Would you like to know where the future is heading? What strange surprises to expect? Do you need comfort from the horrors of the world? I do too. I don’t really know what tomorrow holds. And I don’t even know what the present is. But I find escaping into new forms of tech to be a comforting and disturbing and exciting thing. I need to know what worlds are possible, what magic doors can open in my brain. It shows me possibilities and strange frictions and I love that. This is my thread between the work I do and the things I’m dreaming about, and why don’t you climb aboard?
I came up with the idea of the name “The Intertwixt” because it feels like an incantation. Like a magical doorway. But also it’s about a dovetailing, an overlap. That’s what my life feels like, and that’s what the world feels like. And with the tech I think is coming, well, it’s gonna get a lot wilder than that.
I write about tech at CNET. I’ve done that for a long long while. But before that I thought I’d be a novelist, a playwright. I still do sometimes. I’ve written about tech in plays of mine. That’s where this all got started, I think.
I’m basically saying I’ve found myself thrown between worlds. Lost in the mix. Not entirely here and not entirely there. A lot of us are there most of the time. And ever since social media felt like it was launched into the sun a few years ago, I’ve had this rudderless, centerless feeling. I wanted a little way to reach me, besides all my work at CNET. This is that place, or my attempt at it. (I also like Bluesky, but it feels like a lovely small taco truck in the open ocean of our dissolving reality.)
AI already is fragmenting and remixing our information and putting our dreams in blenders. But in that stew, I’m more curious about the peripherals and new devices we live closely with. It started for me with thinning about my relationship with my laptop, my place to dream. Then phones, little companion familiars that extend ourselves and trap our attention. But then there are the watches. And now the headsets. And glasses. And maybe neural tech that binds them together. We will be part us, part it, and where does that put us?
And reality - will we be here, or there? Real or virtual? Or blended? Mixed reality already shows us some of that. But I want the full overlap, the physical world’s augmented builds. Some places (like Meow Wolf, or Universal’s latest theme parks) are already dreaming of how that overlap will work. The Intertwixt.
This is my little place to extend my thoughts and dream and think about what I’ve been seeing, and testing, and playing, and watching, and reading. Books, especially. And sometimes I’ll have other thoughts; strange flavor combinations or occasionally maybe New York Jets gripes. I’ll code those with appropriate glyphs so you know and can skip to the areas that interest you.
For now, consider this the opening doorway…and I’ll tell you what’s on my mind right now.
Stories I wrote this week
I traveled with the Quest 3 on a long trip to my in-laws’ house in Southwest England, and there was one reason I did it: for fitness. I was committed to keeping active on a long break, and I got into using it every couple of days for Supernatural and Beat Saber sessions (I need to mix up and add new apps to the flow, too, I just like these).
VR still feels clunky for fitness but full of potential, and I’m just annoyed that Meta has been removing features like Move, which was a fitness tracker app that could work across other apps. Why doesn’t Quest have smartwatch support across the board like it does with Supernatural?
In a conversation I had with Meta’s head of wearables over the summer, Alex Himel strongly hinted to me — or basically said — to stay tuned for the Meta Connect conference Sept 17-18 for more news on possible fitness/sports integrations on Meta’s smart glasses.
I loved the 3D exploratory nature of Kirby and the Forgotten Land when it first came out on Switch, and the Switch 2 update has a lovely smooth framerate. The new 12-stage bonus game storyline is nice, too, but short. For $20, it’s a better upgrade package to me than the recent Mario Party Jamboree one. Maybe this is what Nintendo should do with all its older Switch games. But $20 still feels like a lot, especially when you consider that the full game with new DLC is now a whopping $80.
Books I’m reading:
I’m doing two at once. The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram, is a lovely and challenging book recommended to me by AR pioneer Keiichi Matsuda. It’s about our relationship with perceiving and sensing the natural word, and our innate interactions with the non-human world that our language has forgotten. Or, something like that. It’s resonating with ideas I’ve been having creatively.
And the other, The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst, is a comforting cozy fantasy outside my normal reading zone. Sarah is someone I was friends with in college, and we wrote plays in the same classes. She’s wonderful and I’m really bad about reading books by friends, so I’m making up for it. She’s been a huge success, though, so she doesn’t need me at the moment!
That’s all for now. Meta Connect approaches in a few weeks, which I’ll be at. Plenty of questions about the glasses I expect there, and of course, when will Apple’s Vision Pro update and Samsung/Google’s Project Moohan emerge? I think about that stuff here, by the way. More to come next time. Glad to have you on the journey.