In The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset writes (translated from the original Spanish):
The common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.
I do not relate to this passage at all. Every single day my thoughts are consumed by the magnificent edifice, every gleaming facet of it - my day job, the electronic means of communication by which I maintain my friendship with T (who I am going on vacation with) despite us living on opposite coasts, the network of airports and infrastructure that criss-cross the world and allows me to circumnavigate a decent fraction of it for a mere day's wages.
It still feels too slick, too easy - this 21st century imperial core ass lifestyle I somehow have. It also feels so terrifyingly fragile, like it can shatter apart any day now (perhaps even that I would deserve that shattering apart, since surely I'm getting away with something and the true bill will come due soon and I really should have known better). Perhaps I'd think about days like these wistfully at fifty, eating expired beans in a shack somewhere and not being able to remember the last time I've taken a hot shower.
The world is in a strange place. I'm hearing strange things from the AI labs and stranger things from the U.S. government. I think about how this entire edifice (my travel budget, the planes, the resorts) rose up from the dark satanic mills instead of sustaining topsoil. I think about the indigenous Hawaiians driven from their lands, so that people like me can come here and spend a week in a resort with an ocean view and learn to scuba dive.
So when I land in Kailua-Kona it's with a mixture of awe and shame. I feel like I'm blessed, like the luckiest girl on earth, like I’m getting away with something illicit: in the middle of a dreary Ontario February, I somehow procured the wherewithal to escape to a tropical paradise for a week. On the Big Island it is a clear day with an impossibly blue sky, a balmy twenty-eight degrees celsius, and the entire airport is made out of shaded structures in the open air since the weather is nice year-round.
For many reasons, this trip feels like the last true vacation that I'd get in quite some time. The world is changing too fast, and there is too much work to do, and many projects I want to fund with my money besides. In comparison, this tiny tourist town (population: 40,000) feels so normal. No one here talks about AI. You would not believe how shitty the wifi is. We regularly wait fifteen entire minutes for Ubers to show up.
For the span of eight days, I stay here and play hooky from the world, and try to stop feeling guilty.
We lazed around and read slop webfiction (T) and Abramsverse Star Trek fanfiction (me) and explored the tourist town and spent time in the ocean.
We were told by an opinionated uber driver to not bother with most of the poke places in town. Instead we should just go to the grocery store and get it there. What she didn't tell us was that this was because Safeway has a full blown poke counter!?
right between the meat and seafood counters.
We got a preassembled poke bowl from the deli counter and a selection of more poke from the poke counter. It was in fact one of the better meals we had on the island.
Also their receipts have ads on the back? Is this an American thing?
By the way, the view from the Safeway parking lot is incredible. I tried to avoid thinking about how good my menty h would be if this is what I saw every time I did my grocery shopping:
We did make the time to check out a local poke place too, which was marginally better than the Safeway, but indeed twice as expensive :[
As is always the case, while there were lots of food options in the tourist area, most of it was quite mid, even in the fine dining establishments. Exceptions are Black Rock pizza (dominoes-style pizza, really well-executed), with decor that hasn't been updated since the halcyon days of the early 2000s:
RC Kona (a combination sandwich place and butcher shop, possibly entirely staffed by lesbians):
the princess peej was so so good
and TK Noodle and Hotpot (surprisingly good ramen and surprisingly good pho for a place that does both ramen and pho):
I keep forgetting that spicy food is a required nutrient for Jenns, and that first sip of spicy ramen broth made my nose runny in the best way. Probably what came out was all the sludge that was accumulating in my brain. I am confident that that's how human biology works.
There's also a "farmer's market" that operates out of a parking lot most days, close to the public library. Most of the stands at the market exclusively hawk generic tropical vacation souvenirs, but a few fruit stands persist. One of them sold longan that was so delicious I ended up going back a second day and buying more. I also tried rambutan for the first time, but tbh it's just longan that's worse in every way - harder to crack open and less flavourful when you get to the fruit.
And of course, there was the public library: centrally located, free to access, and nicely air conditioned with comfortable enough seating. It had four huge shelves of local history, so it's definitely worth popping in and taking a look.
The weather forecasts for Kailua-Kona called for rain almost every day, but this turned out to be a weird microclimate thing - it's a town at the base of a volcano, and while it drizzles on the volcano nonstop, it almost never reaches the town at all. And then every night we were treated to a gorgeous sunset.
Why Kailua-Kona, specifically? Well, when T first asked me where we wanted to go for my ~annual February getaway to escape the SAD, I said Hawaii on a whim. It seemed a good place as any to lie on a beach for a week, and I was mostly thinking that maybe there will be better asian food than average w/r/t tropical locales.
Then Margarita Lovelace published Why You, the Sex God, Should Get a Scuba Diving License last November, and I was like "ok yeah we should do this too". She specifically talked about a dive with the manta rays, and it turns out that the manta ray dives are only available in this one poky little corner of Hawaii, so this poky little corner it is.
So that was the plan: half the days, we'll laze about and do nothing in particular. The other half, we'll go scuba diving and get our licenses, capping it all off with that manta ray dive.
We dived in shallow waters that were calm and warm, above a shallow coral reef that was teeming with life, so much more than I was expecting - dozens of fish flitting around in my field of view at any given time.
The reefs stretched on as far as the eye could see[1], and sort of struck me as almost being like a sprawling village, bustling with the activity of various fish going about their business. There were all these little nooks and crannies for little things to hide in, and I wondered what would make one cranny a prime piece of real estate and which were more like the bad areas of town. Perhaps the same nook would be characterized differently by different species of fish!
As a side note, to do these dives, we had to use reef-safe sunscreen.
Sadly, since it is possibly designed as reef food first and foremost, the sunscreen is not very good. It has this thick white sheen that made me look pallid, like a vampire (the non-sexy kind). Not only that, despite judicious regular application I still tanned several shades over my stay. Now when I use what was previously my perfectly matched tinted face cream, it's like spreading peanut butter over nutella :^(
Anyways, scuba diving. My friend J was somewhat concerned when he found out that I was going scuba diving in the ocean. "Jenn that's where the sharks live," he helpfully pointed out. Not to worry, I assured him; we did e-learning about that specific case! Here's what the e-learning module says:
Most new divers want to know what they should do if they see a shark or other large, potentially aggressive animal. You should watch it and enjoy the experience. You don’t see them often.
On the second day of ocean diving, one of the divers spotted a whale shark off the side of the boat. As was foretold, following that proclamation was a scurry to get off the boat and into the water, where the shark lives.
Not knowing anything about whale sharks, I observed two things - one, that everyone around me seemed incredibly enthusiastic about making themselves shark food. Two, empirically, if everyone else jumped off a bridge I would in fact jump off too. T, more prudently, stayed on the boat.
Anyways, the whale shark! It was this massive speckled thing, maybe the length of three of me, but thankfully(?) I mostly I saw its butt as it swam away from us in sinuous movements, and very rapidly disappeared into the blue void. Back on the boat one of the divemasters lamented that it swam too fast for him to sex properly and everyone else made sympathetic noises. (I guess it's actually perfectly fine to complain about not seeing genitals, as long as said genitals are not human ones.)
The local dive shop we went with for all our dives, by the way, was an outfit known as Jack's Diving Locker. Strong recommend; I think one criteria for their hiring is how many maritime-themed jokes they know and can whip out at a moment's notice. (Did you know that the ships in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark all have QR codes on them? It's so they could scan the navy in!)
We spotted some manta rays during one of our non-manta dives, swanning around in ones and twos like elegant grey pancakes. After seeing two of them in short succession, one of the guides swam up to T and I with something written on his slate, a device used to communicate instructions or other informative things underwater when hand gestures won't do. Scrawled across it was a single word, underlined: Mantastic!! and I almost died right there because it caught me so off guard and I had no idea how to laugh underwater without choking.
We went up for a light dinner on the boat, I ate slice upon slice of ripe pineapple until it started to eat me back, and then I wriggled back into my wetsuit and then the ocean for the manta night dive. For this one, snorkelers and scuba divers work in tandem to create an illuminated column of water, with snorkelers shining bright lights down towards the depths and the divers laying down in one large ring on the sea floor, shining their own lights upwards. The light attracts plankton, which then attracts the manta rays to come feed.
I was in the last group of scuba divers, and the show had already begun when we descended - a ring of dozens of divers in their black wetsuits and gleaming silver air canisters, an illuminated blue column in the black ocean, and a half dozen mantas swooping back and forth within, their speckled white bellies gleaming. I felt like I was approaching some sort of arcane underwater ritual.
We take our place in the circle and shine our own lights upwards. And then there they were, right above us - these gigantic, gentle flapjacks, wider than I am tall. They glide low over us, sometimes almost brushing the tops of our heads. They do somersaults in the water and sometimes tease each other with gentle gliding touches of their fins, so obviously pleased by their own existence.
Unbeknownst to us, the dad joke champion (and my attempted murderer), Keller Laros, also happened to be a serious heavyweight in local manta ray preservation: he runs a local nonprofit which catalogues and researches the manta rays local to the area.[2] There's a webpage where one can meet some of the regulars, and a database of all the manta rays in the neighbourhood.
After the dive we received a bunch of photos and videos from him, along with information cards about the exact manta rays we saw that night - twenty in all. Yes, our diving package came with bonus manta ray mugshots. The world can be so, so good sometimes.
Some bad things happened on the trip too. I burnt my nose, Pete Hegseth tried to destroy Anthropic, and the United States bombed Iran. In the first 24 hours of the campaign one thousand targets were struck, a number of targets that is likely untenable for human intelligence to generate within that timeframe. Rather, per the above WaPo article, [Palantir's] Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance.
An unusually thoughtful heavily-AI-generated essay articulates the logic:
Cheap drones mean more targets to strike and more threats to assess. More targets and threats mean more data to process. More data to process means the humans cannot keep up. The machine keeps up. And so the machine, gradually and then suddenly, becomes the system — not because anyone decided it should be, but because the volume made any alternative operationally untenable.
Fucking excuse me!!!! What was promised was gradual disempowerment, not speedy disempowerment that had the gall to interrupt my Final Vacation Before Things Became Bad For Real.
So I also found myself doomscrolling, playing hooky from my hooky, and to add insult to injury when I tried to read some vintage[3] Spirk to calm down I found out that a lot of the Star Trek fanfiction I read and loved in 2011-2014 did not hold up so good :c
What helped more: discussing old books with a friend, going outside, watching sunsets, and looking at fish underwater. If you're 30 feet underwater nothing can hurt you, I think. And more importantly you will not be able to check your phone.
So the world caught up to me before my vacation ended, and then my vacation ended shortly afterwards. I wanted to bring some longan home, but it turns out that Hawaii has a two-way embargo on produce, and the agricultural inspectors at the gate who informed me that I had to either eat all the fruit right then and there or have them throw it out.
Thus: the very last thing I did in Hawaii was eat an entire pound of longan by myself in one sitting, in a little bit of shade hiding from the hot Hawaiian sun.[4]
On the plane ride back to the real world I read Saevus Corax Deals With the Dead in one large gulp. It’s about an intelligent man who comes into a stupendously large fortune which is tied to an existential threat.
And now I’m back on the mainland, and while I didn't get everything I wanted out of the vacation I got pretty close, and it is time to get back to work.
In The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset writes (translated from the original Spanish):
I do not relate to this passage at all. Every single day my thoughts are consumed by the magnificent edifice, every gleaming facet of it - my day job, the electronic means of communication by which I maintain my friendship with T (who I am going on vacation with) despite us living on opposite coasts, the network of airports and infrastructure that criss-cross the world and allows me to circumnavigate a decent fraction of it for a mere day's wages.
It still feels too slick, too easy - this 21st century imperial core ass lifestyle I somehow have. It also feels so terrifyingly fragile, like it can shatter apart any day now (perhaps even that I would deserve that shattering apart, since surely I'm getting away with something and the true bill will come due soon and I really should have known better). Perhaps I'd think about days like these wistfully at fifty, eating expired beans in a shack somewhere and not being able to remember the last time I've taken a hot shower.
The world is in a strange place. I'm hearing strange things from the AI labs and stranger things from the U.S. government. I think about how this entire edifice (my travel budget, the planes, the resorts) rose up from the dark satanic mills instead of sustaining topsoil. I think about the indigenous Hawaiians driven from their lands, so that people like me can come here and spend a week in a resort with an ocean view and learn to scuba dive.
So when I land in Kailua-Kona it's with a mixture of awe and shame. I feel like I'm blessed, like the luckiest girl on earth, like I’m getting away with something illicit: in the middle of a dreary Ontario February, I somehow procured the wherewithal to escape to a tropical paradise for a week. On the Big Island it is a clear day with an impossibly blue sky, a balmy twenty-eight degrees celsius, and the entire airport is made out of shaded structures in the open air since the weather is nice year-round.
For many reasons, this trip feels like the last true vacation that I'd get in quite some time. The world is changing too fast, and there is too much work to do, and many projects I want to fund with my money besides. In comparison, this tiny tourist town (population: 40,000) feels so normal. No one here talks about AI. You would not believe how shitty the wifi is. We regularly wait fifteen entire minutes for Ubers to show up.
For the span of eight days, I stay here and play hooky from the world, and try to stop feeling guilty.
We lazed around and read slop webfiction (T) and Abramsverse Star Trek fanfiction (me) and explored the tourist town and spent time in the ocean.
We were told by an opinionated uber driver to not bother with most of the poke places in town. Instead we should just go to the grocery store and get it there. What she didn't tell us was that this was because Safeway has a full blown poke counter!?
right between the meat and seafood counters.
We got a preassembled poke bowl from the deli counter and a selection of more poke from the poke counter. It was in fact one of the better meals we had on the island.
Also their receipts have ads on the back? Is this an American thing?
By the way, the view from the Safeway parking lot is incredible. I tried to avoid thinking about how good my menty h would be if this is what I saw every time I did my grocery shopping:
We did make the time to check out a local poke place too, which was marginally better than the Safeway, but indeed twice as expensive :[
As is always the case, while there were lots of food options in the tourist area, most of it was quite mid, even in the fine dining establishments. Exceptions are Black Rock pizza (dominoes-style pizza, really well-executed), with decor that hasn't been updated since the halcyon days of the early 2000s:
RC Kona (a combination sandwich place and butcher shop, possibly entirely staffed by lesbians):
the princess peej was so so good
and TK Noodle and Hotpot (surprisingly good ramen and surprisingly good pho for a place that does both ramen and pho):
I keep forgetting that spicy food is a required nutrient for Jenns, and that first sip of spicy ramen broth made my nose runny in the best way. Probably what came out was all the sludge that was accumulating in my brain. I am confident that that's how human biology works.
There's also a "farmer's market" that operates out of a parking lot most days, close to the public library. Most of the stands at the market exclusively hawk generic tropical vacation souvenirs, but a few fruit stands persist. One of them sold longan that was so delicious I ended up going back a second day and buying more. I also tried rambutan for the first time, but tbh it's just longan that's worse in every way - harder to crack open and less flavourful when you get to the fruit.
And of course, there was the public library: centrally located, free to access, and nicely air conditioned with comfortable enough seating. It had four huge shelves of local history, so it's definitely worth popping in and taking a look.
The weather forecasts for Kailua-Kona called for rain almost every day, but this turned out to be a weird microclimate thing - it's a town at the base of a volcano, and while it drizzles on the volcano nonstop, it almost never reaches the town at all. And then every night we were treated to a gorgeous sunset.
Why Kailua-Kona, specifically? Well, when T first asked me where we wanted to go for my ~annual February getaway to escape the SAD, I said Hawaii on a whim. It seemed a good place as any to lie on a beach for a week, and I was mostly thinking that maybe there will be better asian food than average w/r/t tropical locales.
Then Margarita Lovelace published Why You, the Sex God, Should Get a Scuba Diving License last November, and I was like "ok yeah we should do this too". She specifically talked about a dive with the manta rays, and it turns out that the manta ray dives are only available in this one poky little corner of Hawaii, so this poky little corner it is.
So that was the plan: half the days, we'll laze about and do nothing in particular. The other half, we'll go scuba diving and get our licenses, capping it all off with that manta ray dive.
We dived in shallow waters that were calm and warm, above a shallow coral reef that was teeming with life, so much more than I was expecting - dozens of fish flitting around in my field of view at any given time.
The reefs stretched on as far as the eye could see[1], and sort of struck me as almost being like a sprawling village, bustling with the activity of various fish going about their business. There were all these little nooks and crannies for little things to hide in, and I wondered what would make one cranny a prime piece of real estate and which were more like the bad areas of town. Perhaps the same nook would be characterized differently by different species of fish!
As a side note, to do these dives, we had to use reef-safe sunscreen.
Sadly, since it is possibly designed as reef food first and foremost, the sunscreen is not very good. It has this thick white sheen that made me look pallid, like a vampire (the non-sexy kind). Not only that, despite judicious regular application I still tanned several shades over my stay. Now when I use what was previously my perfectly matched tinted face cream, it's like spreading peanut butter over nutella :^(
Anyways, scuba diving. My friend J was somewhat concerned when he found out that I was going scuba diving in the ocean. "Jenn that's where the sharks live," he helpfully pointed out. Not to worry, I assured him; we did e-learning about that specific case! Here's what the e-learning module says:
On the second day of ocean diving, one of the divers spotted a whale shark off the side of the boat. As was foretold, following that proclamation was a scurry to get off the boat and into the water, where the shark lives.
Not knowing anything about whale sharks, I observed two things - one, that everyone around me seemed incredibly enthusiastic about making themselves shark food. Two, empirically, if everyone else jumped off a bridge I would in fact jump off too. T, more prudently, stayed on the boat.
Anyways, the whale shark! It was this massive speckled thing, maybe the length of three of me, but thankfully(?) I mostly I saw its butt as it swam away from us in sinuous movements, and very rapidly disappeared into the blue void. Back on the boat one of the divemasters lamented that it swam too fast for him to sex properly and everyone else made sympathetic noises. (I guess it's actually perfectly fine to complain about not seeing genitals, as long as said genitals are not human ones.)
The local dive shop we went with for all our dives, by the way, was an outfit known as Jack's Diving Locker. Strong recommend; I think one criteria for their hiring is how many maritime-themed jokes they know and can whip out at a moment's notice. (Did you know that the ships in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark all have QR codes on them? It's so they could scan the navy in!)
We spotted some manta rays during one of our non-manta dives, swanning around in ones and twos like elegant grey pancakes. After seeing two of them in short succession, one of the guides swam up to T and I with something written on his slate, a device used to communicate instructions or other informative things underwater when hand gestures won't do. Scrawled across it was a single word, underlined: Mantastic!! and I almost died right there because it caught me so off guard and I had no idea how to laugh underwater without choking.
We went up for a light dinner on the boat, I ate slice upon slice of ripe pineapple until it started to eat me back, and then I wriggled back into my wetsuit and then the ocean for the manta night dive. For this one, snorkelers and scuba divers work in tandem to create an illuminated column of water, with snorkelers shining bright lights down towards the depths and the divers laying down in one large ring on the sea floor, shining their own lights upwards. The light attracts plankton, which then attracts the manta rays to come feed.
I was in the last group of scuba divers, and the show had already begun when we descended - a ring of dozens of divers in their black wetsuits and gleaming silver air canisters, an illuminated blue column in the black ocean, and a half dozen mantas swooping back and forth within, their speckled white bellies gleaming. I felt like I was approaching some sort of arcane underwater ritual.
We take our place in the circle and shine our own lights upwards. And then there they were, right above us - these gigantic, gentle flapjacks, wider than I am tall. They glide low over us, sometimes almost brushing the tops of our heads. They do somersaults in the water and sometimes tease each other with gentle gliding touches of their fins, so obviously pleased by their own existence.
Unbeknownst to us, the dad joke champion (and my attempted murderer), Keller Laros, also happened to be a serious heavyweight in local manta ray preservation: he runs a local nonprofit which catalogues and researches the manta rays local to the area.[2] There's a webpage where one can meet some of the regulars, and a database of all the manta rays in the neighbourhood.
After the dive we received a bunch of photos and videos from him, along with information cards about the exact manta rays we saw that night - twenty in all. Yes, our diving package came with bonus manta ray mugshots. The world can be so, so good sometimes.
Some bad things happened on the trip too. I burnt my nose, Pete Hegseth tried to destroy Anthropic, and the United States bombed Iran. In the first 24 hours of the campaign one thousand targets were struck, a number of targets that is likely untenable for human intelligence to generate within that timeframe. Rather, per the above WaPo article, [Palantir's] Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance.
An unusually thoughtful heavily-AI-generated essay articulates the logic:
Fucking excuse me!!!! What was promised was gradual disempowerment, not speedy disempowerment that had the gall to interrupt my Final Vacation Before Things Became Bad For Real.
So I also found myself doomscrolling, playing hooky from my hooky, and to add insult to injury when I tried to read some vintage[3] Spirk to calm down I found out that a lot of the Star Trek fanfiction I read and loved in 2011-2014 did not hold up so good :c
What helped more: discussing old books with a friend, going outside, watching sunsets, and looking at fish underwater. If you're 30 feet underwater nothing can hurt you, I think. And more importantly you will not be able to check your phone.
So the world caught up to me before my vacation ended, and then my vacation ended shortly afterwards. I wanted to bring some longan home, but it turns out that Hawaii has a two-way embargo on produce, and the agricultural inspectors at the gate who informed me that I had to either eat all the fruit right then and there or have them throw it out.
Thus: the very last thing I did in Hawaii was eat an entire pound of longan by myself in one sitting, in a little bit of shade hiding from the hot Hawaiian sun.[4]
On the plane ride back to the real world I read Saevus Corax Deals With the Dead in one large gulp. It’s about an intelligent man who comes into a stupendously large fortune which is tied to an existential threat.
And now I’m back on the mainland, and while I didn't get everything I wanted out of the vacation I got pretty close, and it is time to get back to work.
...visibility was only like 50 feet in every direction, to be clear
While manta rays exist in a large range, some species are residential, so if you stay in one place you'll see the same pod over and over.
If depop sellers can call shirts from the late 2000s vintage I should be able to do the same for fanfiction.
T was uninterested in helping, a baffling decision on her part.