as a surprise, along with a few other treats for our special boy. So far I have yet to attend a traditional debauched bachelor party - it's mostly been karaoke or cabins upstate, rather than Vegas weekends- but I prefer these. It is always really nice to celebrate someone you love, and even nicer when there's a harpist there.

• Finally, this past weekend I went upstate with a group of friends for a Renn Fayre, which was subsequently cancelled because of the Nor'Easter. We still put on our costumes and made the best of it.

So! My summer of travel ended up continuing into the fall. I'm at six countries visited for the year, four of them for the first time and one of them twice, plus plenty of travel within these United States.

I've blogged in the past about a cycle of overcommitting to work and burning out, which I've tried pretty hard to break the last couple of years. This summer feels like I may have applied the same pattern to fun. A lot of this was unavoidable "season of life" stuff, but I also probably could have said no to a few more things and saved myself the level of bone-deep exhaustion I'm feeling right now. That said, I enjoyed just about everything I did, which I certainly can't say about the years I was working myself into burnout. No ragrets, I think, but I'd like to take the fall and winter to slow down a bit and focus on things at home.

Things I'm Reading/Playing/Thinking About

• Perdido Street Station - this was my plane read for most of my summer travels, and it's an absolute delight. It maybe tries to cram a bit too much worldbuilding into one book, but it certainly kept my attention, and deals unflinchingly with hurt, shame, and how we move on from things, forgivable or not.
• Ed Zitron's AI prediction track record - the past year or so has seen me move somewhere towards the center on AI. I'd still consider myself a skeptic in the sense that I have extraordinarily mixed feelings towards the technology, but ultimately my beef is more with capitalism than it is with the tool itself. "AI" in the form of LLMs works in a lot of ways that matter, and I think to be critical of it we have to reckon with that, along with the fact that its improvement rate has been closer to the predictions of its biggest boosters than its critics. So Ed Z's continued claims that the tools are fake and the bubble is gonna burst any day now, backed largely by what seems to be questionable napkin math and wishcasting, are not doing anyone any favors. He may have started out well-meaning, but at this point I find it hard not to view him as a charlatan playing to an audience desperate for him to be right. It has been a bummer to see a lot of people on the critical side that I previously respected stick their heads in the sand in response to the rapid improvement of agentic tooling over the course of the last year, and the left choosing to cede all ground on a transformative technology to the technofascists gives me a great deal of concern.
• Big Walk - on a lighter note, this game rocks. I think this is the most thoughtfully designed multiplayer prox chat game I've seen so far: it uses the affordances of the "friendslop" medium to perfect effect. I also have a lot of respect for its belief in what it is - it's not a generative/replayable game, it is designed to give you exactly the experience it gives you and that's just fine. I had a great time playing it, including laughing so hard I cried at one point, and I look forward to playing it again once I've forgotten how to solve all the puzzles.

What's Next

I'm feeling more motivated on side projects, finally - now I just need to find the time. I think I can commit to getting the demo project mentioned above to a launchable state this fall, and I'm looking forward to, after one more trip, having more time at home to work on the homelab and some writeups/essay drafts that have been collecting dust. So I think I'm ready to get the wheels turning again after an exceptionally busy summer, but I'll hold off on any grand pronouncements until I've caught up on sleep. 'Til next time!