Fernando Gros

@fernandogros.com

2903 Followers 1128 Following

Writer Granta Memoir Workshop alumni Shortlisted for The Deep Creek Residency Fellowship Lived in 🇨🇱🇦🇺🇬🇧🇮🇳🇭🇰🇸🇬🇯🇵 Worked in academia and music TCK https://fernandogros.com/blog/ Made in Chile, grown in Australia, polished in Japan

Bactran Camel - because not all camels are "camel coloured"

Apple Vision Pro display table in Apple store. Desk is as devoid of people as the Vision Pro was devoid of practical use for most people. The product is such a flop even Apple’s own predictive text doesn’t suggest Pro when you type Vision.

Freo v Power at Adelaide Oval on a sunny winter day.

Australian Rules Football.

Photo of a GenX male sitting in a stairwell wearing the same model of sunglasses that Matt Damon wore in Ford v Ferrari.

Four beef tacos on a wooden board. Each toasted corn tortilla is dressed with diced beef, sliced tomatoes and cucumber, chopped lettuce, sprouts, cilantro leaves, chilli sauce and mayonnaise.

Cheese board with walnuts, quince paste, red grapes, dried apricots, various french knives, disappointingly bland crackers because you can't get good oat biscuits in Australia, sliced pairs, and four cheeses, Papillon Roquefort, Queso Mezcla Curado, Blu 61, and Cheese Culture 30-month old Cloth Cheddar.

Driver's license style graphics displaying details about my Bluesky activity such as,

Posts 6,445 (replies 71% / media 11%)
Longest streak 123 d
Active days 977
Avg pace 5.3 /day
Likes given / Reposts 9,512 / 79
Peak hours 00–02 UTC

Also says I have 5 star Web of Trust, Generosity, Engagement, and am a Veteran of the platform.

Home library with stacked bookcases, a geometrically patterned rug, a leather day bed, and a painting hanging on the wall.

Brilliant orange sun setting behind moored sailboats on a slightly cloudy winter afternoon.

Leon Bridges in concert. Bridges is singing and in the frame is guitarist and back up singer.

Young musician in the 90s bored out of his brain at a tedious party wearing his favourite Japanese cotton T-shirt that is 15 sizes too big and wondering how to escape this suburban hell-scape for some kind of creative freedom.

A visualisation of Bluesky users in clusters representing different kinds of people. My account is sitting near tech and science journalsis, internet culture and tech enthusiasts, American intellectuals and media figures, and intellectuals, artists, and science communicators.

Generously topped Hamburger and crispy Pommes frites on a wooden plate in an basement burger joint in Tokyo

Black background with white text that says no conversation selected

Broad view of Hong Kong harbour showing Admiralty, Tsim Sha Tsui, and looking out towards Yau Tong in the distance. Taken at sunset after a storm the image has a purple-ish hue and the bay is calm with few boats.

Single axis graph labelled "grass touching." Options are Online, Balanced, and Offline. A big orange marker is 2/3rds of the way from balanced towards offline suggesting the user doesn't post often. Below the graph some text says You're a Night Owl with 2 posts per day.

A word cloud showing the user's mostly frequently used words on Bluesky. Australia is the largest and most used word, followed by Japan, Japanese, and film. The next level words are thinking, reading, lesson, music, book, and essay.

A screenshot of the Twitter user interface displaying one of the many Twitter was more user friendly than Bluesky. Here were see the way search can be parsed to show results from anyone or only people you follow. And how results can be sorted by location to show any location or posts made near you.

And this is a good moment to point out that Twitter was, for most of it's life, driven by global traffic, with USA users and posts never representing more than a quarter of the platform.

Image comparing the actual size of an intelligently designed and super able Suzuki Jimny to a huge, dumb, environment destroying American Ford F150. One is a nimble and reliable off road vehicle that could work anywhere in the world, the other is a safety menace that reflects a failed culture.

In the image we can see that the Jimny looks tiny beside the huge F150. Almost half the size.

Four new books on the shelf in my writing cabin being watched over my a statue of a resting ballerina. The books are Human/Nature: On Life in a Wild World by Jane Rawson, Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere by Alex Cothren, Desolation by Hossein Asgari, and Fierceland by Omar Musa.

Amusing chart that speculates about the different service standards of UK delivery companies. It reads,

DPD - Your parcel will be delivered by Steve, in a white van at exactly 9:23am and a photo will be taken for prosperity. There are six stops before you. You can stalk Steve by clicking here.

Amazon - Your parcel will be delivered today and if you're not in, we'll deliver it to someone else instead, like your cat. We'll make sure to let you know "Parcel was handed to customer".
You, cat, on your roof, same thing, right?

Royal Mail - We tried delivering your parcel but you weren't in. Well, you probably were, but you didn't open the door when we knocked with the force of a feather. Now you'll have to reschedule or come to us instead.

Hermes - Your parcel will be delivered at some point, by someone. Might be 10am, might be 10pm, but we'll get there. And if we don't get there, we'll say we've delivered it anyway, then deliver it tomorrow instead when you're out. We'll leave it in your wheelie bin on collection day.

Yodel - Package? Wait what? Were we supposed to deliver something today? You sure?

Graph ranking cities by how stressful they feel in different ways. x axis goes convenient to inconvenient and y axis goes quiet to noisy.

In the quiet and convent quadrant, which is the least stressful for me, are Tokyo, Washington DC, and Paris.

In the quiet and inconvenient quadrant, which is pleasant but frustrating for me, is Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide.

In the convent but noisy quadrant, which is fun but stressful for me, is Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and New York.

Alone in the Noisy and inconvenient quadrant is Delhi.

Australia overlaid on the USA using the Mercator system which shows that the landmass of Australia nearly covers the whole of the lower 48 states of the USA.

John Clarke as fictional comedy character Fred Dagg in a black and white still from the show. Dagg is dressed in a black singlet top with a floppy hat, standing in front of an old tractor, and leaning on a sign that reads "the views expressed in the programme are bloody good ones."

The temperature controlled storage room where 28,000 prints, drawings, and photographs are kept in custom built racks. Framed works are stacked on the upper levels. Everything else is kept matted in custom made Solander boxes.

A book quote that reads "an informal moral code among Whites that depicted Latinos as culturally “defective,” which was used as justification for the subjugation of Latino populations. Whites often spoke of Latino “docility, ignorance, decadence, mediocrity, antagonism toward work, submission to vice, and hedonistic proclivities" from Ignored Racism by Mark D. Ramirez and David A. M. Peterson

Lightening bolt and text that reads 1500 to indicate my streak on Readwise of 1500 days.

Green palm fronds in front of a cloudless blue sky.

Apple's Mac site showing a retro style computer from the TV show severance, presented as if it was a current Mac for sale. The model is called the Lumon Terminal Pro named after the Lumon company in the show Severance.

Screenshot of a tweet from March 13 where the author says,

The delivery guy looked a little surprised when I answered the door wearing a face mask & disposable nitrile gloves.

But it does beg the obvious question why delivery companies in the UK haven't adopted 'zero contact' policies.

Screenshot of a tweet by the author from March 9 2020 which reads

Have decided to cancel and avoid making any appointments that take me into central London or require using the tube until June.

A quote from Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

"As the pandemic began to rage, Twitter’s headquarters, an Art Deco high-rise on San Francisco’s Market Street, lay empty. Dorsey initially retreated to his mansions in San Francisco’s Sea Cliff neighborhood and in Big Sur. But he soon hit the road, traveling to Hawaii, Costa Rica, and French Polynesia. His direct reports complained that they could sometimes hear roosters crowing in the background of his conference calls, a reminder that he was on an island, while they were trapped in their apartments. In May, Twitter became the first tech company to announce that its employees would work remotely, forever—a decision driven by Dorsey’s desire to stay away from the office. By the summer, he stopped chiming in during meetings entirely. He routinely kept his camera and microphone off, leaving employees wondering if he was still sitting near his laptop at all or if he had wandered off to surf."

Colour daisy chart of the 3801 pages of my blog. many lines creating dense circular shapes. Categories represented in shades of yellow, green, blue, and violet. The whole image is both chaotic and symmetrical.

Cardboard folder labelled Wednesday sitting on an old table with a stash of art supplies and pens to one side. The folder is part of a brought forward system where paper based tasks are physically assigned to coming days of the week.

Image showing covers of four music albums recently played in my Apple Music Library

DeBÍ TiRAR Más FOToS by Bad Bunny
Trumpets of Michel-Ange by Ibrahim Maalouf
Waiting Room by Kathryn Mohr
Rising by Jasmine Myra

Empty ski field on a beautiful sunny day. Trees heavy with fresh snow. And empty chair lift passing by.

Fender Custom Thinline Telecaster guitar photographed using light painting technique which creates a moody effect that emulates stage lighting.

Image shows Milestone of 1000 artists played on Apple Music this year. Milestone was reached on November 21. Image also shows photos of Taylor Swift and the band L'Impératrice who were my top two most listened to artists in 2024.

Scrivener Binder folder showing core destinations for my writing, drafts where all new writing begins, Assets for things like about me etc, Blog 2025 for blog essays, an essays folder for things being sent to journals, a fiction folder for flash fiction, compost for things that didn't get finished and will become obsidian entries, and dropped, which is the rubbish bin.

Tokyo skyline brightly lit with a luminous pink Tokyo Tower centre stage.

A cup of takeout yogurt from Okinawa

Fernando Gros seated on a guitar amplifier on a rocky outcrop by the ocean in Hong Kong with a stormy set of clouds rolling towards the shore. He is wearing sunglasses and playing guitar with a big smile which feels like the only appropriate response to being in this situation.

Image generated by Bluesky to show this user was the 1169th to join Bluesky.

Low quality artwork of a baby trump being carried aloft by Joe Rogan who is on the back of an atlas-like colossal Elon Musk, who is also carrying an American flag and has a tattoo promoting some crypto-shit on his arm in a visual representation of how far big parts of the tech world are down the right wing magamanosphere.

Hugh macLeod cartoon which reads GReAT IDEAS ALTER THe
POWeR BALANCe IN RELATIONSHIPS.
THATS WHY GREAT IDEAS ARe
INITIALLY resisted

Photo of the recently released The Chicago Manual of Style with what looks like an "adults only" 18 age rating on the cover.

Image showing user 1169 and certified Bluesky elder as one of the first 0.1% of users.

Celebration image showing I was user number #1,169 on Bluesky and one of the first 0.1% of users.

Music studio

A collection of links about famous podcaster Andrew Huberman's problematic method, character, mode of communication, and effect on his audience, in a Scrivener notes pane.

"To succeed in the postmodern information economy requires ingesting, retrieving, and processing vast amounts of information, and the professional class considers their competence in these areas as justified criteria for higher status." (W. David Marx, Status and Culture)

Mind map with four arms for each month of the remainder of the year and four topics for each month

Image saying 0 messages in email inbox

"In her book End of the Sentimental Journey, Sarah Vap writes, “I am against being against the sentimental.” This helps me. I cannot say that I am for the confessional. What I can say is that I am against being against the confessional." by Rachel Zucker, The Poetics of Wrongness)

Quote from the book Nutrivore by Sarah Ballantyne, Dietary diversity is typically defined as the total number of different food items in a diet. One way to measure dietary diversity is dietary species richness, the number of different species represented in the diet during a one-year period.

Text with a quote.

Even more strikingly, Smith notes that the ancient Egyptians, Iranians, Aztecs, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Indonesians, Greeks, or Hebrews did not possess indigenous words for religion in their respective languages. He suggests that it took the efforts of Euro-American scholars or missionaries, either alone or in concert with the locals, to produce new terminology to describe the “religion” of the non-European, in effect conjuring into being through a linguistic act a division between the culture’s religious and political worlds.

by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm from the book Metamodernism