Meeting Metafilter: Cortex Sees America

Day 5: Maine! From Boston to Salem, from Salem to Portland. ...

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:59:49 -0800

Day 5: Maine! From Boston to Salem, from Salem to Portland. Background music this time is by one of my favorite Metafilter musicians, Corduroy.

Boston! Not much footage of the evening of Day 3, since I spent...

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:19:24 -0800

Boston! Not much footage of the evening of Day 3, since I spent most of it playing Rock Band with friends. Day 4 I spend wandering around Boston Common, eating lunch with my brother and then heading off to the meetup at Christophers.

Here’s a rough edit of Day 2 (and some of Day 3) of the...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:20:31 -0800

Here’s a rough edit of Day 2 (and some of Day 3) of the trip, based on some walking-around footage, meetup documentation (Neil Diamond singalong included) and an interview I did with my host in New York, Afroblanco.

I’m still not sure what to do with all the trip footage — or what I even have the footage to accomplish, really — but trying to go at it day-by-day or city-by-city in an episodic fashion is probably the best place for me to start, and this is a first attempt at pulling that off.

After a couple of weeks of really thoroughly not getting...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:52:59 -0700

After a couple of weeks of really thoroughly not getting anything done related to this project, I’m trying to get on with nosing through some of the video I shot and learning my way around my new editing software. This is an afternoon experiment, trying to do a little abstract title sequence for the sake of finding my way around some of the editing tools I’ve got on hand.

So now what?

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:06:26 -0700

I’m home, and I’ve had a long weekend to relax and hang out with my wife and get accustomed again to the idea that I don’t have to go get on a plane again tomorrow, etc.

One problem with doing all that in a month is that I didn’t really have time during the month to digest what all was going on. Now that I can sit still, I’m regretting not carving out a little more time every day during the trip to more thoroughly document the days as they went by, if only by updating this blog a bit more regularly than I did. But, lessons learned.

Next step: figure out what to do with the documentation I do have. I’ve got a pile of video to start looking through today, and a great load of photos I’ve been posting all along the way; that latter stuff I should put together a wrap-up post here for to make it all easy to get at from one spot, I figure.

So, there it is. The trip’s done but I’m not quite done with the trip. Updates here will no doubt be a bit more sporadic than they were during the adventure itself, but there’s a bit more to come yet, so keep your eyes open.

The welcome home. A dozen local mefites (including my...

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:00:16 -0700

The welcome home. A dozen local mefites (including my mother-in-law!) came out to the airport at near midnight on a weekday to greet me with a clever banner and donuts. It was a very nice surprise, though they got a very low-energy cortex for their efforts.

Day 31: Homeward Bound

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:00:00 -0700

On a flight to Portland, six hours give or take from JFK, getting in just a little before midnight. My wife is meeting me at the airport, to taxi home with me — we’re both impatient to see each other again. I spent most of the day feeling antsy because I didn’t have anything else I needed to plan for or take care of after last night’s meetup.

I’m coming home with something upwards of 100GB worth of photos (jpegs from the SD960, RAW files from the 5D) and video (720p footage from the SD960), and a few hours of field recorder audio as well. What I’ll do with, exactly, I don’t know, but I’m going to try to do something.

Also, I’m a thief:

1. I managed to walk out the door of Afroblanco’s apartment with his keys in my pocket, which is complicated because he’s moving out tomorrow. We agreed that I’d mail them to his landlord tomorrow morning by the fastest available method and call it good that way.

2. I also, I discovered in the last couple hours, packed up koeselitz’s SD card reader when I was heading out of Denver. Another thing to throw in the mail.

As a sort of karmic retribution, I’m pretty sure I’ve donated at least one soap and one shampoo bottle to a couple of my various hosts. And then there’s the matter of that missing accessories bag, somewhere in Vermont, having its own weird adventure.

Hosts! This wouldn’t have been nearly as painless (or inexpensive!) as it was without the generosity of all the metafilter folks (and in some cases their families) who offered to put me up and give me rides and show me around their various towns. I should find some way to thank them all in more detail later, but for now let me just say: thanks, folks. This wouldn’t have been what it was without all your stunning hospitality.

And the meetups! Looking back on it, I’m stunned how much meetupery we packed into this month. And kind of stunned I managed to avoid any hangovers. (Though there is the matter of the Mysterious Chicago Sickness.) The meetups ran the gauntlet, from the homey troika in Utah to the friendly half-dozen in Baltimore to the 14 hour jaunt in Philly to the epic multi-day meetupathons in LA and Chicago, and everything in between.

And the food! And the bathroom mirrors! But I don’t think I should try to plow through everything right now. It was an absurd amount of travel, probably too much and too long by any reasonable standard, adn I’m going to need a while to decompress and go back over everything once I can get home and back into my normal routine. My normal, airport-free, hugging my wife whenever I feel like it routine.

I can’t wait to be home.

I earned this hot chocolate, and then some. From a post-karaoke...

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:59:05 -0700

I earned this hot chocolate, and then some. From a post-karaoke snack at Veselka, near Afroblanco’s apartment; he and I and kathrineg and ocherdraco managed to outlast the rest of the crew and get perogies, and boy were they worth it.

But the hot chocolate was really the best part.

One last bash, doing karaoke at 2nd on 2nd in Manhattan. This...

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:56:28 -0700

One last bash, doing karaoke at 2nd on 2nd in Manhattan. This turned into a double-decker party — finishing off my trip around the country, and bidding farewell to Afroblanco who is moving very shortly to San Francisco.

This is my only picture of the actual meetup; I was too busy singing and laughing and so on to pull out the 5D and shoot portraits. But I’ve got video kicking around.

I arrived in NYC feeling moderately less sick than I had been; I woke up this morning after not enough sleep on top of a night of noise and drinking, and I feel better still. My wife has her own cold these last couple days, so we can compare notes when I get home.

Day 30: Delayed in Denver Int'l

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:23:58 -0700

Denver is a big airport with a nice looking main staging area and reasonably nice concourses, but it’s got fuckall for outlets and the free wifi is slow and loads things in an iframe with ads up top. Better than Long Beach, but that’s faint praise if ever I’ve given any.

I’d be less grumpy about the downsides if my plane had left on time (e.g. an hour or so ago), but it’s been delayed and won’t take off for another fifty minutes it sounds like.

Final wrap-up party tonight in NYC, karaoke bash in a private room at 2nd and 2nd, but with the plane delay it looks like I won’t make it there until we’re halfway through the rented time. So finally I’ve managed to get hit by a significant delay — after a month of traveling, I can just about shout BINGO.

I think maybe I should have in fact made Bingo cards. I’ve got some time to kill, maybe I still will.

So: karaoke tonight, sleep it off, and then kill time in New York tomorrow until my evening flight home to Portland, where I wouldn’t mind being right now if it didn’t mean skipping out on people who’ve shown me a lot of hospitality already.

Denver meetup was a nice time; got off to a rocky start since...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:18:18 -0700

Denver meetup was a nice time; got off to a rocky start since the place we were meeting for food beforehand turned out to be closed on Tuesdays, so folks showed up and immediately had to figure out somewhere else to go, and koeselitz (pictured, and my thoughtful host in Denver) and I were a little late getting out to the meetup ourselves.

So we eventually established with the barkeep at P&S that several other folks had come in and left in sequence, assured him that we’d find them and bring ‘em back, and then headed out and found them across the street getting some food at a hotdog joint reportedly owned by the son of local legend Binky The Clown.

Got some food, headed back to P&S, and spent the next couple hours talking and drinking and having a nice, sicko-friendly laidback time. Thanks, Denver! I hope I didn’t give too many of you this Chicago cold.

All of the meetup pictures here.

Nadir. I spent most of Denver in the guest bedroom at...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:13:58 -0700

Nadir.

I spent most of Denver in the guest bedroom at koeselitz’s place, scraping along on antihistimine and kleenex and naps. I’m lucky I didn’t get sick sooner in the trip, but I wouldn’t have minded dodging that bullet entirely.

Day 28: Down and Out in Denver

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:47:36 -0700

So I’m sick. Hopefully as sick as I’m going to get, to feel better already in the morning, etc, but right at the moment I’ve got a sore throat and a bit of a headache and some minor sinus action and I’m spaced out on cold medicine.

I’ve managed to squeak by with an apparently ridiculously robust immune system up to this point, so really I’m thankful that it took four weeks for it to happen, but I would have preferred it not to happen at all or to at least wait until I got home and could be a zombie in my own house instead of moping around in someone else’s.

I have a hard time getting out from the immediacy of the situation when I’m feeling blech-o like this — like some part of my brain is in charge of constantly distracting me and reminding me that OH HEY YOU DON’T FEEL WELL HEY HEY HEY or something — and so I should probably try not to go on at tedious length about not feeling well and just read a book or something.

The tail end of the trip looks like this: Denver meetup tomorrow evening; fly to NYC the next day (since the only way from Denver to Portland is via JFK or Boston); karaoke wrapup meetup in NYC that night (since Denver->NYC->PDX in one day would be torture); and then home to Portland the next night on a direct flight.

I hope I’m not a zombie for these last two meetups. Denver I can be low-energy and make it work, as long as I can at least be social; NYC karaoke party isn’t really something you can smile wanly through though, I don’t think, so I sure hope I’m close to 100% by then.

This has been a fantastic trip, I hope I can end it on a slightly better note than the one I’m sounding right at the moment.

you know the way things are going / they’re gonna crucify...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:37:33 -0700

you know the way things are going / they’re gonna crucify me

Being a long-haired beardo has its ups and downs. One of the ups is that if you’ve got a dozen friends and a lot of beer and a questionable idea, you can make something like this happen.

Photo by mefite pjern, who takes some pretty good non-blasphemous photos too.

Full disclosure: while in Chicago, I ate neither a hotdog nor...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:34:15 -0700

Full disclosure: while in Chicago, I ate neither a hotdog nor any deep-dish. I did eat some tasty things, though, including this: a dark beer and a steak-and-egg burger, at Billy Goat. The sandwich is what it sounds like: a thin steak and a fried egg. Hot damn.

The beer is also what it sounds like: dark beer. They only sell two kinds: light and dark. Both are good, so I’m okay with that.

Chicago! Epic 2-day meetupfest that included a gay bar,...

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:30:53 -0700

Chicago! Epic 2-day meetupfest that included a gay bar, softcore karaoke, short-form community theater, and a partial screening of Lawrence of Arabia, among other things. Tremendously fun crowd in this town, and Eamon (pictured left, giving Juliet Banana a reason to be concerned) was a great host.

And he seems to have the same sore throat I have, a couple days later. Nice work, Chicago. But I forgive you, because it was a good couple of days.

Meetup pictures for Chicago are in two sets:

- Day one photos

- Day two photos

Backlogged in O'Hare

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 08:12:22 -0700

Chicago was a great time, and I haven’t posted anything from it yet because I was too busy having a great time. More later when there’s more later.

Currently sitting in E9 at ORD, waiting on a plane that was apparently late out of Boston and has managed to touch down as of a minute or so ago, four minutes before it’s supposed to be taking off again. Chicago has been the only case of late flights so far this trip, and it’s been coming AND going. Odd luck.

I’m at E9, but I’m flying out of E8. But there’s not a goddam outlet in E8, and I think I found the only one in E9, and only one of the two plugs actually works. And so some other guy looking to power his laptop (and who gamely tried the dead outlet that I warned him was dead) has now just had some sort of argument with presumably his girlfriend over the subject of him wandering further from E8 in order to find power.

Should I have broken out the powerstrip from my bag and made of myself an epicenter of pluggery? Balancing the desire to be helpful with the desire not to be at the center of other people’s drama. Erring on the side of self-preservation. What would Merlyn think?

I have just discovered that I can produce a little checkbox on the side of the tumblr dashboard, labeled “Let people answer this”, by throwing in as the final character in the text box here a question mark. Is that how you produce a comment box for entries? Is it that simple? Is this some questionable fucking UI design?

And how are you all doing, anyway?

My host in Utah, mr crash davis (mark ii: jazz odyssey), who...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:31:51 -0700

My host in Utah, mr crash davis (mark ii: jazz odyssey), who along with his lovely non-mefite wife and yours truly comprised what will certainly be the smallest meetup on this whole trip. Beer was drunk, stories were told, a quiet good time was had by all.

They have mountains in Utah, it turns out; the view from the SLC...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:28:26 -0700

They have mountains in Utah, it turns out; the view from the SLC area is gorgeous in that Rocky Mountains way that’s easy to forget about when I’m in New England or LA or even at home in Portland where we see only fringes like Hood.

It’s also cold, which was a shocking and sort of refreshing change of pace after a lot of warmer-than-Portland destinations in the last couple weeks; I actually had to put on my thermal for the first time.

After a late flight into SLC and a night’s rest, I spent the day wandering through downtown Salt Lake City, taking in the sights such as they were. Lots of construction in the core, some of which I have to wonder might be in trouble what with the downturn; the temple is pretty and staid (and I got through the grounds, hippie hair and Flaming Christopher Walken t-shirt and ipod-and-headphones headgear and all, unmolested by the local religiosa); Gilgal sculpture garden pretty and strange and empty.

Day of weird flying

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:33:22 -0700

So:

For my SFO-LGB flight, they announced Final Boarding Call like five minutes after they announced pre-boarding, with barely a chance to announce by-section boarding in between. It was odd — presumably the product somehow of a VERY empty commuter flight down to LGB — and left me feeling annoyed about feeling guilty about not racing to board ASAP.

Now, in Long Beach, the gate for LGB-SLC is packed to the gills, warmer in here than it probably ought to be just from the human biomass. We should be boarding already but aren’t, even though the plane is there and deboarded. Not that that’s super weird, but it’s easily the first time on the trip that a gate seemed not just full but *crowded*.

Glad I have an aisle seat.

But further weirdness: security seemed to be on its toes tonight. In a meticulous, managerial-review sort of way, is what my gut says. The initial security agents very politely conversational while checking passes and IDs, a little less casual about the actual checks as well. Folks helping with xray prep being a bit more thorough about binning things out conservatively to avoid overlapping items. Folks doing secondary screening being almost apologetic about what I suspect is a higher-than-normal, less-justified-than-normal rate of pull-asides.

The highlight of all that security stuff was the moment, a bit after I stepped into the main security-screening room, when someone shouted loudly-but-not-nervily “OH FIVE BRAVO”.

And the cry went up, like some middle school basketball team joining in a motivational chant: OH FIVE BRAVO! OH FIVE BRAVO!

X-ray belts stopped, screenings halted, agents blocked the portals, and everyone blinked and looked around. A woman gave me a look, as if to say “what fresh hell is THIS?”, and I shrugged and made some small comment speculating on all of the above in some unrefined sentence-long fragment. We shrugged together. And then the ALL CLEAR came down, with an ALL CLEAR, ALL CLEAR following it like post-game highfives, and we were moving again.

Weirdness clumps, I suppose.

Also, I am basically a ninja about security-screening preparedness at this point. Down to a science. I know where my shit is and where it goes and when and what the best order to do this stuff is to avoid hiccups and minimize my x-ray belt bogarting. Not that those around me seem in particular to appreciate this, THE PHILISTINES.

Time to board. SLC, here I come!