Winnipeg/Portland/San Francisco/Los Angeles(/Culver City)/Winnipeg

This photo tricked me when I was reviewing it even though I specifically remembered taking it. I knew it was the shadows of a grating on the beams of a bridge and not the gratings themselves but it still reads as a grating to me. But because shadows defuse and there's a noticeable texture on the steel beams, the photo reads (to me at least) as a grainy photo. So it came doubly as a surprise when there was a crisp watermark right in the middle of the photo. The 'Carnegie' mark on the steel (also visible top right) looks like it's on sky not solid. Maybe it's just me

this worm has been here at least 3 years now. long live the worm

San Francisco is beautiful, but god is it also a hellscape. Beautiful weather. Beautiful temperature. But basically every ad (and there were so many ads) were website tools or AI bullshit and self-driving cars everywhere

Ruth Asawa's wire sculptures were so fun to photograph because they cast such interesting shadows but also my photos mostly didn't turn out. I leave this in mostly to say if you find yourself in SF while the Ruth Asawa retrospective is open at the museum you owe it to yourself to see it

Okay, let me explain. When in LA, me and my friends specifically decided to stay at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel because Fredric Jameson found it to be a sort of unnavigable post-modern maze. How did we find it? Well, the architecture is kind of incredible (there would be more photos if a security guard hadn't told me I could only take photos with a phone) and it is clear they've made it some changes to make it a little easier to navigate, but it is at its heart a bizarre space. There are long sight lines but never directly across the building and most of what you see are balconies you'd have to indirectly reach with a walkway—at almost no point is it possible to make from A to B without first stopping by at C. When traveling to the rooms themselves (which is further warped by glass elevators that switch from inside to outside the building), the four identical towers (distinguished now by a colour and shape that appears regularly but never prominently. We were in green square, which you might have been able to gleam from the green numbers and the green light on the elevator but you probably won't have noticed until you go back because the overwhelming sensation of the Bonaventure is concrete and glass circles) continue the theme by hiding rooms around a concrete pillar. You can't see from A to B but there are always at least two ways to reach it. And with that, you enter the room itself. The room too is filled with odd angles (though as much with sharp corners as gentle curves. The cutout partially visible in the roof here is nature's favourite shape, the heptagon). All of this is to say, what were we greeted with when we got to our room? Two rooms with matching TVs, stands, and perched remotes such as to strongly imply a floor-to-ceiling mirror instead of a passageway. Don't worry, I did make my friends do the Duck Soup mirror thing

Truly, my only real complaint about this bizarre hotel is that the angle of the hallway outside the full bathroom was angled such that the full-size mirror on the wall couldn't reflect the 90º mirrors within the bathroom. Foreseeing this complaint, the staff at the Westin Bonaventure positioned the makeup mirror on a telescoping arm so you could at least take a picture of yourself taking a picture of yourself taking a picture of yourself