Alec Kubas-Meyer

Like: I spent three of the last seven hours in a giant metal tube listening to a baby scream, and I think Aer Lingus owes me at least as much money as I spent on my vasectomy.

I think everyone who has to sit within six rows of a baby on a plane should get a 10-60% discount on their tickets, depending on proximity.

Photography — Alec Kubas-Meyer Dot Net

I may post a handful elsewhere, but I'm using my own website to host the highlight photos from my monthlong trip throughout Asia:
www.alecjkm.net/photography

My favorite thing about Taiwan is that it's a country. My least favorite is that Americans I met in HK told me there was Pooh/CCP merch everywhere and there's not.

(Sorrynotsorry to a future self that wanted to visit China, a completely separate place with no legitimate claim to authority here.)

A man told me that I give off really positive energy so clearly I've been on vacation too long.

Thirteen fucking minutes are you kidding me

It was eight minutes. And then green for another 30 seconds and now red for who the fuck knows how long. I am so livid omfg.

I'm utterly baffled by how the traffic lights work in Bangkok. This light was red for literally-not-figuratively FIVE minutes and then was green for 30 seconds and has been red for at least five minutes since. Like what the actual fuck. How is anyone supposed to get to make a reservation here.

YouTube video by The Week I Review Algorithms called me autistic.

I have been working on this script for two and a half years. A lot has changed in that time... much of it quite bad. But the video is good, so I'll take that: youtu.be/JmsZhpDHWsE?...

On a recent podcast episode, @edzitron.com referred to these sorts of writers as "Tech stenographers" rather than journalists, and I thought that was just such a perfect descriptor.

Christopher Nolan should really bring an IMAX camera to these SpaceX launches so he can use the inevitable explosion in a future movie.

I've been on the same medication for 15 years and in the past 12 months had to go to three different doctors to get it prescribed because of retirements and etc... and I have kinda wished I could just get a bot to keep giving me the thing I need to keep doing my thing. But that is not worth this.

Used Perplexity this morning to find out what generative systems say my politics are so I know what to expect next time I talk to CBP.

I look forward to requesting a lawyer.

Even the march itself was "Defend Migrants *and* the Planet," which are very different issues requiring very different solutions. I obviously agree that we need to do both and also everything else (I was holding a sign from a Tesla Takedown rally), but "fix it all" isn't a clear, coherent message...

"I notice that there's no real consistency in the messaging of all these signs. If everyone's asking for different things and there's no central narrative, can't the Right just sort of squeeze through the cracks between the wants and needs to avoid changing anything?"

A German tourist popped into the @50501newyork.bsky.social march earlier and asked me some questions about the context in which we were. (First question: is the Democratic Party involved in the organization?)

And whatever, I did my best to form good answers, but his last question hit pretty hard:

Obviously wasn't the first movie to do that (the way First Man did it kinda blew my mind), but it is such an effective way of getting the audience hyped for what's about to happen.

As a long-time IMAX snob, the fact that there are new movies getting these IMAX 70mm releases is so incredibly exciting to me, and I want to see more people do more interesting things with it.

(Sinners having the aspect ratio expand at the start of some of those epic sequences was awesome.)

I don't recall any film prior to Sinners having, like, visibly Color Graded IMAX film (Nolan, etc. films always go for a much more "normal" look), and I think that's very cool.

Nothing like fucking up your leg and needing a cane, even temporarily, to make you realize how fundamentally inaccessible places are.

Jeez.

we believe we are special and we simply are not

Are marketing departments saying "From the guy behind Suicide Squad" because they assume people will think of the actually good James Gunn movie and not the absolutely fucking awful movie they're really talking about?

At first I was surprised that ~95% of the people at the Stand Up for Science rally have jobs directly impacted by the federal funding cuts, but then I remembered that most of the folks like me whose jobs aren't affected... are currently at those jobs.

Funny to have watched Oppenheimer on the big screen again on the day that the US president showed the world unequivocally that he is a Russian asset.

My actual favorite movie for several years and still a favorite.

Yesterday a colleague said we were "Blue-skying" in the sense of having wild ideas and I said "No that's called skeeting" and he believed me and now I'm terrified he's going to say that in a professional context not knowing.

Oh cool now I can tell @johngreensbluesky.bsky.social that two years ago I did a 2.5-hour live review review of The Anthropocene, Reviewed to a rapt 14-person audience in London. (10/10 book. Gave me an existential crisis.)

What the future looks like from here. Trumpism won't last forever. But people are going to suffer, and it will take decades to recover.

We've moved to the stage of grief where doomposting is allowed, right?

I couldn't sleep. Here's my doompost. Sorry.

This isn't the end of the world. But it is far worse than 2016. It will take decades to recover. ...And I can't say we had that time to spare.

open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

Literally Friday, my mom left her purse on a street and didn't realize until she got home that it was gone. She then received a message on LinkedIn from a young woman who had found it and looked her up. The woman wouldn't even accept a token reward: my mom got it back with everything intact.