4 min read

Summer Update

Greetings from my second heat wave in as many weeks! Since my last update post I have been extremely busy - I moved into a new apartment, and have also not been home for more than two weeks straight since May.

Things I did

I was born!
  • Cleaned out my mom's old house in WV, finding a lot of fun mementos.
  • Moved: arguably this does not count as "done", since we still haven't hung the art and I am still setting up my closet and office, but the new place is at least livable now.
I saw a fox!
And got extremely muddy.
  • Went to Nova Scotia alone for a week, spent a lot of time hiking and biking.

And, finally, went to Berlin during the worst heat wave it's ever had for a wedding (I did not take many pictures, but above you can see our cursed hotel room for time-traveling perverts from the '70s and some other cursed things I encountered on the trip). We did a brief layover in Iceland on our way back, which was a great respite from the heat, and then we returned to New York on Thursday just in time for another heat wave.

It has been a pretty excellent summer so far, and maybe the best summer New York has had in ages: not included above is the week of celebrations that followed the Knicks winning. I'd never been in a city when it won a major championship before and it was an absolute delight to have that particular cherry popped in the city I've lived in for the majority of my adult life. I admit to being a bandwagoner (I was raised a Celtics fan and stopped caring about basketball at some point during the pandemic) but I'm fully converted now. The collective joy of this beautiful, awful city was something to behold.

Things I'm Reading And Thinking About

  • I have been collecting pieces about the AI trend that concerns me the most personally - the way things that used to take a lot of effort don't anymore, and the knock-on effects that's having on people who, historically, have cared a lot about effort. This has been tough for me personally. It bums me out that I'm no longer impressed by someone's cool creative tech project, or that I have to spend so much mental energy trying to decide if whatever I'm looking at is real or not. Same as Nolen's piece linked above, this has mostly manifested in my interests drifting towards the analog: other than tinkering with my homelab, I haven't really been doing any tech-y stuff in my spare time (although, to be fair, the nonstop travel hasn't given me much chance to either). I've drafted up some longer writing about this general feeling of tech-related malaise, that when the time and effort it takes to make things is so drastically reduced there no longer seems to be any point to it, but I'm still sorting through my feelings on the matter. For now I am just telling people I have a general sense that all of this is bad for the soul and we need to find ways to reckon with it. I have no particular desire to handwrite code for the sake of purity - it has always been a means to an end - but the needfulness of the effort gave the work meaning and I feel its absence keenly.
  • Relatedly, I find myself revisiting this typewritten letter from Chad Whitacre announcing his departure from all post-1980 technology relatively often. I'm not ready to go Internet Amish but I'd be lying if I said the idea isn't occasionally tempting.
  • Unrelatedly, I really enjoyed Mike Cook's manifesto jam contribution, NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR GAME. A lot of people are mad at him about it which is a strong sign that he's right. Indie game dev is like playing the lottery! Just make the game you want to make!

Next

I have a lovely couple of weeks at home for a change, then I'm capping off my summer of travel with two weeks in South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. Normally this is where I'd commit to some new project but due to the aforementioned general disaffection with writing code right now I am holding off on any grand pronouncements until I feel excited about something again. In the meantime I intend to continue focusing on being outside, being around people, and finding things to enjoy that don't live on a screen.

Screenshots/Misc Photos

'Til next time!

Published by:

Brent