IFA in a Limousine
Blogger outings are the actual best—genuinely, not in some ironic way. Everyone shows up in various states of tech obsession or design delusion, you pile into some ridiculous scenario (a limousine, this time), and for a few hours you’re just hanging with people who think about the same things you do and don’t pretend to be normal about it.
This one was Berlin, the IFA, and Western Digital had funded the whole thing to show off their My Passport Wireless, an external drive that backs up your files across devices without cables. Not revolutionary—just the practical answer if you’re the type who shoots constantly and never organizes anything. I barely tracked the specs, but that was the pitch.
What actually stuck was the event itself. Glasperlenspiel played, this electronic duo everyone in Berlin loves for reasons I still don’t fully understand, and the rest of us just drifted around talking about trips and food and the best corner shops for 2am beers. The usual people showed up—Thang, Leni, Janos, Natalie, and maybe a dozen others I hadn’t seen in a while. There was something frictionless about it, how quickly you slip back into friendship with someone when you’re actually in the same room instead of just following their posts.
By the end we’d somehow decided, and it made sense in the moment, to drive the limo past one of these late-night shops and grab beer like we’d found a cheat code. It was stupid and perfect—the kind of decision that only exists because everyone’s together and nobody’s thinking about content.