August 3rd - Latte Art Throwdown, Oomfs IRL

I'm in Long Beach right now! My girlfriend has a conference here for work so I decided to tag along to see what the LA hype is all about.

What I've Been Up To

It's been a pretty busy week! Starting off, I went to Grocery Outlet and discovered that... they made Kelp real??

Then on Wednesday, after at this point four weeks of failure, my friends and I finally won the fourth box of Regicide Legacy, which is just as well because Peanut said she was gonna quit forever if this wasn't our last attempt.

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Shoutout to @kevin.dehaan.ca, @moiststar.bsky.social, and @orion.geese.blue for your help in the attempt, (AND TOPHER, who is afaik, blueskyless)

Community Highlight - Latte Art Throwdown

Thursday FRIDAY was for whatever reason an extremely overspecced day for me, somehow I had a bunch of things to do that day, culminating in a Latte Art Throwdown at Overcast Coffee. This event was SOOO much crazier than I had expected. They had a DJ, the music was bumpin, the people were sexy, and the latte art was truly incredible. They were projecting it on the wall and the whole place was PACKED so I apologize that the photos are not spectacular, but look at that art 🧑‍🍳💋

I left partway through the event to go hang out at @internetstudio.bsky.social for their Seattle Tech Week afterparty. It was fun to hang out but honestly to my surprise the party was way less popping than the cafe (unfortunate Seattle Tech L), probably my highlight was playing @elij.dev's game Neblis on a physical arcade cabinet, which was great! The game has gotten a lot more balanced (and hard 😭) since my first time topping the leaderboard, and I gotta say I was shipwrecked upon the shores of my own hubris more times than I care to admit. I look forward to going back to Overcast and finding out who won the latte art throwdown, I sure hope someone took photos of the winning cups.

Oomfs IRL

I remember many many moons ago, someone organized a Bluesky meetup in Cal Anderson Park. A bunch of the Bluesky team was there, I remember @jay.bsky.team being absolutely swarmed the entire time, and I think back then Bluesky maybe had like... 500k users?? It was great, and honstly there were so many more people than I expected, and I made lots of friends! Simpler times.

Anyways, since then, I haven't really met people from the internet all that often. I mean, yes, at industry conferences I have met The Nerds (laudatory), but I have always felt like there is a great number of normal average Bluesky users all around me that I just never meet, who have interesting things to talk about that aren't just social protocols!

All this to say, I was very excited when @cee.wtf posted this!

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The outing was really fun. I have basically no photos of my own because cee lent me their IR camera, I spent a lot of time photographing lichen and various holes for my upcoming Hole Earth Atlas. probably my best ones are in this post (media is not supported 💀)

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Long Beach

I spent most of yesterday flying to Long Beach (Which is NOT LA, do not let them tell you it's LA because oh my god it is a 30 minute drive, but it is a 2 HOUR MINIMUM train ride from LAX) and getting to my hotel, went to possibly the peakest restaurant I will go to (Sonoratown) for lunch and then waited over an hour with my gf's coworkers to get quite stuffed on extremely good KBBQ at a place I will gatekeep for the sake of the wait not getting any longer.

Oh, I want to try a new section here too. Introducing:

I Saw the Signs

Here are the Signs I saw this week. What do they mean???

What's Coming Up

I am in Long Beach until Wednesday, so don't have too much to say here. I will say I just got the volunteer invite for the 2026 Northwest Tea Festival. I will be there for both days in the afternoon so mark your calendars! Come whenever you want but I'll be there after 1pm both days because the alternative was getting there at 8:30 in the morning.

There is also an HTML day in Volunteer Park, which I think is cute and should be nice in a world where most people have completely outsourced all web dev thoughts to the machine gods.

I've also been reliably informed by @moiststar.bsky.social that there is

The Puget Sound Book Festival, also this Sunday

Best of the Net

I've been trying to get this more organized, going to start using semble.so as a way to track random links I see, instead of trying to assemble them post-hoc from memory.

https://lab.leaflet.pub/3mrq6ma5dgs2x - by the lovely people at leaflet exploring the atmosphere!

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneider-interview-ai-atproto-atmosphere - an interview with the new CEO of bluesky

https://cheapfoodmap.com/ - map of cheap food! need to give it more time, feels slopcoded but i like the idea