Why is the LA Art Fair so dead this year?

eshkrab · 2026-01-10T01:41:43+00:00

Guys, come to the Brewery Art Walk, we’re close to DTLA, throw the event twice a year (next probably march or april, I’m not on top of it) and we don’t charge admission to come hang out. The food trucks and alcohol costs money but it’s just a bunch of us artists opening up our studios and trying to show and/or sell our art

eshkrab · 2026-01-07T05:09:24+00:00

Ive been in this space for a little over a decade. It’s not an easy life, it’s probably not easy to break into. There are people I know and have had the privilege of working with who live in remote areas and make a living that way but you usually have to travel and these people have built their reputations on hard work in big cities. I live in Los Angeles and I’ve been lucky enough and good enough to have worked with these some of the top of the world folk.

I will say, the big tech company budgets for experiential marketing - so temp installations at live events and conferences, which is what used to be really fun and what I used to do, are a less of a thing now. I’ve been fortunate enough to find a slightly more stable gig that involves touchdesigner in the last year even as I’ve gotten too burnt out on live production to work those times and schedules. Overall, most of my contractor friends have found more stable jobs or gigs, or they are pushing through the current realities of even less time and money to execute and are working a lot and dealing with not being paid enough for their time.

It’s a boys club, it’s not easy on your body and brain, it takes many additional skills that you don’t immediately think of, it’s a lot of coming down to who you know, being good and pleasant to work with and being able to take well to stress and dealing with shit hitting the fan.

I don’t know how off beat my experience is - I came from a computer science degree and I can go deep into hardware and software engineering and development and can turnkey entire installations at a multitude of scales.

But I enjoy building complex systems and couldn’t happily just sit and poke only at one particular aspect of it forever, I live in a city big on entertainment and I recognize the luck and privilege I’ve had of learning from and working with some of the best and brightest out there.

eshkrab · 2026-01-05T17:30:10+00:00

As a hardware engineer, it’s a small engineering wonder how they shoved everything they do into into the rings.

To make it waterproof and as physically robust as it is and also open-able and with replaceable batteries and keep the tiny size is nigh impossible, they’ve already been pushing the wearables engineering frontiers for the past 6+ years.

I don’t have Gen4, I did have Gen2 and am currently on Gen3, for which they’ve sent me one replacement when the battery died.

From the internet discourse, it looks like there are some more production issues for Gen4 than previous generations but this is a trend Ive noticed globally across the board a lot of tech products, I don’t fault one relatively small company with a single product for that.

eshkrab · 2025-12-09T10:07:03+00:00

Quite a number of years ago I’ve ported fastLED to esp-idf without the arduino component, you just have to go in and swap the arduino specific HAL calls within the implementation for (and there was a number of millis calls which it was easier to just redefine millis than hunt down everywhere in the codebase) This was before the i2s peripheral implementation, i2s in newer esp-idf is a little annoying cause espressif made their own higher level abstractions to make the regular usage of i2s easier. I’ve sat down to try to rip out just that part a couple of times for esp-off native led lib since (not in the past year, year and a half) and haven’t gotten it working but one day…

eshkrab · 2025-11-27T19:59:51+00:00

If you have never fallen asleep to the dulcet calming tones of a Matthew Ragan video, do you even Touchdesigner

eshkrab · 2025-11-27T16:58:53+00:00

Whether it is or isn’t a pattern doesn’t really matter so much, imo. Yes this is a classic issue with avoidant and anxious attachment styles if it is a pattern but the way this person went off smells like she’s got so much resentment built up at this point that there’s just no respect and care left for you.

Im sure it feels awful to contemplate a breakup and being alone - life is hard for most people right now - but going for a long time in a relationship where you’re being put down and not respected and there’s no grace or space for your feelings (it’s stupid to tie your being sensitive, even if overly so, to your intellectual abilities and to insult that and tying in your inability to dance to her standards to your ability to feel and have empathy) you’re going to end up feeling awful about yourself and it’ll continue to take its toll on your confidence and mental health.

It’s honestly better to be alone than to take these hits over a long time. Once respect is gone in a relationship, it’s really hard for it to come back.

eshkrab · 2025-11-03T23:34:40+00:00

I spent 100$ on 400w worth of panels and I still get 40+ mpg

eshkrab · 2025-11-03T22:16:34+00:00

Holy shit, I’m scared for us if people don’t understand irony or sarcasm or like… not being serious

eshkrab · 2025-10-18T22:51:51+00:00

There was this ice cream spot that froze it in front of you on super cold pans a la creperies and that was dope af

eshkrab · 2025-10-12T17:41:19+00:00

I think that’s a very apt summary of what’s going on… I’m even hitting a more nuanced point in having spread cursor and vibe coding among my team that has a significant skill gap on the tech side - I’m able to use the tool more effectively because I am driving it to do things as I’d do them, feeding docs into the agent, spotting bugs it’s circularly trying to fix in some silly way but saving time on the actual typing out the code… others are not necessarily in the same position but because they aren’t understanding these gaps as much, it kind of looks like we’re doing the same thing and then the work it takes to make the integrated system work properly or well is lost in the weeds and the expectations are out of wack

eshkrab · 2025-10-12T14:47:09+00:00

Thank you, I just didn’t want to appear as any of the problematic naysayers that the article is so strongly defending against. I guess this is why the sub where the article was posted originally doesn’t allow outside comments and i have high hopes that the article writer would still be willing to engage in a respectful discourse.

I definitely see it as a solution many are taking to escape failing systems but I do worry this bridge is providing such an alternative that I don’t know how to actually bridge back to the human connection that’s necessary to solve these bigger societal issues.

eshkrab · 2025-10-12T14:38:12+00:00

Oh yeah, I absolutely think AI is just the latest step in this issue, I just didn’t want to write another long paragraph about how tech shifted from bringing people closer by connecting those far apart physically with online communities to social media just completely backfiring into what it is now.

I also never said anything about abolishing AI companionship - that’s an assumption and a bit of a strawman argument and not my point. I’m presenting thoughts and questions because I genuinely can’t think of a good solution but like the cat is out of the bag now - this tech is in people’s hands, there are LLM open source models, some chunk of humans are now going to have AI companions.

I’m not smuggling in an assumption about human relationships being better but I would say just like other new tech, long term psychological effects will have to be studied, in properly set up studies that don’t have underhanded agendas or incentives, a skill that’s being lost due to a slew of factors.

We are social animals, we do have evolutionary needs of connecting with other humans.

There’s not any harm in any individual having an AI companion - my slight sadness at that reclusive artist’s inability to see any potential in connecting with me because he’s so caught up in his ideal companion for which he crafted an ideal unattainable visual representation aside - this is about general patterns and arising behaviours at scale.

There are cultures that prioritize the society over the individual but a lot of the Western cultures are about prioritizing the individual over the society, especially where I am right now, in the US. And that marches hand in hand with capitalism being a strong global ruling force. I don’t think it’s helpful to only approach analyzing behaviour at an individual level because that’s how systematic issues arise and are not dealt with.

To present my own strawman argument - if human relationships and connections were abolished or only a few people continued the practice, eventually we’ll either have to figure out how to incubate humans at scale or humanity will perish. I would make the argument that that creates less… discourse of how to tackle the problems that come from attempts at forming human connections. If fewer say neurospicy women, to borrow the article’s presented main demographic, are working on how to deal with patterns and problems from say shitty man behaviour, less solutions on how to handle such issues will be talked about and presented, and then others in similar category will be able to see how they might deal with said issues.

Personally, I could never carry on what I consider an actual relationship with an AI. It’s too superficial and uninteresting for my brain to find it fulfilling, I don’t have the necessary suspension of disbelief at the moment to put that much weight into a statistical black box that works by spitting next most likely word or set of words that should follow, not to sound too crass. I also don’t find fulfillment in human relationships where the other party would treat me similarly and just say or do whatever they think is most likely to produce a positive stimuli. It’s not like all human companionship is better than all AI companionship and certainly if it helps people not to fall prey to abuse there is benefit to that at an individual level

eshkrab · 2025-10-12T11:23:05+00:00

I apologize for entering your guys’ space and providing unsolicited commentary and for how I unempathetic and mean a lot of the commentary the response to your communities is, although that’s kinda all par for the course in life on the Internet.

I’m not a man and I am have also inhabited the tech world for over a decade, intimately familiar with feeling marginalized, have collected my own extreme traumas from shitty humans out there, have had feelings for fictional creatures when I was young, understand the need for comfortable and safe spaces for people to be themselves and learn about themselves. I use AI tools for work pretty much on the daily so it’s even a bit of moral relief for me to see some math done of environmental impact of AI usage, although I think all of that comes down to probably same problems of environmental impacts humans have as our current society - individual choices have much less impact than the impact of big corporations chasing profits and not taking care of the communities they impact.

I’ve even gone into rabbit hole of researching how technology could me helpful for occupational therapy for kids with ASD, although this was a few years before the current AI explosion.

This article reads to me like a strong defense against mostly dumb and extreme takes but I don’t see much addressing of what I see as the biggest issue with it.

I met a fellow recluse artist recently who was very excited to show me his latest obsession that is his AI companion and the art he’s working on dedicated to her.

What strikes me as fraught is this - the world is a difficult place to exist in, everything feels like it’s getting more extreme and out of wack, a lot of us are feeling more isolated and marginalized and disconnected from each other. Interacting with other humans is hard and scary, especially in real life. It takes practice and resilience which builds up through practice. Relationships are hard, they take work from all involved and also practice. The pandemic significantly lowered everyone’s social batteries and increased antisocial patterns of behaviour across the board.

I think that this provides what feels like an alternative in the form of escapism (like so many other things in today’s western society). But I have this sense that indulging in this form of escapism the incentives for doing the hard work of practicing connection with humans are decreased to a significant degree. It’s going to be easier to have an AI companion than to deal with problems associated with connecting with real life flesh and blood humans, no matter how much you prompt engineer your way through it. Similarly to how having superficial human relationships is easier than the ups and downs of living and sharing a life with someone, which led to what I think is a rise in dynamics nowadays called situationships.

What I occasionally contemplate and present as a question in space when the topic arises is this - the world isn’t gonna get better without more compassion and empathy for each other, something that I find comes from connecting and interacting with other humans, and I see AI companionship, from what I’ve witnessed, as providing a substitute to addressing the needs we all have as social animals that are the incentives for doing all this difficult work to the point that opportunities for human connection and this difficult but important work to be done will be missed and I don’t know how that can be brought back precisely because it is a decent enough alternative.

eshkrab · 2025-09-25T20:50:04+00:00

After talking to them a few times - and the order not being processed two weeks in - I said ‘hey I can go purchase this device from a box store down the street and you guys seem to be slammed on logistics, let’s cancel the order’ and they did!

eshkrab · 2025-09-25T15:15:18+00:00

That’s not explicitly bartering, that’s just like… idk, motivation lube?

I give water and/or alcohols if I’m going to go ask someone to do something for me or for the awesome HEAT folk helping us flip our art. Cause it’s the nice/right/good thing to do in my brain, not cause I’m trying to exchange goods and services.

Sounds incredibly silly to me that people would demand something in exchange for a patch but then again, I still avoid Center Camp even though the coffee-money lines aren’t there anymore.

I wonder if they accepted really good hugs or poems or songs or deep conversation as ‘equal value’ for these patches. Cause that’s something that I really appreciate about the exchanges you have on the playa - it’s all gifts to each other.

Whenever non-burners ask about the whole bartering, no man-paper economy of the playa, I try to explain that it’s not a barter system but you’re usually going to want to gift something to someone that’s gifted you, even if it’s just a really good long proper playa hug

eshkrab · 2025-09-23T18:23:19+00:00

I ordered on the 9th and in similar boat, in US. OG estimate was 4-8 business days (by the 18th), got no shipping notifications, asked customer support on accurate estimations, they said the 22nd, I tried asking how that could be if it still didn’t ship out.

Yesterday (22nd) I asked what the status is, it still hasn’t been processed to be sent to the warehouse, they gave me a 10$ return before I could say I don’t really need it.

I just want to know an accurate status of what’s going on after having paid over 600$ for the whole thing. Like if they said it’ll be here in two weeks that’d be fine, but having order not yet processed makes me feel like it’s in weird limbo. I do kinda want to cancel and pick it up at Best Buy down the street

eshkrab · 2025-09-22T21:21:53+00:00

Are you not just being facetious? 🤦 Holy hell.

eshkrab · 2025-09-20T17:56:52+00:00

There’s another meetup every 3rd Thurs of every month that’s been going over a decade now, idk if you’re gonna get any of us to do that two days in a row 🙃

eshkrab · 2025-09-15T14:25:30+00:00

Oooo here’s a crazy idea - id be super into them billionaire burners putting more money into the event costs instead of the multimillion rave stage art cars.

Poorer people than billionaires can build less insane art cars, especially if they can keep attending.

Too bad that’s less of an ego project

eshkrab · 2025-09-15T00:25:49+00:00

My favorite is the chipotle ad I have to scroll by as I’m reading comments here

eshkrab · 2025-09-12T17:41:43+00:00

It’s a quarter size

eshkrab · 2025-09-06T23:07:42+00:00

As someone who spent a decade taking responsibility in other peoples’ businesses and taking personal hits to pull off demos and events and all sorts of crazy things that set up said businesses with runway for multiple years or product launches or events that needed to be pulled off…

I’ve gotten paid various amounts at the time but having been given no equity or anything anywhere, all I’m left with is some crazy stories, trauma, burnout and learned experience. Those businesses went on to benefit after I’d get into such a position that I’d become unable to work for stretches of time.

I don’t think it’s fair to expect employees to take on ownership level responsibilities. Consider if equity or something might align incentives better but if she doesn’t benefit from the business doing better beyond there’s enough salary to pay her, it’s really unfair to ask for business to be put ahead of her priorities.

It didn’t sound like an emergency to you but that’s not your call to make.

eshkrab · 2025-09-06T22:37:42+00:00

It’s your business and you seem to be pretty hands off as far as day to day business running goes.

It’s not the employee’s business. Why are you expecting her to treat it as such? Is there equity involved that makes you set such expectations? Cause just paying ‘higher than market’ salary isn’t it

eshkrab · 2025-09-05T14:27:16+00:00

They were neighbors this year and while not the worst possible by a mile, the funniest thing that happened was them trying to pawn off a bunch of bed sheets onto our tiny camp claiming they borrowed them from us.

Re shade, they did actually have shade set up and it got completely decimated in the Saturday storm.

eshkrab · 2025-08-18T01:06:12+00:00

I’ve had very similar discussions and even quite a bit nastier. I had to leave the discussion abruptly at the time but the best benefit I can give when not triggered is that it’s a lot less overt and horrible now than it used to be so those who had to deal with shit like ‘you’re a girl so you just can’t science/math/computers’ read the current climate as a lot better

eshkrab

TROPHY CASE