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My first computer: IBM PC Convertible

My first computer was a luggable. That was the name for the awkward adolescent phase of a reverse growth spurt computers were making in the late 1980s. The era of room-sized computing was over, and early enthusiasts had desktops in their home office, but no lap was big enough for this device to sit atop. The iconic elements that define laptops today were emerging though: the screen on a hinge that folded over the keyboard, the ability to run on a battery. The giveaway that clearly defined the IBM PC Convertible as a luggable was the integrated handle, which let you carry it around like a suitcase.

My first computer: the IBM PC Convertible.

Beyond its luggability, the name provided a clue that something more innovative was at play — this thing could expand! To make the core of the computer as small as possible, the keyboard, grayscale display, and dual floppy drives were all housed in a base unit that provided basic functionality at the smallest size. Modules could then be snapped on the back to add additional capabilities, extending its length (and weight) but integrating into a seamless whole. I had the modules for extra ports (serial and parallel), and the adapter to drive an external CRT display. I also had the module that gave the PC Convertible its most distinctive capability: an integrated thermal printer.

Printer and port/monitor modules.
All modules attached in carrying mode.

Stacked together, the assemblage nearly touched the ground when held from its handle. The printer was like a secret capability, hiding its mechanical identity behind a pop-up plastic door. It printed like a fax machine, burning crisp black characters into the same rolls of thermal paper that would fade to nearly unreadable gray outlines within a month. If your goal in owning a printer was to get data off of easily corruptible floppy disks onto a more archival substrate in the physical world, then this module was a clear failure. But if you defined success by the mere possibility of printing ASCII art banners on the go, then the PC Convertible was truly game-changing!

Printer module with thermal paper roll attached.

IBM launched the PC Convertible in April of 1986, and it was discontinued just three years later. It was already well put to pasture by the time I got mine, around 1992, when my Mom bought it at a garage sale or auction. New at retail, my setup would have cost over $3,000, but if I remember right, she paid just $25. Surprisingly, for the era, this wasn’t the first computer in our house. That would be the green-screen desktop in my Dad’s office that he used to manage his farm. I had a few games I was allowed to play on his computer, but there was always the specter of screwing it up somehow. The PC Convertible was mine to explore.

Even by the standards of the time, it was incredibly limited. No hard drive, and the floppy drives only supported double-density (720K) disks, not the newer high-density (1.44MB) versions. But I didn’t really register the limitations because it was the first time I could root around and figure out how things worked. I futzed with shareware games (shoutout to Babbage’s at the Portage Crossroads Mall), but what really captured my attention was the command line. It came with IBM PC DOS 3.2, spread out over multiple floppies, and I would spend hours running each command just to figure out what they could do.

This wasn’t yet programming, but it was my first introduction to computers as spaces of possibility and experimentation. Up until then, I’d watched my Dad use his computer like a single-use device, following written instructions on how to load and operate the programs he needed for his business. But here, on my own machine, is where I learned to see computers as general-purpose technology, with capabilities you could string together to do something new. What I discovered, in something as simple and limiting as a DOS batch file, was the mental reframing of a computer from an appliance to a platform.

It wasn’t long before I was able to move beyond the PC Convertible, to a hand-me-down Packard Bell desktop with a 40MB hard drive and a 256-color monitor. That led to modems, discovering the BBS world, and eventually the Internet. But that old luggable has a special place in my heart, and it’s the only computer I’ve kept in storage and still own today.

Museum Worthy

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m old enough for childhood artifacts to be museum-worthy, and it’s been nice to run into variants of my first computer at museums and swap meets around the world. That’s also made me realize that mine is in pretty good condition, and that I’m lucky to have both the printer and external CRT display.

As an artifact of design history, the IBM PC Convertible has been collected by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, along with some of the original design sketches and prototypes created by the industrial designer Richard Sapper. I would love to see these someday, in particular this gorgeous prototype made out of wood, cardboard, and paper.

IBM PC Convertible wooden prototype (open) by Richard Sapper, in the Centre Pompidou.
IBM PC Convertible wooden prototype (closed) by Richard Sapper, in the Centre Pompidou.
IBM PC Convertible design sketch by Richard Sapper, in the Centre Pompidou.

Below are photos that I took of IBM PC Convertibles at the Large Scale System Museum, The National Museum of Computing, and just this week, at the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest.

From the Large Scale Systems Museum in New Kensington, PA (2019)
From The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, United Kingdom (2026)
Info sheet from The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, United Kingdom (2026)
From Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, Schaumburg, IL (2026)
Info sheet from Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, Schaumburg, IL (2026)

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Restoring TCUP

Digital decay is inevitable. Zeros and ones might not fade, or rust, like their material counterparts, but without maintenance and care digital systems break down over time just the same. Some of this gets swept under the rug, because Google might stop linking to a broken website, reducing the chances people will run across it. But if you’re the sort of person who diligently bookmarked your favorite websites over the years, you know that clicking on anything older than a decade will likely lead you to a dead end.

I’ve always felt a sense of responsibility to counter this digital entropy as best I can, which means upgrading my web server and editing old code to make sure it still works with newer versions of programming languages, browsers, or operating systems. I try to make sure links keep working, and redirect them to their new home if I need to move things around. But sometimes the cause of the breakage is out of my control, like when browsers just stopped supporting the Flash plugin, rendering millions of websites, once on the vanguard of being alive with animation and movement, inert and lifeless.

So it was with a website I built over 25 years ago called The Collective Unconsciousness Project (TCUP). I created it during my last year of undergrad, as an independent study in my graphic design program at Western Michigan University. This was during a period of time in which Macromedia Flash was an incredibly exciting tool for interactive design, in the sweet spot where it had matured to include pretty good programming capabilities alongside its animation engine, and before HTML and CSS provided support for similar functionality. It was easy to make immersive online experiences that broke away from the standard table cell layouts of Web 1.0, and felt like the first tool that let designers create whatever they could imagine on the web.

I was also getting interested in databases, and information architecture, which was introducing all kinds of interesting ideas that are commonplace today but were quite new at the time — like tagging, or as they liked to call it at the time: folksonomy.

TCUP was a chance for me to bring these two things together. It was a tool that let people log and tag their dreams, using a very straightforward form, paired with a “dream-like” interface in which anyone could read those dreams and navigate between them using the tags. By following certain tags you could drift through the collection of anonymous stories in a strangely interconnected way, with no way to directly link to or return to any particular dream. It was the kind of project that the web used to be full of back then: simple, unique, experimental, and non-commercial.

Thousands of dreams were logged into TCUP before it stopped working. It was Macromedia Site of the Day in November 2001, and in 2002 it was featured as a chapter in the book Macromedia Flash Interface Design: A Macromedia Showcase by Darcy Dinucci. It was online and working fine up through the launch of the iPhone in 2007, which famously never supported Flash — accelerating the decline of the plugin and the site’s extinction.

BUT — I’m happy to say that now, in 2026, there’s finally a pathway to restoring TCUP to at least a partially functioning state. It’s all because of an open source project called Ruffle, a Flash emulator built in Rust and Web Assembly that brings Flash websites back to life without users needing to install anything. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t support everything, but with a few workarounds in how you interact with it, TCUP is now alive again!

Beyond Flash, I had to clean up the website backend a bit, making it compatible with the latest version of PHP and MySQL, and fixing some security issues. I didn’t restore the ability to log dreams, and removed the ability to retrieve your personal dream log. If you submitted any back in the day you can email me and I’ll send you a copy of your dreams.

Along with getting the site back on its feet, I also noticed that the Internet Archive has a copy of the Dinucci book, so I extracted out the TCUP chapter, which is now available as a PDF if you want to learn more about it and see an old photo of 22-year-old me. It includes background on the project, lots of screenshots, and a technical section with actual ActionScript code that goes into detail on how the interface was built.

During this era of the web, it was common to find books about websites, which at the time felt a little strange, like when you see the local news read social media posts on the air. But now, after decades of digital decay, I’m so thankful that those books were printed. Without low-resolution screenshots in those books’ pages, the web of that era would be lost. The Internet Archive is an invaluable tool, but it relies on today’s web browsers to render the old code it has saved.

Shoutout to all the contributors to the Ruffle project for making this possible. It seems to be an active community that continues to improve and provide more functionality for Flash emulation as time goes by.

So, feel free to check out TCUP once again — with the following caveats:

  • You can no longer log a new dream.
  • On the Explore page where you launch the interface, be sure to read the note about the required interaction workarounds.
  • This was well before the mobile era, so it works best on desktop.
  • But, thanks to the power of Ruffle, it actually runs on iPhone! (at least partially — no tag navigation because no hover)

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Iceland: Week 52

One year later, this is my last full day in Iceland. It’s been more than a year on the calendar, but somehow my time in Iceland ended up being exactly one year when accounting for various trips. My apartment is empty, and despite its tininess, I’m sore from scrubbing it clean and packing all of my things. There are three suitcases and a backpack, which weigh in total almost exactly the same as my body. Apparently that’s all it takes, for a year at least.

I will miss many things about Iceland, but day-to-day, I will mostly miss Mount Esja. The mountain range sits opposite Reykjavík, a persistent natural presence balancing the country’s largest city across the bay. I made sure to see it every day: taking it all in along the shore walk in the evening, catching glimpses in-between buildings while running errands, or puzzling over the perceptual trick that somehow gives it a towering presence from all the way on campus.

Esja always reflects the mercurial Icelandic weather, catching and holding low clouds with its peaks, looking grand in a snow-covered coat at sunset, acting as the backdrop for dancing aurora, or straight-up disappearing in the fog. I know someone who grew up in the Eastfjords, and she told me that in her hometown they say that “when Esja starts looking beautiful, you know you’ve been gone too long” — but that just speaks to how stunning the Icelandic countryside can be. As someone who grew up amidst the relative flatness of the American Midwest, living alongside Esja has been a revelation.

This week, on Looking North, I published a review of Tim Ecott’s new book, Eva and the Island: Life at the Loneliest Farmhouse in the World. It’s about Stóra Dímun, in the Faroe Islands, which of course I visited when I was there. I had read a pre-publication copy of the book before my trip, which provided me with the unique experience of learning a great deal about its history and inhabitants beforehand. It’s likely that I’ll be the only person to review the book who has actually visited the island, so I tried to approach it from that perspective.

For the solar eclipse on Wednesday, I had two sets of glasses to choose from, having picked up the first at the public library before realizing that my ticket to Björk’s rave came with a pair. In the end I didn’t need either of them, as the clouds never cleared and the day was rainy throughout. Still, even without seeing the moon move slowly into place and completely block the sun, the feeling of totality was pretty profound.

I thought it might feel like sunset, but it happens much faster than even the speedy sunsets near the equator, and my involuntary reaction was to start laughing. It felt shocking, and absurd, and made me feel like I could understand why pre-modern societies would create elaborate eclipse mythologies to explain what was happening. It followed no natural pattern I could relate to, and in some ways was even more mysterious by the lack of visual evidence about its cause. One minute later, everything was back to normal.

Finally — this will be the last numbered Icelandic post. I’ve enjoyed the challenge of writing here every week while I’ve been in Iceland. I don’t yet know if I’ll continue on a weekly cadence, but I do plan to keep making this place my home on the Internet, as it has been (inconsistently) for 25 years. I hope you’ll keep following along.

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Iceland: Week 51

Things have gotten very minimal. As I enter my last week living in Iceland, I’ve had success in selling all of my larger pieces of furniture, which is a relief, but that also leaves me with a very sparse setup: air mattress, desk chair, side table. It’s enough to get me through the week, the highlight of which is the eclipse and the festival that Björk is hosting on Wednesday. As of now, the weather forecast is cloudy with a chance of rain, so it’s unclear how much I’ll actually see. But I’ve heard that even if it’s cloudy, the feeling of totality is dramatic, so I’m excited to experience it for the first time.

During my second semester at the University of Iceland, I ended up orienting a lot of my studies around cybersecurity, a topic I’ve had a longstanding interest in and which I got to intersect with directly when I worked at the CFPB. Some courses, like Internet Governance, already included relevant readings, and for others, such as International Institutions and Security Studies, it was a way for me to align those courses with my personal interests. One of the things I researched was the potential for an international approach to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP) in which countries do a better job disclosing partial information about zero-day vulnerabilities they are hoarding, with a defined path towards disclosure and patching those vulnerabilities over time — essentially an international agreement on phased cyber-weapon disarmament.

It was during that time that the Claude Mythos AI model and the related Project Glasswing were announced, which signaled a massive leap forward in AI cybersecurity capabilities. Since then, it’s become clear that we have entered into an entirely new world. Advanced AI models are now routinely finding new zero-day vulnerabilities (i.e. previously unknown critical software flaws) with ease. These were previously so scarce that they were part of a thriving black market, but are now being uncovered at a pace that creates a huge backlog for software vendors to fix. They can also now be found with such ease that less sophisticated bad actors can exploit them.

Theoretically, in an optimistic scenario, all of this could reach a point in the future where these new AI cybersecurity capabilities make software significantly safer, maybe even negating the need for the kind of VEP I was researching because all the holes in our critical software systems have been found and fixed. But that future isn’t here yet, and even if it arrives, we’re in for a wild ride in the period between now and then in which bad actors and defenders are racing to see who can find the flaws first, and the defenders are always at a disadvantage because they have to not only find the vulnerability but fix it and get the patch installed everywhere it’s deployed.

It is in this context that the last week of news has seemed like a tipping point, as we learn of the possibility that Iranian hackers may have infiltrated water systems in Minnesota. We’re also getting a lot more details about the AI agents at OpenAI that autonomously orchestrated a hack on Hugging Face, a dataset and AI model provider.

At the Black Hat security conference last week, OpenAI shared more detail about that hack, and a video of the talk is on YouTube. It’s slightly technical, but if you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend it and you will get the gist even if some of the acronyms go over your head. In short: this is the first documented case of a team of different AI agents autonomously collaborating to break out of the constraints placed on them and stage a hack. They first had to figure out how to hack out of OpenAI, and then how to hack into Hugging Face. They were not directed to do this, but decided to, as a consequence of trying to achieve a task they were given. They had to uncover multiple zero-day vulnerabilities along the way to achieve their goal. It’s honestly mind-blowing, and very concerning.

For more on this, I highly recommend this week’s Foreign Affairs podcast: Cyberwarfare in the AI Age: A Conversation With Jen Easterly. She was the Director of CISA in the Biden administration, which is the government agency that should be leading the charge in helping us deal with these radical changes in the cybersecurity landscape. But of course, Trump has massively defunded it because he doesn’t like that its assessment of the 2020 election as secure cuts against his big lie that it was stolen from him.

I suppose that diving deeper into cybersecurity topics wasn’t exactly what I expected to do with my last couple of weeks in Iceland, but the weather has been poor and the tourism crunch for the eclipse has made it impractical for me to take more trips outside of Reykjavík.

It is interesting that the two areas in which I ended up focusing during my International Relations program were the Arctic and cybersecurity, both of which ended up being extremely relevant to current events and international tensions. Because of Trump’s aggression towards Greenland, the Arctic has gotten more geopolitical attention in the last year than any time since the Cold War, and the speed of AI advancements has brought urgent attention to cyber threats.

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Iceland: Week 50

I’m down to my last fortnight in Iceland and it has a symmetry of undoing, mirroring the steps I took last July as I figure out how to cancel accounts, sell my things, and say goodbye to my adopted country of the last year. I haven’t made it to every one of the places I wanted to see, but I’ve done a lot with my extended stay through the summer and it’s good to leave something for the future.

The main thing I completed this week was my essay about visiting Stóra Dímun that I started writing in the Faroe Islands. I wanted to capture what it was like to be there, the natural environment and landscape, but also share more about the lives of the couple who live there full-time. I decided to post it on Looking North instead of here, as it seemed more at home there, but I hope that you’ll click through to read it.

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Faroe Islands: Week 2

After an unusually sunny first week in the Faroe Islands, my remaining time exhibited the more typical Faroese pattern of unpredictable rain, fog, and wind. This wasn’t nearly as bad as it seems though, since the weather is rarely the same everywhere and the country is small enough to drive across (and back) in a single day. I had a rental car starting Monday, so I could adapt my plans and chase the sun by checking webcams distributed around the country.

Being able to drive also meant I could check out Eysturoyartunnilin, the last subsea tunnel I hadn’t seen, with the world’s only subsea roundabout. The Faroese are incredibly prolific at building tunnels, and not only the subsea variety. When I was there in 2018, the tunnels in the Northern Isles were single-lane and unlit. But in 2024, they replaced them with modern two-lane tunnels that allow larger vehicles to pass. They even opened a new tunnel while I was visiting! On Sandoy — coincidentally on the same day that I visited, but on the other side of the island — the tunnel connecting Dalur and Húsavík was opened, letting residents avoid the narrow cliff-side route that has a history of landslides.

Múlafossur waterfall in Gásadalur.

On Monday, my initial plan was to hike the old postman route between Bøur and Gásadalur on the island of Vágar. Gásadalur is most well known for the Múlafossur waterfall, whose water falls from the cliff edge into the ocean. But I’ve long been interested in the history of the village itself, which was very isolated before the tunnel was built twenty years ago. There is a fascinating documentary called 1700 Meters from the Future, which I’ve written about (and you can watch) on my Looking North blog, that was filmed in the time period just before the tunnel. It shows what life was like there, and touches upon the hopes and fears that the impending tunnel raised for the 17 residents at the time.

The mountain path I wanted to hike is the one the village’s postman would historically walk every day, and continued to walk three times a week even after helicopter service started in 1983. The film features the second-generation mail carrier, whose father before him walked the route for 56 years. It’s stories like these that fascinate me about remote places like Gásadalur, and I was excited to experience for myself what that route was like. Unfortunately, on Monday morning, the top of the mountain sat in a cloud of fog. Buoyed by my experience on Stóra Dímun the previous week, where the fog ended up clearing just in time, I began the route undeterred. But after a mile and a half of very vertical walking, the fog was thick enough to soak my hair, and the wet grass underneath my feet was slippery. I was alone, the views of Tindhólmur and Drangarnir were lost to the fog, and I concluded that I should turn around.

I had planned for other hikes on Vágar, but the fog seemed intent on hovering, so I decided to visit the village of Tjørnuvík on Streymoy, which had clearer skies. The road to Tjørnuvík reminded me of traveling in the Westfjords, or the north of Iceland. The end of the road gets progressively narrower, eventually dropping to a single lane serving two directions of traffic. This isn’t necessarily unusual in the Faroe Islands; cars simply negotiate their turn, using pullouts placed at regular intervals. But the final stretch, where the road descends along the cliff edge into the village, is gated by a traffic light that alternates for each direction at five-minute intervals. There are many signs along that way, forbidding cars from stopping, which is understandable because the view as you round the corner of the mountain is incredibly photo-worthy.

The village of Tjørnuvík.

Tjørnuvík is home to the best surfing beach in the Faroe Islands, the best view of the sea stacks known as “the Giant and the Witch,” and, relevant to my unique interests, is also the landing site for the CANTAT-3 subsea fiber-optic cable. That cable is pretty old and slow now, largely used as a backup connection, but it marked the first time the Faroes were directly connected to North America when it went live in 1994. Not surprisingly, this was not an attraction for anyone else, but the cable connection box is right there on the beach itself, ready for a prominent plaque to mark this milestone of telecommunication history, if someone were so inclined.

I believe that this is the cable connection point for the CANTAT-3 subsea fiber-optic cable. I couldn’t find any other evidence, and I know that it is located in Tjørnuvík.

Tuesday, I drove to the Northern Isles, one of the most dramatic areas in the Faroes, to catch a morning ferry to Kalsoy. This island is long and skinny, earning it the nickname of “the flute” for the combination of its shape and the series of tunnels that make up the single road along the east side of the island. These are old-school mountain tunnels, the kind that have been mostly upgraded on the other islands, just barely big enough for the bus to fit through.

I was headed to the northern tip of the island to hike to the Kallur Lighthouse. That hike has gotten more popular recently, since it was used as a filming location in the James Bond film No Time to Die. On this day, the island exhibited the kind of micro-climates that the dramatic topography of the Northern Isles is particularly known for. Most of the fog was moving fast, hiding and showing views of Kunoy, which runs parallel to the island, in the span of a minute or less.

Kalsoy as viewed from the ferry.
The village of Mikladalur on Kalsoy.
There was no view from the lighthouse, and the wind picked up enough that people were sheltering in the sheep dugouts.

Wednesday, I was back in the Northern Isles, for a day of somewhat extreme logistical complexity with the goal of traveling to the island of Fugloy and taking a helicopter ride. The helicopters operate as public transit, serving outlying islands. Non-residents can use them, but at an increased cost, and you can only book a one-way ticket. My day involved driving to Klaksvík, then taking a bus to Hvannasund to catch the ferry to Hattarvík on Fugloy. From there, I walked over the mountain road to Kirkja, the other village, where I took a helicopter back to Klaksvík. I could have stopped there, but I didn’t. Instead, I waited for the helicopter to refuel and flew to Tórshavn, where I walked to the terminal and caught a bus back to Klaksvík, then drove back to Tórshavn. Yes, it was worth it.

Fugloy is a place I’ve wanted to visit for a long time. Back in 2019, I wrote about a documentary made about Hattarvík in 2001 that talks about life there at that time. It questions what will become of the village, but also points towards the potential for mobile phones and the Internet to revive the remote community. Hattarvík, the easternmost settlement in the country, still has a very small population. Yet because of the Internet, I actually know someone who lives there. She contacted me because of that blog post, to tell me that she was marrying one of the men in the film and moving to Fugloy to live with him. She posts about her life there now as @FugloyFarm on Instagram, and while she wasn’t there when I visited, she was kind enough to take a phone call when I was planning my trip and encouraged me to take the helicopter.

Hattarvík from the ferry.
The ferry, docked at Hattarvík.
Kirkja, on Fugloy.

Similar to my other hikes during the week, the walk between villages was through the fog, so I missed out on views of Svínoy, Borðoy, and Viðoy from the top. But as I descended to Kirkja, I was happy to see that the fog was clear enough at that level for the helicopter to fly in, and I would soon be seeing those islands from above.

As the helicopter arrived, it seemed to draw the entire population of the village to the landing pad, both passengers and onlookers. The loading process was very informal, typical for the Faroe Islands, and while nearly every seat was filled, I was lucky to get a window seat for each flight. In the air, the reaction of the locals was muted, treating it like the public transport it was, but I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. It was stunning to see a swath of the country from the air, particularly the Northern Isles. You can watch videos from the flight on Instagram.

Helicopter during refueling in Klaksvík
All the Atlantic Airways planes and helicopters are named after artists. This helicopter is named Ruth Smith after the painter.

My love for the Faroe Islands is fully reaffirmed after this trip. Studying it the way I have over the last eight years has made me appreciate it even more on this second trip, and I’m certain there will be additional visits at some point. There are 18 islands in the archipelago, one of which is uninhabited. I have now been to 14 of them, including six new islands on this trip: Stóra Dímun, Nólsoy, Sandoy, Skúvoy, Kalsoy, and Fugloy. It seems reasonable to think I could make it to the remaining four someday.

There will be more for me to unpack, from both the explorations on the islands and the time spent working at Williamshús. But it was an excellent trip, with some moments of both luck and inspiration, that feels like it was the right way to wrap up my year in the North Atlantic.

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Faroe Islands: Week 1

I’ve been in Tórshavn for a week, long enough to settle into a routine of sorts. I’ve been writing at Williamshús in the morning, then out exploring the city and nearby islands by bus and boat in the afternoon. I’ve made progress thinking through some upcoming projects, but have also been drawn to capture what I’m experiencing. Travel and nature writing are already intertwined interests, and the Faroe Islands continue to be a source of inspiration.

Being based in the capital has given me a chance to get to know it better, beyond the tiny turf-roofed houses of the old city and the charming government buildings of Tinganes. I’ve seen art from a cross-section of Faroese painters at Listasavn Føroya, visited The Nordic House, a sibling of the one in Reykjavík, and stopped by Oy Brewing, which is as cavernous as Mikkeller is cozy. My flexible schedule allowed me to meet up with Joel Cole, a Minnesota-born artist who has lived in the Faroe Islands for decades. We corresponded briefly back in 2020, after I wrote about his work being featured on Faroese stamps, and he was kind enough to give me a tour of his studio. It’s located in an old NATO base, high in the mountains, and is improbably shared with the prison.

But I’ve also gotten off of Streymoy, most notably to spend the whole day on Stóra Dímun, the smallest of the inhabited islands and a place that has loomed large in my imagination. Only two people live there, and it’s difficult to visit, with no harbor to dock a boat and requiring a climb up the cliffs to reach the single farmhouse. It encapsulates many of my fascinations: remoteness, dramatic topography, extreme weather. I feel fortunate that I found a way to visit. I’m working on two different pieces about Stóra Dímun that I’ll share soon — one about my experience there, and a review for an upcoming book about the island.

The shortest cliffs on Stóra Dímun.
Walking down the cliff edge, the only way to arrive or depart Stóra Dímun by sea.

Yesterday, I spent a bright sunny day on Skúvoy. Located just northwest of Stóra Dímun, this larger island forms a trio with Lítla Dímun that together resemble decreasing ripples of a giant skipping stone thrown across the North Atlantic. Until recently, getting there was a complicated multi-step affair: first a ferry from Streymoy to Sandoy, and then a drive across to catch another ferry to Skúvoy. That changed in 2023 when the Sandoy subsea tunnel opened, a 6.7-mile fixed link that brings the island into commuting distance from Tórshavn. Coordinating the ferry and bus schedules gave me nearly five hours on Skúvoy, enough to walk to the bird cliffs on the northwest tip, an idyllic area with views as far as Mykines, given the cloudless sky.

Skúvoy in the foreground, Stóra Dímun and Lítla Dímun in the distance.
The village of Skúvoy.

I also travelled to Nólsoy, the easiest of the islands to visit, just across the water from the harbor in Tórshavn and a visible presence through my window as I write this. It’s only a twenty-minute ferry ride, although timing of the return trip for the length of stay you want can be tricky. Being there, in the quiet that even a short ferry ride can provide, you can understand how people think of Tórshavn as the “big city,” despite its status as the smallest of European capitals.

The village of Nólsoy.

It is that smallness that has always impressed me about the Faroe Islands. In many places, a small town can stay on the periphery, leaving governance and culture to the bigger populations in the center. But here, the whole country’s population is only ¾ the size of Kalamazoo, Michigan — and yet, within that group of people, every role needs to be filled: from prime minister to football star, ambassador to Michelin chef. I’ve heard before, and my conversation with Joel Cole confirmed, that to pull that off, people wear many hats here. Another thing he shared, which I’ve noticed myself in even the limited interactions I’ve had, is that the Faroese people are very straightforward and practical. It makes sense when you consider human adaptation, both nature and nurture, in an environment where survival has been historically very difficult and far from guaranteed.

From tomorrow morning, I’ll have a rental car for the rest of my time here, which will let me explore more broadly. I have some hikes I’m looking forward to, and at least one more island I haven’t been to before. The remarkable weather we’ve been having here may not last, but I can’t complain. The wind and fog more typical of the Faroe Islands have led them to be known as the Land of Maybe, and back in Reykjavík it’s the wettest July on record.

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Williamshús

This morning, I woke up at 5am to the sound of crows and kittiwakes, the July sun already fully risen but still bathing Tórshavn in a pink haze that flattened the outline of Nólsoy, visible from my kitchen window. The shape of the island in shadow is like a cartoon snake that has swallowed something many times its size. A tiny village acts as the head, sitting in a flat, low spot on the northern end. The mountainous belly of the snake rises rapidly to the south, betraying its too-large prey inside, before tapering off to the southern tip, where a lighthouse marks the tail like a rattle.

The view of Nólsoy from my kitchen window

I’m in the Faroe Islands, staying at Williamshús, the former home and studio of William Heinesen, one of the country’s most celebrated writers. My quarters are on the second floor, with the first floor and basement preserved as a museum. From up on a hill, the view contains not just Nólsoy but most of the old town center, including the turf-covered roofs of Tinganes, one of the oldest parliaments in the world.

When I arrived yesterday, I was delighted to discover that I was surrounded by trees, in a country that is famous for lacking them. The city park next door is a lush oasis, filled with ducks and shaded walking paths, covered in pine needles and moss. A river wends its way through the greenery, and the National Gallery sits on its northern edge. Way-finding signs throughout the park point towards Williamshús, and given that the museum is only open for two hours each Sunday, these felt like a personalized set of directions, just for me.

I’m here for a writing residency, but not to complete a work in progress or to chip away at an existing project. Instead, I find myself at the start of something, or, more accurately, the pregnant pause before the start of something, when the intention and goals are still a snarl of feelings, before the painstaking process of untying all the knots and straightening out the strings.

I am not a morning person, but when I wrestle myself awake before I’m naturally inclined, I find that it offers something I can’t get elsewhere. Years ago, when I was writing my book about core principles of design, I would program my coffee pot to brew at an hour when I was incapable of working it myself. I would sit in my office, fully shrouded under a wool blanket, half asleep and non-verbal, writing for an hour or two before my morning commute. This wasn’t only a technique to steal time from an otherwise overbooked calendar; the silence of those hours is where the words lived.

I can’t commit to becoming a perpetually early riser, but on a day like today I can be convinced that I should.

This afternoon, I visited the National Gallery, which included paintings from dozens of Faroese artists including Sámal Joensen-Mikines, Ruth Smith, Tróndur Patursson, and Sigrun Gunnarsdóttir. It also had a special exhibition dedicated to Zacharias Heinesen, whose abstracted landscapes include not just paintings but also collages of wooden blocks. These works, hung in the cafe space, were part of a recent event celebrating his 90th birthday. An unanswered thought went through my mind when I heard that: I wonder if he’s still painting?

The fjord of Nólsoy by Zacharias Heinesen

Later today, I got an unexpected sort of answer. After walking around Tórshavn, I returned to Williamshús for the evening and found a man on a ladder, putting a fresh coat of red paint on the shed next to the main property. He introduced himself — Zacharias Heinesen. I knew that he was the son of William Heinesen, and had donated the house to the foundation that owns it, but I didn’t expect to meet him, and certainly not like this.

We didn’t talk long. When I started to tell him that I’d seen his paintings earlier today, he claimed he didn’t speak English very well, and it was unclear to me if this was a kind of modesty. Still, I can now say that I’ve seen Zacharias Heinesen completing a painting, even if it was only the siding.

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Iceland: Week 49

Tomorrow I fly to the Faroe Islands for my residency at Williamshús, the former home of William Heinesen, a Faroese writer and composer. I’ll be living in an apartment on the second floor, while the first floor and basement act as a museum, preserved as they were when he lived and worked there.

I’ve only been to the Faroes once before, but that week-long trip in 2018 left an impression and a connection far beyond a typical tourist visit. I started reading as much English-language history of the country as I could find, devoured all the episodes of the Faroe Islands Podcast, and started my Looking North blog to document and share what I was learning. It’s hard to explain why that place sank its claws so deeply into my psyche, but it’s easy to trace how that experience inspired subsequent research into northern cultures, which ultimately led to discovering the Arctic studies program and my move to Iceland.

If it resonated with me so strongly, why have I been reluctant to return? By a certain logic, I should have gone back to the Faroe Islands much sooner. But perhaps paradoxically, I felt an aversion to going unless I had a deeper reason to be there. I didn’t want to be just a tourist; I wanted at least slightly more grounding and purpose as to why I was there. I felt similarly about Iceland, also because of my love of the place, and of course my graduate certificate program became the deeper purpose for coming here. The writing residency at Williamshús was just enough of a nudge to overcome this hurdle for the Faroe Islands.

I suppose that this distinction is something like the tension between being a tourist and a traveler, of wanting a way to see a place a level deeper — if not as a local does, then at least at a level of engagement beyond the superficial. I’m not concerned with being on the far end of the tourist spectrum, like the cruise ship passengers in Reykjavík who swarm in for pre-packed experiences with shopping lists to check off. But the question of what “authentic travel” means is thorny. I think it really comes down to the trip’s intention, for which the English language lacks a single word.

Some people associate the word “vacation” with relaxation, although I tend to overload that term to include trips with a lot of physical activity too. Further complicating that is the distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 fun, the latter of which pushes further away from the typical vacation definition. Unsurprisingly, German has a clearer distinction, where the word Bildungsreise translates to “educational trip,” whereas Urlaub means simply “vacation.” I guess I’m hoping that this trip to the Faroe Islands will prove closer to a Bildungsreise, with writing and thinking, hiking and exploring — sitting a little deeper in the culture and present of a place that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the last eight years.

Noted & Done

  • I went to Björk’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Iceland.
  • I finally switched from Spotify to Apple Music. If you’re thinking about making this move, let me reassure you that it is easy and seamless. Apple provides a tool to import everything and the design of their app is better in every way. I wish I had done it sooner.
  • Instagram has a new feature that will use your Instagram photos in AI images unless you opt out. Follow the instructions here.
  • I highly recommend the TV show Star City, the spinoff of For All Mankind that continues the premise of the Soviet Union winning the space race, but from the Soviet perspective. It’s really fantastic and doesn’t require that you’ve seen any episodes of For All Mankind, which FWIW I think has gone downhill since season three. Hopefully Star City will be a limited series and not the first of a multi-season run; it feels complete.

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Iceland: Week 48

The numbering of these weekly blog posts doesn’t include the three weeks I spent in the US around the new year, so while typing “48” into the header, it caught me off-guard to realize that this coming week will cap the one-year mark of my arrival in the country. It has been dawning on me in other ways, though, as annual events I’ve attended begin advertising their next iteration and the temperature and tourist levels begin to resemble heights I remember from last July. I’m thankful that I’ve gotten to experience a full cycle of the seasons, to feel the gradual shifting of nature and life throughout the year. In some ways, I think experiencing that slow circular shift in its entirety is a minimum requirement to really know a place.

My friends Jason and Val are here right now, and it’s been fun to hang out with them. Yesterday, Val and I hiked to the top of the Glymur waterfall, on what turned out to be an even nicer day than when I did it three weeks ago. One of the things I love about hiking is that repeat walks on the same trail always feel different. For example, since I was there last, the volume of water has noticeably increased, requiring a full-on wade through the first river crossing instead of the mostly-dry stepping-stone path last time. It also led to considerably more mist floating up through the canyon, creating rainbows for the Northern Fulmars to glide through.

I think this hike is the best trail within roughly an hour of Reykjavík, or maybe it’s a tie with the Reykjadalur Hot Spring Thermal River. It’s easily accessible, but has the kind of elevation that feels more like the highlands. It’s strenuous enough to make you feel accomplished — including unique features like a double river crossing — but not terribly difficult or long. It fits easily into a larger itinerary and doesn’t take the whole day; we didn’t leave until 1pm and were back in time for dinner.

I’ve been writing about Icelandic whale hunting in the last couple of posts, and last week I predicted that the attention from Captain Paul Watson might actually backfire, spurring notoriously independent Icelanders to double down in the face of outside pressure. One sign of that is a news story from this week about the Icelandic national anthem being played as a slain fin whale was dragged into the processing plant. Worse still, in response to media presence on the scene, a worker grabbed the whale’s penis and made lewd gestures towards the cameraman. Taken together, it was a shameful mix of misplaced nationalism and disrespect for the animal, only amplifying the point of the activists. The news article about this is in Icelandic, but the embedded video tells the story clearly without translation.

Like with most things, my viewpoint tends away from the extremes, and I personally have a nuanced view of whale hunting. I’m generally opposed to it, but open to limited and sustainable hunting practices within communities for whom it holds a traditional significance in their culture. This includes various forms of indigenous whaling, including Inuit hunts and the Faroese grindadráp. But while there is evidence of whaling in Iceland’s past, it is not deeply ingrained in their culture or history. The modern whaling they’re doing now is a purely commercial activity, by one company that exports nearly all the meat to Japan.

It feels like an irreconcilable contradiction to have tourists packing whale-watching boats all around the country, while in the same waters whalers use multiple exploding harpoons to kill whales in a process that can leave them in agony for up to two hours before they die. It is not distant or hidden: the fjord that Val and I drove along to reach the Glymur hike yesterday is Hvalfjörður, the “whale fjord,” which is where the whaling station is situated. In some ways, it is good that this tension between two industries is so clear, but it’s unclear how it will be reconciled. It reminds me of the film I saw back in Week 39 about how open net salmon farming is hurting not only the environment but also Icelandic fishing tourism. It may come down less to environmental protection, animal welfare, or international norms than to a crass economic calculation of which industry has greater impact on the economy.

Noted & Done

  • I went to a concert by Lávre, a Sámi joiker, in the greenhouse at Nordic House.
  • Inspired by the Faroe Islands, authorities in Shetland have approved initial plans to build subsea tunnels to connect some of their islands.
  • I launched a new feature on Moped Army to let people hide their email, part of an ongoing effort to help people avoid scammers when using the Buy + Sell Forum. I’ve learned that most scammers send emails instead of using the built-in Personal Messages system, which bypasses the reputational signals that PMs provide. This feature pairs well with my recent PM upgrades.