12.08 | travel vlogging again with this wuhan meet cute
To travel is to live
– Hans Christian Anderson
✉️ letter #17
Oops! I ended up missing a week just with the hectic-ness of trying to plan everything that’s happening in the next several for me. Now that my time at RADII is officially ended, I can let the cat out of the bag: I’m moving back to the United States and will be truly living there for the first time in over 12 years!
I'm heading back to New York City to join an organization called SupChina, a multimedia platform of some of the best podcasts, essays, and English-language reports on China around. Having been a long-time admirer of both their hosts & writers, I’m really excited to work with them.
I’m sure there will be more to talk regarding that as I get into the swing of things. In the meantime though, realizing I have so few days left here (and knowing how hard it will be to get back) has really kicked my butt into gear consolidating travel footage.
So here’s the first travel video I’ve done in a long time.
As you might recall, I went to Wuhan recently for one of my last work trips. I liked the quick taste of it so much that I decided to get my friend/colleague Lu to talk to me more about it, and to go back and enjoy it again.
I'll be working on more of these, so I hope you enjoyed this one!
🌱 the ethical ideas newsreel
- Scientists are utilizing AI to analyze therapist interactions with their patients and determining paths towards better outcomes. This could help make therapy way more effective. That is super cool and finally a nice story coming out of algorithm news.
- Maybe you missed the news that the Hubble Space Telescope was having issues. Don't worry about it, it's been fixed and we're going to continue getting awesome cosmic knowledge beamed to us from outer space. Even better, it's going to be joined soon by its bro, the James Webb Space Telescope, which should supercharge our ability to record what's actually going on out there.
- United flew the first ever passenger flight using 100% "sustainable fuel" last month, reducing flight carbon emissions by nearly 75%! Considering plane trips are probably the largest contributors to regular people's carbon footprints, this is a pretty big deal.
🎵 song of my week
Spotify Wrapped came out. Usually the final playlists aren't particularly representative of my actual tastes because I only listen to music from my phone when I'm exercising or lazy dj-ing a party. But I guess this year I actually spent time utilizing Spotify to discover songs.
The most played songs aren’t that surprising - in fact, most of these have shown up in previous “song of the week”s! The only one that made me go huh?!? was #3 - which I couldn’t place despite me apparently having played it about 13 times this year.
(I suppose when you’re like me and don’t repeat songs very much, it’s easy for one that randomly gets chosen a bunch to both completely blend out of your memories while still showing up on your most played list).
Listening to it now, I can see how I’d probably have thought it was listenable enough not to hit skip on, but not quite impactful enough to stick. Still, it’s this song of the week because I low key appreciate its dark horse nature.
✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun
I’m all about Hawkeye on Disney+ leading the Marvel Universe into Christmas.
I’ve got to say, in general I’ve really loved how the MCU episodic series have given us a chance to sit longer with characters that really got short shrift in the cinematic films. Hawkeye in the movies was always kind of a weird also-ran character - since he usually had less than ten minutes to tell any part of his story, it was usually done through expositional hints ala:
- Something happened in Budapest that was crazy, right Natasha? Man, we are SUCH good friends.
- Hey, I’m actually really great at connecting with people on an interpersonal level to work out issues really quickly in the middle of a crisis. Haha yeah, the skill sets you pick up while you’re becoming a bad ass archer, I guess! Wanna help us out? Thanks!
- Me and my big family are actually really close and loving - I’ve been finding time to pump out children since before Tony Stark became Iron Man! They don’t even need therapy despite all the awful stuff that’s happened to me - guess it’s that interpersonal connection superpower I have going!
- Oh you found me! Nah not been doing much the last five years, mostly just murdering people, how about you? Yes, you heard right. Well. Look, when you break bad you break really bad okay? Let’s move on.
Which has really unfortunately not given Jeremy Renner much to do with his character except emote like you should already know what’s going on with him anyway.
Now with Hawkeye - which has been oodles of fun so far and So New York(!) and So Christmas(!) - you actually get a chance to meet him in all his grizzled family man glory. Not only do you get a fun romp that's half Planes, Trains & Automobiles and half Die Hard, a lot of his character beats from previous movies have begun making sense.
I'm into it.
Did you enjoy it?
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