Dinner and Drinks with the Good Dr Ellis

Met up with Josh Ellis of Zenarchery fame for dinner, drinks and wandering. He's up in the Bay to meet with his new employer and is moving here for good soon. We talked a lot about the old SF of 7 years ago when he lived here. I think he's in for some surprises given the mass exodus of the past few years.*

Josh has been mysteriously hyping up his new gig on his blog for a while, and while I'm not liable to reveal many details there is tremendous potential. Lets just say this company claims to have found one of the internet idealists' holy grails. I'm somewhat skeptical, but I do believe this particular change does have the potential to be revolutionary. More likely though it will successful and useful, but not quite as earthshaking as some cloudy eyed proponents make it out to be. Regardless its great news and exciting stuff, congratulations Josh, the bay area needs some new troublemakers.

We talked a bunch about SF rent, its ridiculously easy to find a nice space in SF right now, which makes it a once in a lifetime opportunity to move to the city. Jump in while you can kids, things are going to change. I just hope enough of the freaks pushed out by the dot com era move back. And yeah I still won't be making this place home, fear not, I'll be gone before you know it, hopefully to Barcelona.

While on the subject of places to live Josh has some crazy stories about people living in the storm drains below Los Vegas. They're 10 years old and already have a vibrant community of living in them, and a legendary Gollum like figure who is rumored to stalk down and kill strangers that come into his dark private space. Josh has written a few articles on these communities, which I need to track down and read. Sounds like a great book to me, but apparently there isn't much interest yet.

Interestingly I just started reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, which is about a world of people living beneath the streets of London. So far its quite good, although Gaiman's prose doesn't have nearly poetry of his comics. Fortunately his ideas are just as imaginative and inventive as ever.

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*on a somewhat related note though, its good to read danah boyd's enthusiastic posts on how much she loves SF. This city will return to its former glories at some point.