works of wanderlust

Month: July 2025

  • media: nostalgia summer mode

    Two weeks of blur, waiting for professional stuff to happen while July slips away into the heat. We went on a road trip to BC and I loaded up my device with a bunch of movies and books and it turns out I barely had time to read the news, let alone finish a novel. But I squeezed in some down time and stared at a screen when I got tired of the beautiful mountain views.

    The last couple of weeks I watched:

    films: all the matricies

    I was there in 1999. And again a few years later when the sequels hit theatres. Films were still events back then, and trilogies building on universes were rare and precious gems worth queuing up for at the local megaplex. And it’s not like I haven’t gone back and watched any of the Matrix movies in the intervening twenty-five plus years… but it has been a while, and never have I ever sat down and over the course of three days watched all four (yeah, even the 2022 Resurrections instalment.) Until recently. Summer. Vacation mode. Heat wave. Laziness on the couch. Call it whatever, I unplugged from life for the duration of four movies and plugged into the oh-gee mind-bender of philosophical cinema. This isn’t a review, of course. You can read opinions of any or all of them online, and like all online opinions many are shrouded in rage and bias and unrealistic expectations, particularly following the unlikely masterstroke of storytelling-meets-special-effects-meets-brain-melting-concepts that was the original The Matrix. Spoiler alert: what if we were living in a computer simulation? What would that tell us about free will and emotions and personal agency and choosing blissful ignorance over gritty realities? The Wachowskis were telling a story that was as open to interpretation as any piece of art, and I ate it up along with half the modern world fitting a skewered worldview though the lens of a reality that I would now forever question, even just a little bit. I recently heard someone suggest that the reason everyone hated the ending of Lost so much, remember that show?, was that the build up and hype did not align with the final result. I think the same could be said about other shows like Battlestar Galactica, another long run show that was dissected on the fly online and could never have filled the spaces of anticipation and imagination of eager viewers waiting to see the ending. The Matrix fell into the same trap, and even when the four-quel arrived in 2022ish it was met with a kind of collective what-was-that-groan. But The Matrix extended universe had already been scoped by the unbound imaginations of millions of critical viewers and fans leaving a space of expectation so big that no story could ever hope to rival the vague perception of what it should be. That same Lost theorist suggested that a modern “binge watch” of the show held up so much better because there was no anticipatory collapse: that it was just a good story with a reasonably solid (if weird) ending. And having just binge watched the four Matrix movies I think I would suggest the same for those films. Watching them all in a row with no expectations beyond it as a piece of interesting film and art, they are far from perfect, but they are interesting and entertaining and hold up.

    film: cast away

    I saw this flick for the first time in the theatre a few weeks before I moved to Vancouver. (That should put some dates onto my timeline for those of you doing research on the matter.) It is one of those sort of core memories stuck in my head because I had been hanging out with a small group of friends from my summer job of the year before and a few of us met at the theatre and went to see Tom Hanks yelling at a volleyball and a couple of the people were trying to simultaneously wish me well while selfishly suggesting that Vancouver was going to “eat me alive” and that I should just stay here and look for a job locally. I wont say that it made me upset, but those words always kind of haunted me, particularly three years later when (without much regret) we bailed on Vancouver and moved back and I always sort of wonder if those friends were astutely correct about my fortitude or just generally cynics about moving abroad. I can’t help but flashback to that conversation whenever I watch Cast Away so entangled are those two things, which is strange because the movie is a story of resiliency and personal fortitude in the face of overwhelming powerlessness and even creeping hopelessness. Hanks loses everything but anchors himself in the tatters of that hope and survives being stranded on a deserted island for four years only to return hope to learn that most everyone else lost hope about him long before he escaped and was rescued.  There is something parallel there to the journey I have been on personally lately wherein I ejected from the flight of my career and dropped into the wilderness of wherever I’ve been wandering for the last two years. I often feel like despite the seeming agency I imparted myself in pulling the ripcord and jumping that to do so from a burning plane is not so much agency as it is playing a forced move and convincing yourself it was a good choice. Hank’s character made choices to survive and fight against the powerlessness but those things were less choices as they were playing well the poor hand he was dealt and trying not to crack under the pressure when it seemed that all was lost, that he was lost, and when everyone back from where he came had assumed he was gone forever and so they had moved on. Nearly every time you take a run at the wave it is gonna toss you into the reef and mess you up, but you only need to break over that barrier once to get back to civilization.

  • meta (not) monday and other stuff

    Starting with an aside, I’ll just note that it drove me nuts when the company that makes and runs that dystopian social network—you know the one—decided to call itself meta. Many wager that they stole the term from Neal Stephenson’s classic novel Snow Crash which itself was a fiction-shaped social commentary on the explosive expansion of technology into our lives and his “metaverse” was, at least in my opinion, an analogy for the navel-gazing narcissistic amplifications that would inevitably extrude from every pore of an increasing entrenchment of virtual spaces into human lives. Zuckerbot probably just thought it would be a cool name, so now when anyone uses the word “meta” —which simply and properly in English just means something along the lines of “self-referencing”— one can’t help but seem like they are talking about that perverse social network, and not say, being reflective and talking about one’s own work and platform—which is where I was going with this…

    For years when I blogged I used to routinely use the term “meta Mondays” as an excuse to plant a flag in the ‘state of the blog’ and write about what I was working on in and around it, or more often write down excuses about why I wasn’t writing more or building it bigger and better. Meta Monday. Alliterative and clever and whatever.

    I apologize if you are a reader and were expecting a sudden explosion of new and insightful content about my random musings. I apologize if you have stumbled here from my old urls and are now wondering why those more focused brand-idents are a guy blogging about his weekends and his fitness.  My energies have been focused on other stuff.  Who knows how long that will last. I have put a lot of those energies into a couple project about which I may or may not ever share—professional stuff, ahem, you know how it goes—and when I’m spending six to eight hours at a keyboard doing that stuff, finding time to be expressive and philosophical here is a slipping luxury.

    And those damn social networks, amiright?

    The wasted human potential that has been sunk via billions of human life hours every day into this fuzzy digital existence. Gah!

    I was always a bit of an optimist. 

    Do you know why I started blogging?

    It was the afterglow of the science fiction idealism of the eighties and nineties. Authors would create this abstract setting where virtual spaces were pure and engaged. A place where truth was challenged, sure, but where rational thought and big ideas prevailed. People would write and share and create and build and make incredible things.

    What did we get?

    We got the shitty shadow. The Internet. Influencers selling their souls for clicks, deep fake images and video, AI slop, hate, rage, unfiltered racism, the masses looking at reality but then jabbing their own fingers in their eyes to avoid seeing it.

    If you can’t express your idea in an eight second video clip no one cares. 

    Ninety-nine point nine percent of attention goes to zero point one percent of the voices and creators. We haven’t broken celebrity, we’ve amplified it and commodified it.

    Long form expression is all but dead.

    Why write a post if no is going to read it?

    Why write a novel if an AI is going to steal it?

    Why host a blog if search engines will bury it?

    Why engage in a discussion if the brain at the other end of the connection is unwilling to consider it?

    What I used to hope for was a kind of online world where everyone has a place to write and share and create, at least a little something worth reading, but that was always a kind of long shot idealism—I will admit—and I honestly never even considered that it would go this badly for us online. In the last year or two my hope for a lovely digital future has faded to a kind of dystopia of necessity, of me eventually eluding escape for but a single reason: that ceding even one more byte to the darkness would be a betrayal of my life’s work. The internet is deeply broken for good and all that is left is a commercial platform run for the sole purpose of harvesting as much cash out of the fibres before the whole thing burns to the ground, and worse. 

    How’s that for a not-Monday morning thought?

    I guess what I’m saying is that my optimism is on life support.  Objective reality is apparently broken. The internet is a bully platform. The nerds built it and then the rest of the tribe saw merely another space that could be used to induce hate and pain and hurt—and for every one of us there and ninety-nine of them, and now they are shifting algorithms to amplify the ninety-nine to ninety-nine millions. I am drowning in a sea of digital stupid and I sometimes feel as though I am on the precipice of a post-internet phase of my life.

    And yet, here I am still writing.

  • weekend wrap, eleven

    Last week was a busy week. Some work-related, professional stuff occupied my days (oddly enough) and my the time Friday rolled around my head was crammed full of half-baked frustrations with the state that summer has on the speed of business. It was always my least favourite time of year to try and get things done, and this year has been no exception.

    Alas, nothing some sporadic video gaming interspersed with various parenting emergencies couldn’t distract from.

    The blur of a mid-summer weekend included:

    Friday evening was a bit of an adventure trying to sort out a lost airpod for the Kid which meant driving across town to locate it.

    I watched a movie to relax. I settled into the couch and something inclined me to put on Cast Away, you know, the old Tom Hanks on a deserted island movie, and oddly enough it boosted my spirits a little bit after a weird week.

    Saturday morning was a little lazy, but the Kid needed to catch up on paperwork (yeah, figure that one out!) and so wanted to trip over to Starbucks and do her work over a coffee. This is my life now. I joined her and did some writing while she did her stuff.

    The weather was spotty, raining mostly, so the gals decided to do a morning costco run. Saturday at costco is always a bit sketchy, and with it being summer and raining it hit the mark. We tried to find something we could all agree on to cook for dinner but failed miserably. 

    I spent a good chunk of the afternoon prone on the couch, jumping between reading and playing some cozy video games, so reporting on that is a bit of mixed bag of “yeah, I needed to chill for a couple hours” and “lazy dude sits on couch.”

    Then the adventure began.  Well, not really. The kid got roped into a summer dance performance (even tho we thought she was all done with the studio) for a local highland games. The weather was garbage and the car needed gas, so we took my truck and I drove. I sat in the parking lot reading my book until she wandered back after the show an hour and a half later and oof… dead battery in the truck.  We got a boost from one of the other adults, but in the process I noticed my last-legs battery was corroded to the point of imminent failure

    Sunday morning I met the crew for a run and coffee, as usual, and as reported on in a previous post. 

    Then I went home, got showered and changed, and headed over to the store to buy a new battery for the truck. Changing it out—time spent mostly cleaning the corrosion off the leads—took about an hour and then I went for a little drive to make sure there was a solid charge in the new battery.

    I decided it was time to put my feet up and put the hammock out in the backyard, then waded out in grass up past my ankles, and nestled into my hammock… for about seven seconds. I figured I should probably cut the grass before I relaxed completely, and promptly checked off both those items from my afternoon list.

    The making of dinner followed, and after settling in to finish off another book while I waited for the food to digest (and the community free time at the pool to end at seven) I started reading a new novel.

    I capped off the weekend with a long lane swim at the pool shortly after seven, and the kid tagged along to go to the gym. I zonked me out and I was in bed at a reasonable hour like any middle aged guy who had a busy weekend should be.

  • head over feets, three

    As we pass through mid-July it has been a mix of rain and smoke and heat. I can’t complain too much because, as I noted to one of my fellow runners, the trails are lush and green and lovely right now—and we’re already starting to realize that the fall and winter are just a few short months away.

    Summer also means that a lot of people are coming and going, and without a proper race that we’re all training for attendance is scattered for our group activities. I’ve been trying to supplement by making good use of my rec centre pass, though, and also finally motivated myself to tune up the bike for the season, even tho the season is almost half over.

    So it goes and recently I added to my fitness by…

    I did a huge cycling lap around the neighbourhood shortly after posting my last update—as in I literally posted and packed up my keyboard and left the cafe via my bike. Later that day I met Ron for a short five klick run, logging a few hills and then some more distance on the flat. This meant that over the morning and by early afternoon I had swam, ridden, and run in that order and for roughly the distance of a sprint triathlon.  Not bad for a random Tuesday.

    By Thursday, and after a very busy Wednesday, I found myself back in the pool first thing in the morning. I had delayed slightly in leave the house tho, and the lanes were packed—three to a lane in most cases—and I realized that lane availabity is probably my biggest anxiety about resuming my pool activities. You may go there and have a whole lane to yourself, or you may be stuck in a lane with a couple of slow flutterboard dudes or forced to share a lane with someone passing you every other lap because they are training for the olympic gold or something. I never have to worry about space running because there’s thousands of klicks of trails in the city, but just eight lanes in the local pool.

    That same evening I had a solid run with the regular Thursday crew meetup. We dashed through the Mill Creek trails and I logged a six klick run that felt better than most anything I’ve run in the last month. Good news, perhaps.

    Friday and Saturday were pretty chill, but Sunday morning despite threats of rain the crew met up for the regular weekend run and coffee.  We logged an easy eight klicks (mostly because a few people were recovering from their ultras last weekend) and then parked for some java in the rec centre.

    I capped off my weekend with a lot of laps at the pool. Sundays are generally a free community day, so until exactly 7pm when they kick out the masses the pool is too crowded to do much of anything. But by ten after seven, the lanes are all but abandoned and I had a lane almost entirely to myself for long enough to increase my distance again. I logged one thousand meters, or twenty full laps, bringing my return to swimming back up into to more real distances for the first time in years.

  • ghosts in our spaces

    please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.

    Have you heard the theory about spaces? 

    I think formally it is referred to as Third Space Theory, and having just spent some time reading about the background of it I can share that (a) it is a kind of sociological theory of culture and identity that is meant to help us understand our modern society but which may not reflect on other non-western cultures or historical cultures and (b) you should almost certainly read a more reliable source than my meanderingly philosophical blog post if you want to know more.

    But I can simplify it here to make a point.

    And a point about AI, even.

    The theory kinda posits that modern humans in the western world are creatures of multiple spheres of identity and existence: first, second and third spaces—or home, work, and recreation if one wanted to simplify the concept for a meme post like where I first stumbled across this concept before reading more about it.

    The first space is our domestic sphere: where we live, the place where we are part of a family unit, probably where we sleep, maybe where we eat in privacy and away from the public, and a space where we generally spend our quiet, personal moments. This space may be a house or an apartment or just a room to call ones own, but could alsobe something less physical.

    The second space is where we contribute to public life or society. For most people this work or school or public service or a job-slash-career space. Again, this can be a physical space like a building or a worksite, or can be something more transient like a video meeting or a conference in a faraway city or a job interview while wearing a visitor badge in someone else’s second space.

    Then comes the third space, and the theory talks about the variety of these spaces but often we can consider these, simply, spaces of public participation: recreation activities, playing sports, going to the library, attending a church, shopping at a mall, eating at a restaurant with friends. Other spaces not home or work and spaces where we can relax, socialize, and be our authentic selves for the purpose of playing and enjoying our lives.

    The theory also leans into some ideas about value of these spaces, particularly the third space, on the health and wellbeing of not only us as individuals but of society as a whole. Society, you ask? Well, according to the theory, but where else in the public sphere can we as individuals plot our dissent and dissatisfaction with the state of our society and work to communicate ways to improve it—or perhaps overthrow those who are seeking to oppress it? These theories always have a serious side, don’t they?

    But perhaps I digress. I was getting to AI, wasn’t I?

    So, consider for a moment what has happened to these spaces in the last few years. 

    Consider, for example, what happened to the second space of so many office workers during the pandemic: work from home became a collapse of the second space into the first space for many, myself included. My kitchen was suddenly my office, and I was staring through a digital window into the living rooms, basements, and (yes, really) messy bedrooms of many people I formerly only knew as nine-to-five office people. Many have only slightly decoupled this collapse since, and a lot more have remained (sometimes stubbornly oblivious to the downsides) still living in this blurring of first and second spaces for half a decade.

    And now consider what has happened to many third spaces in the last few years: libraries have lost funding, malls have gone bankrupt, the price of admission to public facilities has either gone up or simply been privatized and gated and thus become a barrier to entry for many and all the while many third spaces have just generally been usurped by the so-called digital town square of social media, or online shopping, or multiplayer video gaming, food delivery apps, or even unidirectional media platforms streaming content into our screens.

    To recap: the first and second spaces have collapsed and blurred together, and too the third space has become limited or completely virtualized as a collection of apps for others and consumed from the couch while sitting around that same blurry first-meets-second space.

    And all that might be manageable if one sad fact about those virtual third spaces wasn’t also simultaneously true: that more and more the participants we meet inside that third space are not other human beings but rather AI algorithms, bots and chat agents and tour guides to this artificial public sphere where we are supposed to exist for the sake of forging and maintaining a healthy society.

    What is the impact of that to not just our personal health, but to the strength of our political and social structures?

    On the one hand, AI is not necessarily to blame for our whole cloth migration into the virtual or our physical abandonment of second and third spaces, but at the same time it has likely eased the transition and gobbled up our willpower to go back to how things used to be when we had three fulsome spaces and all those spaces were populated by real people, for better or worse. And I suppose one could ask: does it even matter if the end state of all this is that enough people blur all three spaces into a single digital virtual sphere populated by artificial intelligences? Maybe that’s just what some people prefer, the health of themselves and a broader society be damned.

    But that’s just a theory.