While Tesla literally crashes and literally burns, forever tarnished by the epic fail that is the “CyberTruck” (not to mention Elon’s insanity), other EV companies are taking on the mantle of cool & different.
I love seeing products like the Slate Truck. Historically I have been supremely disappointed at the conservatism of so many America-made EVs…and the nosebleed prices of most. But it feels like we’re turning a corner. EVs have been around long enough and established long enough as real, viable automobiles, the market is ripe for a few quirky experiments. I wish Slate the best of luck.
You know those sorts of conversations you have with old friends when you get together after a long absence and you just talk and talk and talk for hours upon hours about a great many things both lofty and lowly and everything in between?
I’m grateful to have had several of those conversations over the past few days. And it’s given me much food for thought. Good friends help stimulate your imagination in ways you didn’t anticipate, or perhaps reinforce vague ideas you were wary of ruminating on too much in a vacuum. And perhaps most of all, they help you feel less alone in this world.
Value such relationships. They are all too rare, too fleeting.
I realize I didn’t mention much about what I’m doing for work as I live the #NomadLifestyle. I’m doing the same thing I’ve already been doing for years, #freelancing as a software developer for my boutique web studio Whitefusion.
Working on the go isn’t anything new for me. I had gone on short “digital nomad” excursions on a regular basis long before hitting the road full-time. It’s been a matter for pride for me that I can work in almost any conceivable environment. I’ve worked in:
Planes
Trains
Automobiles
Parks
Mountaintops
Libraries
Boats
Steps Behind a Building
Coworking Spaces
Cafés
Pubs
AirBnBs
Hotels
Grocery Stores
Beaches
Churches
Conventions
Next to a Creek
Athletic Clubs
And Yes, Home Offices
In a certain sense, that last option is the least appealing to me which is why I never fully resonated with the concept Work From Home. For me, Remote Work has always had little real overlap per se with WFH. I could literally head into an office every day and “work a 9 to 5” — and yet it’s remote work. In fact, I’ve done exactly that at times when I’ve had a membership or even a dedicated desk at a particular coworking space.
Remote work and also being a digital nomad to me simply means that nobody is dictating the how of my getting the job done. They simply evaluate the merits of the outcome. Whether that outcome was obtained because I did some work at an office desk or because I did some work in a yurt in the middle of the woods is completely beside the point. I’m very thankful I’m able to make a living—challenging certainly in this crazy Tech Industry season we’re in—as a remote worker.
With regards to the journey I’m currently on, I definitely have to manage some logistics at times around where I’ll be able to find a decent cell signal or Wi-Fi. Starbucks has certainly saved my butt now and again. I ended up joining the “Sip Club” at Panera Bread which has also been very helpful when I’m in major urban centers. Independent coffee shops in all sorts of out-of-the-way places are always a blessing. Some nicer grocery stores with seating have also worked wonders. And any chance I get, I always seek out a local library. They are truly treasures of the common good and rare examples of public spaces open to all.
But sometimes I’ve simply sat in my car seat with a little attachment that fits over the steering wheel to provide me with a “desk” for my laptop while using my iPhone’s Personal Hotspot feature. T-Mobile has been pretty good to me a decent amount of the time.
I could greatly level up my “off-grid” work opportunities if I purchased Starlink, but do I want to hand a single penny over to Space Karen? Aw HELL naw! So I make do.
I have my scars, you have yours
Don’t let them take your power
Don’t leave it alone in the final hours
They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power
Unless you stand up and take it back
Try to see the future and get mad
It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had
You don’t have much time to get it back
In the midnight hour, they’ll slam the door
Make you forget what you were fighting for
Put you back in your place, they’ll shut you down
You better learn how to fight, you better say it out loud
I’m in the midst of #writing my first travelogue installment to publish here on the blog since I embarked on the #NomadLifestyle, and I’m quickly realizing I don’t really have any template, any “grid” to follow. I’m generally so used to consuming (and occasionally making!) travel vlogs, and let’s face it, video is a very good medium to show off travel & adventure.
Yet there’s a longstanding tradition of people spending time on the road and then writing about it. Unfortunately I can’t say I am sophisticated enough to have read much of it.
I suppose I could search the web for what other people have written, and copy that. However I worry that in doing so, I’ll end up simply trying to sound like those other people. I’m very protective of my own voice in this matter. There’s a reason I haven’t been filming any travel vlogs in this season. I did think about it a lot. In the end, I decided it would diminish my experience—and add a great deal of stress to the situation—if I were swallowed up in the need to focus on how to film my travels…and how people would receive it.
I have no interest in becoming “a professional YouTuber”—and in fact I have a bit of a critique lurking in my brain somewhere with regard to the class dynamics between attractive Millennials showing off a glamorous world-traveling lifestyle vs. the very real fact that sometimes you’re sharing space in a parking lot or a public restroom with people who are very much down on their luck and by no means feeling glam.
Hence my travelogue will be frank, honest, raw, and hopefully enjoyable for the most part. I make no guarantees. This isn’t a performance for me, nor is it a career. This is my actual life I’m living. You’ll get a taste of the bad and the good alike. Make of it what you will! 😅
I have always had the greatest respect for people who are deeply passionate about something esoteric.
I don’t even personally need to care about what they care about. I’ll admire them anyway just for their passion. I once knew someone who was passionate about the fine art of making reeds for bagpipes. He didn’t even play bagpipes very well, but he was a hell of a reed maker. It had never occurred to me there could be a person out there who doesn’t really play the bagpipes yet cares about how to make bagpipe reeds.
What a strange passion to have right? And yet I would never dream of wading into a heated conversation about the best way to make a bagpipe reed, or how to form the shape of a bellows, or what type of leather to use for a strap, and say “calm down, it’s only just a…”
How disrespectful. How rude. How ignorant.
My rule of thumb: never walk up to a master of their craft and tell them what they should or should not be concerned about when it relates to their craft. It only serves to illustrate the poverty of your own mind.
A very close second to this is when people come along and say, in so many words, nobody cares how the sausage is made. This comes up in programming circles all the time for some odd reason. “No user cares” how XYZ language/tool/framework/library/technique was employed in the production of this app, supposedly. They just care if it works to meet their perceived end goal.
People will care about your craft because it’s your job to make them care.
Me, I care deeply about how other people make the things that I use. I may not understand much of what they say about how they build what they build, how they design what they design. It doesn’t matter! The point is that I respect their craft. I respect their ingenuity and unique #creativity.
I care about what they care about because I admire how much they care about it.
I have been riding high on this news all evening. Between the recent court rulings and this meeting finally transpiring between Senator Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia, it is feeling more and more likely that the illegitimate Trump regime is due for a reckoning.
AG Pam Bondi erroneously claims that Garcia is “not coming back to our country”. As Lawrence O’Donnell so adroitly articulates, we’ll see about that.
I am Today Years Old as I realize I would rather live in a small dwelling that’s mostly empty—but what is in it is fabulous—than live in a large house filled with disposable cheap crap.
I think the Democrats are finally starting to get it.
We’re done with speeches and charts and sternly-worded memos. We’re asking you to get in the fight and make audacious spectacle that is messy and uncouth and raw and real. Become the story. Become unignorable. Take control of the narrative and wrest it away from the MAGA propagandists.
Senator Van Hollen, I salute you. 🫡 Godspeed on your travels and I hope you can get to the bottom of what’s really happening to Kilmar Abrego Garcia and aid in bringing him home. #politics
The road is a lover
You never recover
Not now or any time soon
My head starts to spin
When I think where I’ve been
Playin’ twin to an old fiddle tune, oh
As the wind chases after the moon
We’re witnessing a digital coup unfolding in real-time, according to British journalist Carole Cadwalladr—one of the original reporters who covered the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. The broligarchy is reshaping world order as we speak, and while we may feel powerless to stop it, all hope is not lost if we start to act NOW. We need to name the exact problems and be completely unshamed to hold all in both #politics and Big Tech who are perpetrating these atrocities accountable.
I want to copy here verbatim from Wikipedia just how many awards Carole Cadwalladr has to her name. She is a force to be reckoned with, and a voice who must be heard.
British Journalism Awards’ Technology Journalism Award in December 2017
Specialist Journalist of the Year 2017 at the National Society of Editors Press Awards
Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in June 2018 (for her work “on the impact of big data on the EU Referendum and the 2016 US presidential election”).
Reporters without Borders “L’esprit de RSF” award in November 2018 (for her work on subversion of democratic processes).
The 2018 Polk Award for National Reporting with reporters from the New York Times.
The 2018 Stieg Larsson Prize, an annual award of 200,000 krona for people working in Stieg Larsson’s spirit.
Political Studies Association Journalist of the Year in November 2018 (joint award with Amelia Gentleman) for her persistence and resilience in pursuing “investigative journalism on subjects such as personal data”.
Two 2018 British Journalism Awards for Technology Reporting and Investigation.
Technology Journalist of the Year in the 2018 Society of Editors awards.
The 2019 Gerald Loeb Award for Investigative Reporting.
The annual Hay Festival’s Medal for Journalism in May 2019, “for the heroic and rigorous investigative journalism”.
Finalist, 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, alongside The New York Times reporters, for her coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Winner, 2023 Quaker Truth & Integrity Award.
So yeah. I think maybe her dire warning of just how much trouble our world is in right now bears serious consideration.
One more pull-quote from the talk because I was jumping out of my seat and shouting when she said this. THIS, THIS, THIS is what we need right now. THIS is what the moment requires. 100% commitment to the resistance! 🙌
So I want to leave you with this. This is ChatGPT writing a TED Talk in the style of Carole Cadwalladr. And it is creepily plausible. But what it doesn’t know, because AI is actually as dumb as a rock, is that I am going to turn to Sam Altman, who is coming here, a TED speaker, and say that this does not belong to you. ChatGPT has been trained on my IP, my labor, my personal data. And I did not consent.
One of my most anticipated #TVShows coming to a conclusion this year (along with Star Wars: Andor) is The Handmaid’s Tale.
I have a lot of thoughts about my experience watching this final season in a year such as 2025 and how the show relates to Our Present Moment™, but I’m saving that for a Fresh Fusion podcast episode to be released very soon. As the saying goes: stay tuned!
The F3 is now getting its moment in the sun, and from what I’m seeing so far, it seems like a truly excellent ride for a remarkable price (potential tariff insanity notwithstanding). I think it’s very likely this will be my new #micromobility vehicle come summertime. 😎
