500: CA roadtrip sites, AI as an initiate, and Burner hate
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It’s Coreyspondence #500! Only 5 months away from a decade of blogging!
Thanks to all of you for tuning in. For a laugh, check out #117 as the first issue I surfaced as Substack imported from Revue - before that it was manual Wordpress.
I’m back in SF after living vanlife on the road through LA last week. Things went well and I validated my assumptions about road vanlife - it’s lonely and sleep is even more uneven than sedentary vanlife!
It’s definitely nice to roll up to a beautiful spot and exist in your own home though. I was surprised with how easy it is to find quiet overnight urban parking - it might not be legal, but for one night, nobody will bother you, even in a janky rig like mine.
Some California highlights for the rest of you road trippers:
June Lake - pales next to Mammoth, but gorgeous and cute mountain lake town.
Mammoth Lakes, Devil’s Postpile, and Whitmore Hot Springs - big ski mountain with weird rock formations and desolate natural hot springs nearby.
Alabama Hills, Manzanar, and Bishop - cinema famous big rocks, America’s home grown concentration camp, and a cute outdoors base camp town.
Solvang and Ostrichland north of Santa Barbara - Danish architecture and live ostriches you can feed.
Technology
The Emerald Podcast on AI was recommended to me by an industry friend, and while it was a novel podcast experience with hippie delivery and original music, I can’t say I can recommend it to you as it’s about 60% fluff.
Here’s my paraphrasing of the 40% of juice:
ChatGPT responds like a neoliberal Stanford grad would. That’s only one POV.
Disney’s Fantasia is a good example of the ancient myths that warn of giving intelligence to inanimate objects, or the sorcerer’s apprentice biting off more than they can chew.
Most spiritual wisdom practices have a phase where the student is ground into dust before being reborn as worthy of teaching. Manual labor, meaningles repetition, etc. AI won’t have that, and people getting handed AI powers wont’ have that either.
Ideologies
The rain and mud at Burning Man made headlines this year. This copter footage of vehicles leaving and getting stuck helped me put exodus into context.
You may have missed the climate protestors blocking the road at the start of the event and being aggressively removed, so here’s (concerning) footage of that as well.
Healingfromhealing and Northwest MCM Wholesale went off with dozens of critical Burner memes this week, with varying degrees of validity IMO.
The Burn is easy to hate on for elitist hedonism, but singling out the explicitly inclusive LNT event built entirely by volunteers in the harsh desert for exclusion or carbon feels like mistaking the visible symptoms for the invisible cause. Carbon emitting jetsetters and trashfullier festivals exist the world over, but I don’t see many picketing airports or ticket booths.
Instead, make fun of the Burners glamorizing struggle. That’s what I do :)
Memes
Speaking of drone show fireworks the other week, check out this one where a Terminator head shoots lasers that explode on the ground! Wow!
This kind of oddball spaghetti art content is what the internet was made for.