Southern Utah gives you a huge bang for buck. And you can spread a little further to add fantastic stuff in surrounding states. I'm not American but have flown from Australia several times to hike in Utah and its neighbours.
In 10-14 days, you can do an exceptional loop from Las Vegas taking in:
Bryce Canyon NP
Byway 12
Capitol Reef NP
Goblin Valley
Dead Horse Point SP
Arches NP
Canyonlands NP
Goosenecks SP
Horseshoe Bend
Antelope Canyon
Zion NP
Valley of Fire SP
That's all very accessible (besides The Maze in Canyonlands, which is superb but takes 4x4 and/or solid hiking to get into).
Then when you go back, you can do places requiring a bit more planning like Coyote Gulch (amazing), Buckskin Gulch (also amazing), and secondary spots like Natural Bridges, SR 95, etc. Hundreds of great places in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, etc, and all before you get to adding anything more remote or long distance.
OKLCH is a polar coordinate space. Hue is angle in this space. So to interpolate hue from one angle to another, to get from one side of a circle to the other, you go round the edge. This leads to extreme examples like the one shown:
linear-gradient(in oklch, #f0f, #0f0)
You can also go round the circle the other way, which will take you via blue–aqua instead of via red–yellow:
linear-gradient(in oklch longer hue, #f0f, #0f0)
The gradient shown (in either case) is a good example of a way that perceptual colour spaces are really bad to work in: practically the entire way round the edge of the circle, it’s outside sRGB, in fact way outside of the colours humans can perceive. Perceptual colour spaces are really bad at handling the edges of gamuts, where slightly perturbing the values take you out of gamut.
Accordingly, there are algorithms defined (yes, plural: not every application has agreed on the technique to use) to drag the colour back in-gamut, but it sacrifices the perceptual uniformity. The red in that gradient is way darker than the rest of it.
When you’re looking for better gradients, if you’re caring about perceptual uniformity (which frequently you shouldn’t, perceptual colour spaces are being massively overapplied), you should probably default to interpolating in Oklab instead, which takes a straight line from one side of the circle to the other—yes, through grey, if necessary.
linear-gradient(in oklab, #f0f, #0f0)
And in this case, that gets you about as decent a magenta-to-lime gradient as you can hope for, not going via red and yellow, and not exhibiting the inappropriate darkening of sRGB interpolation (… though if I were hand-tuning such a gradient, I’d actually go a bit darker than Oklab does).
During its beta period, Tailwind v4 tried shifting from sRGB to Oklch for gradient interpolation; by release, they’d decided Oklab was a safer default.
> It feels to me like “do the things you like” is a luxury of someone who isn’t anxious about paying all their bills.
The real lesson is that you should not rely on popularity-based success to pay your bills, because there is no knowing how long it will take until you have any success; it may in fact never come.
It's that kind of thing that should be the side hustle. You'll have only limited time for it, but at least you know how to pay your bills and can do it the way you want.
The other option is to be a starving artist who also feels bad about compromising their vision to make something marketable.
Not quite the same thing, but over the weekend I hacked google maps 3d tiles (mesh) together with a gaussian splat and the effect is pretty similar and effective:
As a child growing up in the UK I was allowed to call up, each evening, the bedtime stories phone line run by British Telecom. I used to call that bedtime story phone line from an an old 1970's era rotary Snoopy telephone from British Telecom which I still own.
I ever so carefully updated the phone with a new RJ-30 jack (the original was bare wires), so that in a custom built base that the phone sits on is an Nvidia Jetson running an LLM and trained on Charlie Brown's voice and a voice recognition model.
Dialing 1 will answer questions about Snoopy and Peanuts history and Charles Schultz in Charlie Brown's voice. You can just talk to it. Dial 2 and a very nice lady with a British accent will read you a bedtime story, interactively, like a choose your own adventure of sorts, from a large database of stories. Dial 3 and Lucy will pick up, announce that the therapist is in, and talk with you about what's troubling you, again, voice recognition and an LLM. Dial 4 and you get Woodstock. Any other number gets you an "adult" from the Peanuts cartoon that is impossible to understand, again, voice recognition to understand what you're asking, but the response is unintelligible.
I own multiple interactive entertainment concepts. We build room scale hardware and props. So definitely a bit different than normal consumer hardware, but still have a lot of the same problems. One of our issues is we our low volume and unique use cases for our hardware.
I’d love to connect with anyone else doing similar things. My info is in my bio.
Don't take VC money if you don't wanna be forced to find a 10x exit for those investors.
The investors want an exit, so they have to IPO. To IPO at a reasonable valuation, they need to demonstrate significant revenue potential. And to get significant revenue, they need to monetize the hell out of the userbase.
You can do that through:
1. Ads--monetize your user's attention.
2. Subscriptions--monetize your user's attachment to your service.
3. Surveillance capitalism--monetize your user's data.
Very few services have shown the ability to hit that 10x target with #2, and thus Reddit chose paths #1 and #3.
The lesson: Once again, for those in the back row 1) if you're not paying for the product, you are the product, and 2) don't build communities on closed platforms unless you're comfortable with the potential of a rug-pull.
https://nakashimawoodworkers.com (new commissions around $7K-$15K for a coffee table, $20K-40K for dining table, plus shipping; older Nakashima pieces are highly valued in the art world and sell anywhere between $15K-$300K)
Edit: Also, to echo what someone mentioned below, if you're interested in solid wood furniture you should find a local woodworker.
Another edit and thought: I used to own a lot of IKEA furniture and as I've gotten older, have slowly replaced those pieces with items from Knoll, with custom pieces from local woodworkers, with a few pieces from the studios listed above. A lot of people are commenting on the cost, and yes they're expensive and could be considered luxury goods.
But if you like art and design and you care about quality, you save for what you want to buy. I wanted to be surrounded by great craftsmanship, so instead of buying "stuff" and instead of spending money on lots of subscriptions and services, or constantly upgrading phones and computers, I buy one piece of nice furniture every year. I believe the more you appreciate the things around you, the more they begin to influence your own work, and your sense of place.
I regularly see a lot of IKEA furniture on the side of the road and in dumpsters. I think this is the difference between buying "things" and having "possessions" but that's a discussion for another day.
In 10-14 days, you can do an exceptional loop from Las Vegas taking in:
That's all very accessible (besides The Maze in Canyonlands, which is superb but takes 4x4 and/or solid hiking to get into).Then when you go back, you can do places requiring a bit more planning like Coyote Gulch (amazing), Buckskin Gulch (also amazing), and secondary spots like Natural Bridges, SR 95, etc. Hundreds of great places in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, etc, and all before you get to adding anything more remote or long distance.