There and back again
I spent most of this week in Orange County, where my company is based. It was fun and valuable to actually be with folks who I almost entirely interact with digitally: a nice reminder that, even with the slickest videoconferencing software and the liveliest Slack channels, there is no substitute for spending a couple days around a coffee machine with your coworkers. (Shuffleboard helps, too.)
It was a nice reminder, too, of all the things I like about working remotely, and working remotely in Seattle -- having a desk ten feet away from my kitchen and being a couple blocks away from a grocer and a coffeeshop and pretty much anything I could need -- the warmth of familiarity.
Traveling, for me, has always served the purpose of giving me new experiences and letting me decontextualize my old ones: to act as a rejoinder for my status quo. Now, as I grow less young, it is starting to serve another purpose: to remind me how much I like where I am.
(Sometimes it feels like exercise: how I always prefer the feeling of having worked out to the act itself.)
Anyway. Orange County was good; being back in Seattle, too, is good.
Some other good stuff:
- I wrote this week about Skyrim and about the value proposition of finishing things versus leaving them unfinished. (You might know what Skyrim is, you might not -- all you really need to know is that it is a video game that does not want to be beaten.)
- I really enjoyed Sampha's debut album. It exists somewhere in the delicate, melancholy space between The Weeknd's first albums and Bon Iver.
- If you're a Mac user: check out Balance, a Mac app for viewing your transactions + spending. This is one of the best and most polished financial apps I've ever used.
- Now that The Good Place has finished up it's season (which you should absolutely watch, btw, if you haven't already), I'm finally picking back up Haibane Renmei on Amazon -- which, coincidentally, seems to occupy a lot of the same strange territory that The Good Place does, minus the NBC sitcom bent.