Miles with Micro Archives - Jared Kuvent

Showing Up: The Cat Who Crossed the World

Jared Kuvent — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:29:35 +0000

Showing Up: The Cat Who Crossed the World

Most cats get one house. One couch, one window, one lap, a handful of people whose names they’d recognize if cats admitted to recognizing names. It is not a small life — no life with love in it is small — but it is a life the size of a living room.

Hobbes got more. He was born in Australia, adopted out of a shelter before his first birthday, and spent the next eleven years living the way most of us only claim we want to: two continents, an ocean crossing, multiple cities, an entire country traversed more than once, and a supporting cast of family, friends, and readers on both sides of the planet who knew him — actually knew him, by name, by personality, by reputation.

He died today, while I was still days from home, driving back from the other side of the country. I found out in a parking lot off an interstate exit in Louisiana. I’ll get to that. But that is not what this piece is about.

This is about the fullest life I’ve ever watched a cat live. I was lucky enough to be the person he lived it with.

Nacho

I found him online, the way you find things now. I had always wanted an orange cat. My foster brother had one when I was growing up, and that cat was awesome in the way certain childhood animals are permanently awesome, and somewhere in those years it settled in me as fact: someday I’d make friends with an orange cat of my own.

So I drove out to meet him. The shelter had three cats that day. A black longhair with a friendly, easy personality. A second guy who was bouncing off the walls with somewhere important to be. And then a small orange cat named Nacho, who let me pick him up and was instantly, completely comfortable in my arms — as if the interview were a formality and he’d already seen the paperwork.

I knew immediately. He came home with me that day.

Nacho became Hobbes, named for the best friend a boy ever drew — the tiger who was realer to one person than anyone else could see. Years later someone photographed him lounging beside a giant plush leopard, both of them in the same pose, and the name explained itself.

The world

The shelter was just outside Melbourne, and for his first years Hobbes was an Australian. He had a backyard with a wooden fence and long grass, and a little collar with a ladybug bell, and a neighborhood. My friends Mitch and Mike lived close by, and they were there within days of the adoption — from the beginning, Hobbes wasn’t just mine. He was family to people who had no obligation to love him and did anyway. Whenever I had to be somewhere else, I never once worried. You don’t worry about a cat who has his own people.

When my time in Australia ended, there was never a question. Hobbes crossed the Pacific Ocean — a shelter cat from outside Melbourne, arriving in America with more international travel behind him than most people I know. Then he kept going. City to city, coast to coast, apartment to apartment, until we landed in Maine. The furniture changed. The coastlines changed. Hobbes walked into each new place, performed a full inspection, decided where the couch ought to be, and made it home. Home, for eleven years, was not an address. It was wherever the orange cat was.

His people

Here is a thing I learned tonight, counting: Hobbes had more people than most cats get in nine lives.

There were my mom and my brother, who looked after him when I traveled in his early years — and who discovered a Hobbes I’d apparently never met. With me, he was not a lap cat. Never once. With them, I’m told, he spent hours at a time curled in a lap like it was his job. He had different rules for different people, and he never explained the system, and I respect it to this day.

There was Luke, my roommate in Maine — his second person, full stop. When I left for weeks at a time, “Hobbes duty” was the phrase, but it was never duty. The two of them had their own household rhythms, their own understandings. When I wrote, last fall, about the night Luke and I cleaned the apartment back into place, it was Hobbes who delivered the final verdict — pacing the freshly washed floor, inspecting our work, then settling down with a single approving flick of his tail. Nothing in that apartment was finished until Hobbes said it was finished.

And there were the readers. If you’ve followed this blog, you’ve been in a room with him whether you knew it or not. He was in the first post I ever published. He was asleep on the back of the couch at 11:47 PM in the piece where I introduced the projects I’ve been building — present, as he always was, for the making of everything. He had opinions about everything and offered them constantly, and some of them made it into print.

Tonight, within hours of the news, more than forty people had responded to his picture with love — from three countries, from every chapter of my life. Some of them met him in person. Some only ever met him in writing. All of them knew exactly who he was. That is not a normal amount of world for one cat to have touched. That was Hobbes.

The two of us

With me, he was not a lap cat, but he was mine in every other way a cat can be. I picked him up for kisses whenever I wanted, which was often. I grabbed him in bed for cuddles against his will — a crime he tolerated for eleven years without ever officially dropping the charges. He supervised everything I built from the back of the couch. He was the constant through every move, every country, every chapter, every version of my life through the entirety of my thirties. The one detail that never changed.

And between us, over eleven years, we built a pattern.

I left sometimes. A weekend, a month, seven weeks on the road. He stayed with Luke, or with family, always with his people. And every single time, I came back — and he met the coming-back with a ritual he invented himself: a few days of staying extra close. Following me from room to room. Sleeping nearer than usual. Making sure. In the first post I ever published on this blog, leaving for the first big road trip, I wrote that the hardest part was knowing he wouldn’t be *”sitting by the door when I come home at the end of each day.”* Seven weeks later I came home, and there was the door, and there was the ritual, and the pattern held.

It held for eleven years. Two continents. Eight crossings of this country. Not one exception.

The day

An hour and a half from Baton Rouge, my phone rang. It was Luke, and I knew from his voice before I knew from his words. He had found Hobbes in my room, unresponsive. Gone.

I heard myself saying no, no, no, and took the next exit, and stopped the car in a Burger King parking lot, and came apart in a place that had nothing to do with either of us. I pled — please, please, please — as if pleading could change it. There were no tears at first, only sobs. Then the tears came like Niagara Falls. For five minutes I couldn’t reach a single person I love. Then my mom called, and I got the words out on the second try — *”Hobbes died”* — and she comforted me until I could breathe, and then, because she and I have done hard days before and know how to triage, we made the arrangements together, over the phone, from a parking lot.

Had I known, I would never have taken this trip. Nothing on any road is worth it. That is simply the truth, and I won’t dress it as anything else.

But I will hold the other truth beside it: he was home when it happened. My room. The place he knew best, in the middle of the life we built, with his second person down the hall. He was not somewhere strange. He was exactly where Hobbes belonged.

The door

Tomorrow I get back in the car, because the only way home is through. In a few days I’ll park outside the apartment, carry my bags up the stairs, and walk through the door after the longest time away — the exact moment the two of us were best at. The surprise. The reunion. The extra-close days of making sure.

I don’t know what the apartment sounds like without him in it. I’m not looking forward to learning.

Eleven years, he kept his half of the pattern. The waiting, the greeting, the days of making sure — that half was always his, and he never missed. And I kept mine. Every trip, every country, every absence, I came back.

He knew I always come back.

He just couldn’t wait this time.

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The post Showing Up: The Cat Who Crossed the World appeared first on Jared Kuvent.

Showing Up: You Drove!?

Jared Kuvent — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:33:12 +0000

Showing Up: You Drove!?

All week at SIGGRAPH, the same conversation kept happening. Someone asks where I’m from. Maine. How long was the flight?

I drove.

You drove? From MAINE?

I did. It’s my eighth time crossing the country, and when people find out, they ask how I do it like I’m carrying secret knowledge. I’m writing this from the road home, so let me finally reveal the secret: I have almost run out of gas twice — once on my first crossing in 2015, and once on this one. My eighth. I forget sunscreen on day one of every single trip and rediscover my left arm at the hotel, medium-rare. I once lost two hours of my life in a laundromat because I didn’t check whether my hotel had laundry. Earlier this week I walked into my room, got comfortable, and realized I’d forgotten the ice. Again.

This is exactly why you should take my advice.

Everyone who is good at something got good the same way: by doing it badly, repeatedly, on purpose. That’s been the quiet argument of this whole series — the first dispatch was about asks that felt too small to matter, the second about walking up when it would be easier not to. Nobody involved was qualified at the start. The country looks uncrossable the same way the room looks unenterable, and it comes apart the same way: into small pieces, learned one mistake at a time.

So this dispatch is the manual — written by a man who has personally field-tested every error in it, so you don’t have to. Though you will anyway. That’s allowed.

The shape of a day

Six or seven hours of driving is my ceiling when I’m doing back-to-back days. Ten is my absolute maximum, and I don’t recommend it. I’ve done ten. I did ten this month. Somewhere around hour nine, your thoughts get replaced by a low hum, and the only remaining goal in your life is the next exit sign.

Stop at least every two hours. You’ll probably have to pee anyway.

Here is the single best stress-reduction technology I know on the road, and it costs nothing: pad your arrival estimate by an hour to an hour and a half. If you tell yourself you’ll arrive at six and hit traffic, every red brake light is a personal attack. If you told yourself seven-thirty, the same traffic is just scenery, and a longer-than-planned stop is just a nicer stop. It’s okay to relax. It’s part of the journey — arguably it is the journey, and the driving is what happens between relaxing.

A good stop has a bathroom, some shade, and a building cold enough to reset you. Since your trunk is fully stocked — we’re getting there — a stop is also lunch, whenever you decide it is.

As for planning: I map my legs a few days ahead, except when I don’t. On some crossings I haven’t known my next destination until I arrived at the last one. Both approaches work. Watch the weather for major storms along your route; I’m comfortable driving through bad weather, but if you’re not, re-routing or staying an extra day is not a failure. And if the interstate is boring you into a trance, pull off at the next exit and ask your GPS for a route that avoids highways for a while. It costs less time than you’d think, and the country you’ll see is the reason you didn’t fly.

The arrival ritual

Years of refinement have produced the following procedure, which I execute nightly with the precision of a launch sequence.

Get naked.
Put your clothes back on, because you forgot to get ice.
Now get naked.
Turn the thermostat to your preferred temperature. I prefer icicles forming on the windowsill.
Enjoy an ice-cold, hydrating drink. Something with electrolytes, preferably.
Do something that relaxes you. Give yourself at least an hour before dinner if you can.
Take a long shower and get the road gunk off of you.
Find a good, hot meal. I like local pubs and diners where I can sit at the bar and talk with the staff and locals.

I’ll spare you the photos of this section.

Step 2 is not a joke. Step 2 is the most consistently executed step of my travel career. Eight crossings, and the ice machine has never once been remembered on the first pass. At this point I consider the second trip down the hallway a form of light cardio.

Step 8 gets its own section later, because step 8 has gotten me into some of the best nights of my life.

The refrigerator in your trunk

The best two hundred dollars I’ve spent on any of these trips was a cooler. Not a cute picnic cooler — a fishing cooler, the kind that looks like it should have a marlin in it. You don’t need the six-hundred-dollar Yeti. But spend close to two hundred, and here’s what you get: a working refrigerator in your car. It fits in a trunk, takes about three bags of ice, and holds its cold for three to four days. It has a drain spout, which matters more than it sounds — you drain the meltwater and pour fresh ice on top without ever unpacking your food.

If that’s not in the budget, get the biggest cooler you can and plan on daily ice. The system still works; it just asks more of you.

Then add a small second cooler — an insulated lunchbox is perfect. Three or four cans and a scoop of ice from the big one. It rides up front, so cold hydration is always within arm’s reach and never requires pulling over. The big cooler is the warehouse. The little one is the storefront.

Don’t skimp on lunch

Road food wants you to fail. The default options out there are bad fast food and gas station sandwiches — expensive, gross, and somehow both at once. The cooler is how you opt out of the whole economy.

My lunch is ham, brie, and arugula with preserves on a fresh bakery roll. Yes, I stop at a grocery store every three days specifically to buy fresh bread. I spend eight hours a day in a car; lunch is allowed to be the good part. Make yours something you actually look forward to. This is not the place to economize on joy.

The rest of the inventory, refined over eight crossings: diced cheese, eaten by the Solo-cup handful. Hard-boiled eggs — great pre-made protein, with the caveat that they’ll turn on you fast if the cooler warms up. Cold diced melon, which on a hot desert afternoon is roughly a religious experience. Yogurt cups, granola to go with them, trail mix (the classic kind with the M&Ms — I don’t make the rules), a favorite salty thing, a favorite sweet thing, apples, energy bars. Nothing that melts. You will only make that mistake once, and it will be a chocolate-based mistake, and you’ll think about it every time you see the stain.

Drinks: I basically want a convenience store in my trunk. Milk, for lunch and for coffee. Gatorade or some electrolyte drink — sugar-free versions exist if you want them. Cold seltzer, which is somehow ten times more satisfying than the warm water bottle rolling around your footwell. Soda if you must, but know that regular soda is quietly dehydrating you while pretending to help — drink water alongside it. Simply Orange makes little four-pack juices that feel like a hotel breakfast you didn’t have to attend.

And coffee. If you’re a coffee snob, most big grocery stores stock at least one acceptable bottled cold brew. If you’re a serious coffee snob, we need to talk about mason jars. Take two half-gallon jars. Grind a pound of coffee medium-coarse, split it between them, fill with water. Steep 24 hours for nice, 48 for serious — past 48, keep it cold. Filter through cheesecloth into clean jars. You now have better coffee in your trunk than most of the towns you’re driving through, and you made it in a parking lot. Insulated mugs elevate the whole operation.

The part I hope you never need

I’m going to set the jokes down for a minute.

Just east of Indio, California, on one of my crossings, the car in front of me hit an embankment. It flipped. A tire came off and flew. There was no warning — one second of ordinary highway, then a car in the air. I was driving defensively, with real following distance, and that’s the only reason I wasn’t part of it. The driver, remarkably, was okay. Traffic stopped. I put on my hazards, pulled to the side, and checked on him.

I had no emergency gear with me that day. Flares could have diverted traffic around the scene. A first aid kit would have mattered if he’d been hurt. A fire extinguisher — cars that flip sometimes burn. I carry all of it now, and here’s the part I want you to hold onto: emergency gear is not just for you. It’s for whoever’s accident you happen to be standing next to, because things happen even to good drivers.

What rides with me now: a first aid kit. Road flares or LED flares. A car fire extinguisher. A safety hammer for breaking glass, kept within arm’s reach in a holster — because in the moment you need it, it cannot be somewhere in the back seat, and an unholstered hammer in a crash becomes a projectile. And water: four gallons minimum, more with passengers. If you break down in 120-degree heat, that water is the whole game. I’ve also handed it out the window to stranded drivers who needed it more than I did.

One absolute never: never carry gasoline inside your car. The fumes can cause an explosion. There’s no trip where that’s worth it.

The two mistakes I see first-timers make are the two this section and the next exist to prevent: not enough water, and running out of gas.

Gas

About that.

My first crossing, I watched the range readout count down — thirty miles, twenty, ten — while the world offered nothing but horizon. When a gas station finally appeared, it was on the other side of the highway, and the U-turn I took to reach it was not, in the strictest legal sense, a turn that exists. I rolled up to the pump showing zero. Not “low.” Zero.

You’d think that lesson would hold. This month — crossing number eight, the one where I’m the guy writing the manual — I did it again. Not the U-turn; I’ve grown. But the zero. It is so much easier to do than you think.

So, the rules I mostly follow: always fill the tank completely. In populated areas, start looking for your next station at thirty miles of range. On long, desolate stretches — and there are interstate stretches where stations simply stop existing — start planning eighty to a hundred miles before empty. The gauge is not a dare.

On price: gas costs what it costs where you are. I look for something reasonable, but I pick reputable stations first, and they usually have the best prices anyway. The big travel stops are your friends. Love’s is a great trucker stop with genuinely clean showers — remember that detail; it matters in the camping section. Pilot and QuickTrip are solid. Bigger stations mean cleaner bathrooms, friendlier staff, real parking, and knowing what you’re walking into. But when the options thin out, don’t fret: a crappy, tiny gas station will get you everything you need, as long as it has a bathroom.

Under $120 a night

I try to book hotels in advance. The road has other ideas — see above about not knowing tomorrow’s destination until today. Fortunately, booking along the way is usually easy, as long as you don’t expect to sleep in a major metro.

My target is under $120 a night. The brands that have earned my loyalty: Holiday Inn Express, Fairfield, Courtyard, La Quinta. Best Western is hit and miss. I stopped staying at Days Inn the night I met a cockroach the size of my hand in the bathroom. We did not exchange information.

If you’re staying somewhere more than a night, check whether the hotel has laundry before you book. I did not do this recently, which is how I came to spend two hours of my Los Angeles trip watching my clothes go in circles when I could have been doing literally anything else in Los Angeles.

Three packing rules that keep the nightly stops sane:

One trip in, one trip out. You’re at this hotel for twelve to fifteen hours. One bag, one suitcase, optional backpack. Before going up, grab a few cold drinks and snacks from the trunk so you’re not going back down. If travel makes you feel disorganized, this rule is the cure.

Compartmentalize everything. A dopp kit you can toss onto the bathroom counter and be done. Soap in a ziploc if you bring your own. Clothes in the suitcase, essentials in the laptop bag, snacks in their own bag, cups and silverware in another — and a dedicated trash bag for dirty clothes, so the worn things never mingle with the clean ones. Future-you, packing at 7 a.m., will be grateful.

Prepare your cockpit. You’re spending six-plus hours in one seat, so decide what belongs within reach — for me: the small cooler, the snack bag, the iced coffee, the sunscreen — and figure out before you’re driving how you’ll grab each thing safely.

The road

Rules of conduct, learned the long way.

Let it go. People out there are, let’s say, jerks sometimes. You’ll meet them across all three thousand miles, and engaging makes every one of them worse. The goal isn’t to win. Nobody wins the interstate.

Don’t speed. You won’t arrive meaningfully sooner, you’re driving dangerously, and eventually the math catches you — no app, map, or radar detector changes that. If you want a spirited drive, that’s what backroads are for, and they’re more fun than the interstate anyway.

Use cruise control; your foot has done nothing wrong and deserves the break. Watch your tire pressure. Keep the washer fluid full — it’s trivial right up until the moment a truck baptizes your windshield and it’s the most important fluid you own.

Sunscreen. Every trip, day one, I forget it. Every trip, day one evening, I meet my left arm: medium-rare. You would think eight crossings would fix this. The evidence says no. Learn from me anyway: cover everything that catches light, including your legs, which you will forget about because they feel like they’re indoors. Polarized sunglasses. And aloe at night and in the morning — even without a burn, you’re getting more sun than you think, and your skin deserves the apology.

My car is a Mazda CX-30 Turbo, and it has some of what makes long crossings easier. The full wishlist, for anyone choosing a road-trip car: radar-assisted cruise control (dramatically less tiring), lane-keep assist (same), heated seats and steering wheel (a luxury that stops being one the first cold morning), and a moonroof. The moonroof is technically optional. Morale-wise, it is not.

The people along the way

When I plan a route, I think about who I know along it and pin those places as stops. Usually that’s lunch with a friend. If I’m in their town for the night, it becomes dinner, or an arcade, or drinks. Sometimes people reach out when they see I’m passing through; sometimes I’m the one reaching out of the blue. And sometimes a friend hosts the whole night — on this leg, MK Haley is graciously putting me up in Austin.

But the people layer isn’t limited to people you already know. One crossing, I stopped for dinner at a small-town pub — at the bar, per the ritual. The only people in the place were the wait staff and the bartender. By the end of the meal I knew everyone by name. By the end of the night, we had all gone out together to the bar-arcade down the street, and I’d been briefed on the town gossip like a visiting official. It remains one of the best nights I’ve had on any road.

If you read the last dispatch, you’ll recognize the move. Walk up, say something true, want nothing. It works at a conference of fourteen thousand people, and it works at a pub with a staff of four. The country is full of people who will talk to you. Most travelers never find out.

What it costs

Real numbers, because everyone asks and nobody publishes them. My round trip — Maine to LA and back — cost about $2,000: gas, maintenance, and hotels. Food isn’t in that number, because food is the cost that balloons fastest if you let it, which is why the cooler got its own section.

For comparison: flying to LA in summer and renting a car there would have run me over $1,500. So the drive cost roughly $500 more. That $500 bought me the country twice, a week of thinking time, every person in the section above, and a trunk full of brie. Driving is way more fun.

And if $2,000 is out of reach, you can delete the biggest line item entirely.

Without hotels

Camping removes lodging — the single largest cost of the trip. If your budget is limited and your deadline is soft, this is the way. Your daily costs drop to gas and groceries.

The gear: tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, camping pillow if you’re fancy, a small camping stove, a pot, something to scrub the pot, a spatula, LED lanterns with spare batteries, a headlamp. Extra water beyond your normal supply — you’ll be washing dishes and yourself. Consider a five-gallon water jug with a spout, the kind REI or L.L. Bean sells: fill it with tap water, stand it in your trunk, and the back of your car becomes a mini sink. I’ve showered out of mine.

Better still: a camping shower. This is a black bag with a spout. You fill it with water and leave it in the sun, and the material warms the water all day. Hang it from a tree branch, and tomorrow morning there’s a warm shower waiting for you in the middle of nowhere. Civilization, it turns out, is negotiable.

Where to camp free: west of the Mississippi, the land opens up, and a lot of it is public. The reading list is short — Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, State Forests, Wildlife Management Areas. These unlock free, primitive campsites. Primitive means primitive: open land, no plots, no toilets, no entrance. Sometimes reaching your spot means driving across grass or through trees — which comes with its own rule: do not push your car through terrain it can’t reasonably handle. Stuck on a backroad with no cell service is not the kind of adventure this essay endorses. And know that not even all BLM land is free to use — some is leased out for forestry or agriculture — so check the maps before you commit.

Primitive camping is some of the most beautiful camping there is. I prefer it to organized campsites. East of the Mississippi the land gets dense and open country gets scarce; look for backroad tent sites there, and skip anything advertising RV camping — RV camping and tent camping are different worlds, and you want the quiet one.

Two honest warnings. First: camping makes you kinda gross, pretty quickly, and you’ll need a real shower sooner than you think. Don’t punish your skin by skipping it — those clean Love’s showers exist for exactly this, and diaper wipes are a great freshen-up in a pinch. Second: don’t camp on private land. You don’t know the owner, and the best-case outcome of being found is an extremely awkward conversation, with police as the runner-up. I can add this to my list of field-tested errors: I did it exactly once, in a pinch, at dusk, when there was nothing else. I set the tent up close to the car, woke at six, packed, and was gone before the coffee. No stove, no shower, no lingering. It’s not worth the sleep you won’t get.

Home

I’m about a week out from Maine now. The big cooler needs more ice — assuming I remember to buy the ice, which history suggests is a coin flip.

Eight crossings in, I still get something wrong every time. This trip it was the gas again, and the sunscreen again, and the laundromat. Next trip it’ll be something new; I look forward to finding out what. That’s the actual manual, underneath all the tips about coolers and flares and brie: you do not have to be good at this to do it. You just have to leave — and be willing to be bad at it in a moving vehicle until, seven crossings later, people at conferences start asking you how.

One dispatch left. It comes from Maine, once the photographs are delivered and the miles have had a chance to settle.

Tonight, somewhere ahead of me, there’s a hotel room with a thermostat waiting to be set to icicle. The ritual will run again. Step one: get naked.

Step two — you already know step two.

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Showing Up: Most People Didn’t

Jared Kuvent — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 05:53:39 +0000

Showing Up: Most People Didn't

The Electronic Theatre is SIGGRAPH’s animation festival — the centerpiece screening of the year, two hours of the best animated shorts in the world, in the biggest room the conference has. Monday night it was full. The four awards were announced at the top of the night: Best in Show, Jury’s Choice, Student Film, Community Choice. Then the lights went down and we watched.

The Jury’s Choice belonged to a film about a man who finds an abandoned baby in a box — and the couple who fights to keep him. An hour into the program, it took me apart. It hit closer to my own life than the filmmakers could have known. I’ll get to that.

When the last film ended and the lights came up, the room did what rooms do: a thousand people stood, gathered their bags, and drained toward the exits at the back. I was working — photographing the crowd as it left, then slipping backstage for a few last frames. When I came back out, the theater was nearly empty. And at the front of the room, in almost exactly the spot the whole night had been pointed at, stood the couple who made that film — holding their award, talking with the Electronic Theatre chair and a few members of the crew. Their young son sat in the front row with an iPad.

A thousand people had just watched their film. The room had emptied in the other direction. Almost nobody came forward.

I walked up.

I congratulated Mikki Rose, the Electronic Theatre chair, on an outstanding show — because it was one, and because she made it. Then I turned to the couple, and I didn’t have a plan. I told them their film was extraordinary and what it had meant to me, and that I was glad they made it. We talked. I took their photograph — the two of them holding the award. I gave them my card and promised to send the picture. They invited me to coffee before the week ends.

None of it would have happened if I hadn’t walked up. Most people didn’t.

This dispatch is about networking. I know — the word makes people’s skin crawl. It conjures elevator pitches and business cards thrust into palms, the person at the mixer scanning over your shoulder for someone more useful. Here is what a week at SIGGRAPH has been teaching me: none of the connections that mattered came from anything that looked like that. Not one. What worked, every time, was something that wouldn’t be called networking by anyone watching it happen.

This is the second dispatch in a four-part series written from inside this trip. The first — about how one message to an old friend became an archive role, a photographer credential, and a drive across the country — went out the night before the conference opened. Since then, more than two thousand people have read it, and something has been happening that I didn’t anticipate: people at the conference keep stopping me in the halls to tell me they read it, and what it meant to them. I wrote an essay about walking up to people. Now people are walking up to me.

Which is, it turns out, exactly how this works.

Let me show you the week.

The film

The film deserves more than the one line I gave it. A man discovers a baby abandoned in an alleyway, in a box. He brings the child home to his partner. They are a same-sex couple, and the film follows what it costs them to keep the child — the ridicule over the baby having no mother, and eventually a courtroom: a judge rendered larger than life behind a massive gavel, and a jury of whispering silhouettes, strange forms leaning into each other like the room is keeping a secret. In the end, the couple wins custody. It is based on the true story of a real couple. It was made in a blend of CG and stop motion, in an art style unlike anything else in the program.

I was adopted. I watched that courtroom decide whether a child gets to keep his family, in a room of a thousand people, and felt it somewhere most of the room could not have. So when I stood in front of the filmmakers an hour later, that is what I led with — not who I was, not what I do at the conference. What their film meant to me. It happened to be the truth, and they could tell.

They are from Brazil and live in Portugal. This is their first SIGGRAPH. When I asked how they found their way here, the husband told me he had never heard of the conference — someone mentioned it, he looked into it, and thought their film might be a fit. They submitted to a festival they didn’t know. Now they were holding a jury award from a conference accredited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the kind of place where the Best in Show winner becomes eligible for Oscar consideration. They arrived not knowing what SIGGRAPH was. They are leaving as award-winning filmmakers.

Notice what actually happened at the front of that theater, because it is this essay in miniature. The conversation opened with their work, not mine. The card came at the end, attached to a promise — the photograph I owed them. The coffee invitation came from them. Nothing about it resembled what people picture when they hear the word networking. And it worked better than anything that does.

The handshake

Tuesday morning, walking into the building, I passed a legend walking out.

An older gentleman with a long white beard — slightly like a wizard, in the best possible way. I read the badge. Jim Blinn. If you know computer graphics, you know the name; a remarkable share of what makes rendered images possible traces through his work. I was starstruck, and he noticed me looking.

I stopped and kept it simple. I called him “Mr. Blinn” — a formality I don’t normally reach for, and it felt right for someone so central to the field. I told him it was a pleasure, that we had crossed paths once at the 2008 conference, and that I hoped he enjoyed the week. He shook my hand. He looked me in the eye. I thanked him, and we went our separate ways.

Nothing in particular will come of it — and that’s fine. It was never for something. Not every introduction is an investment. Some are just gratitude: a thank-you to someone who helped build the road everyone in this building walks on. If I see him again in the halls, I’ll wave. Maybe that becomes a conversation. Maybe it doesn’t.

If networking only counts when it leads somewhere, that handshake was worthless. It was one of the best moments of my week.

The long way

Some walk-ups take thirty seconds. Some take weeks.

Chris Redmann is the conference chair of SIGGRAPH 2026 — the person at the top of the volunteer structure that makes this entire event happen. I met him this week, and he told me he’d love to sit down for a chat. I intend to take him up on it.

From the outside, that could look like access. It wasn’t. It was the end of a long, slow introduction. I connected with Chris on LinkedIn weeks before the conference. On Saturday, he stood in the group photo I was honored to take of the conference chairs and committees. He has seen me all week — camera up, working, everywhere. By the time I introduced myself, most of the introduction had already happened. Chris wasn’t responding to what I said. He was responding to what he’d seen.

There’s an old line about digging your well before you’re thirsty. This is what it looks like in practice. Not a pitch delivered at the right moment — a body of evidence, accumulated before any moment arrives. And the evidence has to be real. I am not holding a camera this week as a networking tactic. I’m holding it because this work matters to me and I wanted to do it well. That’s what makes it work. People can tell the difference between someone building a reputation and someone performing one.

The well

The oldest relationships in this story never started as asks either.

Dana Plepys and I found each other in the art gallery this week. We hadn’t seen each other in about ten years, and it was such a treat — she is a dear friend and has done so much for me, including vouching for me with the History and Archive team. It was Dana I messaged back in the spring, a catching-up note with an honest question inside it. That note is the reason any of this exists.

Bonnie, who leads the archive team, made it official this week in the way institutions do: a flag for my badge, and a stack of printed business cards. ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive. My name on the back. I keep looking at them.

Bonnie, I’ve learned, is retired — and spends more than sixty hours a week on the archive. Read that again. Sixty hours, retired, keeping a field’s memory alive. That is not a budget line or a job description. That is a person who decided the past matters and shows up for it every single week.

Ernest is here too — my friend and former Nickelodeon boss, now at DreamWorks. We’ve been trading messages on WhatsApp all week and meeting up wherever the schedule allows. Twenty years of friendship, still compounding.

And then there are these dispatches. I wrote the first one as an essay, not an outreach strategy. But two thousand readers later, with people stopping me in the halls to talk about it, I’ve realized the writing belongs in this story too. Sharing what you’ve learned, publicly, is digging the well while giving back — you offer something real, and some of the people it reaches decide to walk up to you.

Why most people don’t

So why did a thousand people file past two award winners on Monday night?

Not rudeness. Not even shyness, exactly. I think most people believe walking up requires something they don’t have — a reason, a pitch, a status, an opening line worthy of the moment. They’re waiting until they have something to say. But the couple at the front of that room didn’t need anyone’s pitch. A single true sentence — your film meant something to me — was worth more than every elevator speech in the building.

The other thing that stops people is the opposite problem: they see the status instead of the person. A fan leads with someone’s fame — and fame is a wall, because the famous person has heard every version of it. When you idolize someone, you’re actually talking about yourself: your awe, your nerves, your need for the moment to go well. The alternative is to find the person inside the role. Listen to their story. Find what’s actually shared between you — not “what inspires you,” not “how did you get your start,” but the real thing, the specific thing. Lead with that.

And never lead with the ask. The moment you open with what you want — a job, an introduction, a favor — you’ve changed the context of the entire conversation. It stops being an introduction and becomes a transaction, and people feel the shift instantly. The line between networking and desperation is exactly there.

Here is the permission slip most people never realize they’re holding: a conference is the one room where walking up is the entire point. Chris Redmann comes to be met. So does Jim Blinn. So does everyone with a badge, from the students checking yours at the door to the legends George Lucas used to wander these halls among. Nobody here thinks a stranger saying something true is an interruption. It’s what the building is for.

The cost

I want to be honest about what this week takes, because leaving it out would make all of this sound easier than it is.

Monday ran seventeen hours by the time the evening’s photos were processed. I went to bed at two and got up at six. I’ve been at the convention center since Saturday, and I am running on fumes — and not only because of the schedule. My body makes weeks like this cost more than they look like they should. I would not trade this week for anything. Both of those things are true at once.

Every walk-up in this dispatch happened tired. That’s worth saying, because showing up isn’t a mood that arrives when you’re rested and confident. Some days it’s just a decision.

The other side of the table

The student volunteers are the backbone of this conference. Some of the brightest students in the world apply for the program — they check badges, direct traffic, answer questions, and hold the whole event together, the way they have for decades. I was one of them here, nineteen years ago.

This week, one of them walked up to me.

He was curious about archiving and CG pipeline work — genuinely curious, the real kind. I told him about the Discovery project I developed in Australia: the data structures, the way the system held a community’s cultural material. I showed him screenshots. He was in awe — and I made sure to tell him the part that matters: nothing about that work is out of his reach. There is no credential wall between him and building things like it. He has my card. He says he’ll be in touch, and I believe him.

Notice: his approach worked on me exactly the way mine worked on the filmmakers. No pitch. No angle. Just real interest, plainly expressed. The method is symmetrical — it works at every level, in both directions, on students and legends and everyone in between.

And somewhere in that conversation I understood that my role here has quietly flipped. Nineteen years ago, people at this conference welcomed me, encouraged me, told me I belonged in rooms that felt too big. Now I’m the one saying it — to a student volunteer with his whole career ahead of him, to two filmmakers holding their first award at a conference they’d never heard of a year ago. The welcome I got is mine to give now.

Two more days

The conference ends Thursday. The room that filled on Sunday will empty for good, and everyone in it will scatter back across the world.

What a week like this leaves behind isn’t the sessions. It’s the sentences said to strangers — the thank-you at the doorway, the compliment at the front of an emptied theater, the true thing offered with no ask attached. Some of those sentences go nowhere, and were still worth saying. Some of them turn into coffee, or a sit-down with a conference chair, or a student’s email that arrives months from now. You don’t get to know which is which in advance. You only get to decide whether to walk up.

Most people didn’t.

Tonight, before I sleep, I owe two filmmakers a photograph. That’s the other half of walking up that nobody talks about — the small promise you made in the moment, kept afterward, when you’re exhausted and it would be easy to let it slide. The picture goes out tonight.

Two more days. The room is still full.

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Showing Up: Miles to SIGGRAPH

Jared Kuvent — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:08:42 +0000

Showing Up: Miles to SIGGRAPH

The day before

The convention center is ready. I spent part of today walking through it with a camera — up the escalators under a giant screen welcoming me to Los Angeles, past registration counters that are lit and staffed and waiting for no one, past rows of chairs lined up in front of empty stages. Out on the exhibition floor, the last booths are still going up around the crews building them. Tomorrow morning, SIGGRAPH — the biggest computer graphics conference in the world — opens its doors, and this building fills with thousands of people from every corner of the field. Today it is quiet.

Today, the whole place is potential energy.

I was here today because I had work to do. This morning I photographed the conference chairs and committees — the volunteer leadership of the entire event, gathered in one place for an inaugural group portrait. My first frames of the week. I am one of the conference photographers this year, and this is the biggest event I have ever photographed. And this afternoon, several boxes that have been riding in my car since Ohio finally came out of the back seat and found their home here.

Four months ago, none of this existed. No assignment. No boxes. No badge with my name on it. I had not been to SIGGRAPH in eighteen years.

The whole thing started with a message.

The message

In the spring, I wrote to an old friend. Dana Plepys ran the SIGGRAPH Video Review for years, spent a four-decade career at a notable visualization lab, and now consults for SIGGRAPH on its history and archives. We had fallen out of touch, so most of the message was the ordinary kind of catching up — how have you been, what are you up to. Then the part I actually wanted to ask: what is SIGGRAPH doing with its archive, especially the animation collection, and how could that material reach more people?

The question had been sitting with me for months. While researching an essay earlier this year, I ended up deep in the history section of SIGGRAPH’s website and was struck by how much is there — decades of records, carefully kept, rich with metadata. My master’s work focused on digital archives and making cultural material accessible. Reading through it all, I kept thinking: more people should be able to find this. It felt like a place I could be useful.

So I asked.

Dana wrote back. The catching up turned into a conversation, and the conversation turned into an introduction to Bonnie, who leads the history and archives team. I offered what I could bring. Bonnie said yes.

That yes grew. A few weeks later I was planning a cross-country drive with a stop in Ohio, at Bowling Green State University, where much of the physical archive lives. I stood in the room that holds it — shelves of a field’s institutional memory, older than my whole career. Then boxes of it were loaded into my car, and I drove them west.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a second chain started. MK Haley, a longtime conference chair, mentioned that SIGGRAPH was looking for photographers this year and pointed me toward the person who had put out the call. I sent my portfolio. He passed me to Morgan, who coordinates the photography team. A few days of correspondence later, I was on it.

Which is how, this morning, I found myself standing in front of the assembled leadership of the conference, camera raised, asking them to look at me.

None of the steps felt big while they were happening. A message. A reply. An introduction. A portfolio. Each one was small enough to skip — and each one, on its own, would have amounted to nothing. Stacked together, they became a role on the archive team, a media credential, and a car full of a field’s history delivered to its biggest annual gathering. That is the part I keep turning over. The asks were small. What they became was not.

San Diego, 2007

Standing in the empty halls today, I kept having the feeling that I had been in this exact moment before. Not this building — this evening. The one right before.

The first time I attended SIGGRAPH, I was twenty-one. San Diego, 2007. I was a student volunteer — a program that trades a conference pass for working shifts, with hundreds of volunteers from around the world. It was a well-run machine even then: forums where we met before the conference, an orientation, mixers. I had every reason to feel prepared. I still spent my first hours on the floor certain there had been an administrative error, that everyone around me knew something I didn’t.

They didn’t. Everyone in that building was feeling some version of the same thing at different volumes.

That week rearranged my life. The career that followed — Nickelodeon, eventually, and everything after — traces back to it, along with friendships that are still active nearly two decades later. And the thing is, the application to that program had been its own small ask. A form, filled out by a twenty-one-year-old, with no idea what it would become. You never know at the time. That is what makes the pattern hard to trust and worth trusting anyway.

Tomorrow morning, somewhere in the lines at those counters, there will be students picking up their first badge — walking into a building that feels too big for them, carrying some version of the administrative-error feeling. Some of the small asks they make this week will still be unfolding in 2045. None of us will know which ones.

About this series

A note on where this piece sits. This blog began as a travel blog, became the record of building a life in Maine, and this year turned into essays about the animation industry — a series called Losing Each Other, about generative AI and the people it is dividing. That series is on pause; two more essays are drafted and will land after this trip. Showing Up is something different: dispatches written from inside events as they happen, before I know what they mean. This is the first. The next ones will come as the week allows — during the conference if I can manage it, from the road home, and from Maine once the photographs are delivered and the dust has settled.

Tomorrow

When I left the building today, the big SIGGRAPH sign was standing in the middle of the empty lobby, lit and waiting. That is the picture at the top of this post.

Tomorrow the doors open. The counters get their lines. The stages get their speakers. The quiet I photographed today disappears under thousands of conversations and does not come back until Thursday. Somewhere inside all of it is everything this week is going to turn into — the people I have not met yet, the pictures I have not taken, the outcomes I cannot see from here. All of it is already in the building, the same way the conference was already in those empty rooms today.

Every big thing in this building started small. A message. An application. A question somebody almost didn’t ask.

Tomorrow the room fills.

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