Netflix is a reminder that you can always change direction in life

Netflix didn’t always do what it does now. As of writing, Netflix is the world’s largest entertainment platform, excluding user generated content platforms like YouTube. Without revealing my age, I remember when Netflix mailed DVDs through one’s letterbox - yes, that means I am old enough to remember DVDs, and mail, and letterboxes (hardly any of my Amazon packages can fit through one these days). Netflix is a constant reminder that one can change completely, ride out the ridicule of the haters and emerge the other side victorious, and so successful that you can buy out your competitors, as well as enjoying the schadenfreude of watching your old competitors go out of business. In the startup world, it is a concept called ‘pivoting’, and it mostly applies to startups because much like Blockbuster, a lot of big companies are like oil tankers, taking forever to change direction. Netflix is the exception that proves the rule, but it provides lessons that we should all take to heart and attempt to apply to our own lives.

It teaches us to take a risk on the future. Famously, when Netflix first launched its streaming service, internet connections were so poor that the idea of streaming TV seemed insane. These were the days of dial up internet, when you had to make a choice between a good internet connection and a functioning phone line. Broadband was available, but much like colour televisions, it hadn’t become mainstream enough to build a business around online streaming yet. To this day, good internet connection is not exactly universal, but it is very common. That was the risk Reed Hastings and his team had to take, to move in the direction of online streaming before the technology was even available. Today, adopting new technological infrastructure had become so common that there is a general backlash against tech companies overpromising and under-delivering. It’s the inevitable over-correction in light of the success of all these companies that succeeded by making a bet on future infrastructure, like homes and airports that are built before there are even roads and people to justify the investment.

5G has been the core of much overpromising, with a long list of companies making the bet but the timing not being quite right. Tech journalists mock these companies and the smartphones that are providing a limited connection to the future. In a way, we could read the bet that these companies are making as the same one that Netflix made, which eventually proved the doubters wrong. It could be that 5G is just not that useful to everyone - after all, some people are still looking for reliable 4G. The direction does trend towards 5G becoming the infrastructure of the future, and companies would be smart to start pivoting. More importantly, companies need to be able to hold their nerve, because the naysayers are right up until the moment they’re not, and when they are proven wrong, it’s not like they could be reprimanded for their doubt, so there’s actually very little satisfaction for them to be proven wrong. Instead, all the satisfaction of betting on the future and changing one’s direction is in being successful in the end, rather than being right.

Life is the same, make the change and take the risk and you’re going to get your fair share of backlash, but as long as things are trending in your favour, the bet will pay off as some point and you will never look back - others certainly won’t. History is written by the victors, after all. No one thinks of Netflix as a video rental company, as it once was, and those who remember Blockbuster will remember it’s failure with a heavy dose of rose-tinted nostalgia, if it is remembered at all, but in the end, only the operating system of our television sets remain, and that is Netflix: the streaming platform, the largest entertainment company in the world, and the only thing keeping us sane during this lockdown.

Still refusing to watch Tiger King...

So I’ve tried my best not to watch Tiger King on Netflix, and as of writing I still haven’t watched it, but I now know almost everything I need to know about it. I know all about Joe Exotic, all about his husbands, all about THE husband, yes, I know all about Carole Baskin, I’ve seen the memes and I’m considering making my own. I know about the music - I’ve watched the music videos and I loved it. But I’ll like to emphasise that I still haven’t seen it, and as you can tell, I probably don’t need to at this point. It’s probably an indictment of modern media culture that I already know everything about a show that I have not watched or have any intention to watch.

Right now, Netflix is shoving Tiger King in my face, prominently displaying it and recommending it, and still I refuse to watch it. I consider it a form of protest, because Netflix needs to know this, as futile as it is, that Tiger King is not good content. It’s interesting, diverting, sure, but it is not something around which to build programming. What do I mean? There is an algorithm that helps the big wigs at Netflix decide what to buy and to commission. Thanks to the success of Tiger King, be prepared for an avalanche of true crime documentaries about homosexual polygamists and their feuds with other keepers of exotic animals. I look forward to Gorilla Queen and Pangolin Prince, coming in just a few weeks.

This is why I cannot in conscience watch Tiger King because I do not want to add to its viewing figures and aid the algorithm in regurgitating versions of the same show. At this rate, Netflix might as well rebrand itself as the streaming platform for true crime content, with the sheer amount of the stuff on the platform. I’m not watching Too Hot to Handle, either, but I would love to see what the algorithm produces.

On Earth Day 2020, things are not looking good

To no one’s surprise, Earth is not doing so well on Earth Day in 2020. Things are not looking up anytime soon, and there is no co-ordinated action to fix it. As custodians of this planet, we’ve truly f-ed this up. Whilst Elon Musk is looking to colonise Mars, and it has never been more apparent that we actually do need a backup, the cast majority of us are stuck with this one planet. What can we do to fix the mess? We know what we need to do, but it will required everyone to be less selfish, consume less, and think about the greater good of the planet. None of these things will be done in the foreseeable future, and there is no political will great enough to push through measures that work. The only thing that Earth can do is to take things into its own hands and stop humanity from consuming at the same rate as they were before and to stop pumping toxic fumes into the atmosphere and polluting its waterways. None of this is to say that the current crisis is good for the planet, but there is no way we can continue to live the way we did in the second half of last century and the beginning decades of this century. As the Native American saying goes:

“When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.”

4/20 and the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme

So today is the day that the UK government is releasing details on their job retention scheme for furloughed employees. Millions of employers will begin to claim for their employee’s wages. It also happens to be 20th April, or 4/20 in America. I’ve always said that history has a sense of irony, or likes to create coincidence, or something to that effect. The fact that a scheme to get employers to continue paying employees to stay home and do nothing that was announced in March finally comes online on 4/20 is just a wonderful aligning of the planets in my opinion. So it is, then, on this day, employers will be making claims on gov.uk while their employees should definitely just stay home, and stay safe, and for those who partake in the recreational ingestion of that herb - celebrate 4/20 and put on some Bob Marley. Even for those not in the UK, it’s five o’clock somewhere in the world.

YouTubers will be one of the few to survive this crisis Pt. I

We used to laugh at YouTubers. As recently as two years ago, people looked down on people making content in their own homes with a makeshift home studio setup. People moving their content to an online platform was something that we didn’t see as much value in a few years ago. Now it all seems to be a wise move. Moving to YouTube allowed many of these content creators to better engage with their audience and own that relationship. Traditional media scoffed at first and YouTubers continued to be looked down upon by the former, but this is changing slowly, and will only be accelerated by this crisis. Old media is dying, and those who sweated blood and tears trying to make it own their and divorce themselves from their employers in old media will reap the rewards of all that work in the future. Google, as a platform has provided many content creators with a way to own the relationship with their audience, but it remains precarious. A lot of content has been demonetised and some creators have even been de-platformed, especially for producing political content. The money will not flow forever, and for some, the money has already dried up. This has led many creators to more lucrative sources of monetisation such as Patreon, that allows the audience to directly fund the creator, which again helps to bypass the platform itself. YouTube will prove as suffocating a platform as their former employers, so some YouTubers are already departing the platform, and the lucky ones will be able to take their audience with them.

The Sun has set on the Construction Industry - Part I

In the story of Dune, there is a spice called Melange that is the most valuable substance in the universe. Several things throughout history can serve as inspiration for such a substance, something that for whatever reason, people in a certain period of time treasured above all else. Some of these were useful commodities, like oil, some were luxuries, like tea and sugar. Others were just plain stupid because they were entirely speculative, such as tulips In these unprecedented times and in preparation for the painful recession to come, it is important for us to ponder what our version of the tulip fever has been, and what substance or thing will become the spice for the coming decade. We have always known that there was a real estate bubble; property could only go up, after all land feels very much like oil, in that it is always useful, and will always go up in value. This analysis is wrong, of course, on both counts. Property’s price, like oil, is driven almost entirely by supply and demand, and it is not always useful. In London today, we arguably have enough urban fabric as we will ever need, it just needs pruning. This is demonstrated by the fact that we didn’t even need to ‘build’ a brand new NHS Nightingale hospital from scratch, we had a huge convention centre to convert into a hospital, and there are numerous other convention centres in London, not that there are any trade shows at the moment. If demand for new buildings go down, and it WILL go down, there is no argument about it, then the price of property, like oil, falls because supply exceeds demand. New and even existing buildings fail to be useful anymore, as we have all shown during the lockdown. The sun has set on the property boom, and will only see contraction in the future. A lot of people simply did not need a separate building to work in, they could do with working from home, permanently. This is a development in the property sector and the wider construction industry that I will be exploring more in the future, so watch this space. For now, we should look out for the spice of the foreseeable future.

Happy Easter, do not let the perfectionist in you paralyse you

Happy Easter, everyone! In these strange times a lot of us are trying to be more productive. We all get those days when we experience some kind of block on our productivity. It’s so important to eliminate as many of those obstacles as possible. If there was an additional step to writing this content right here, I would probably not finish it. The perfectionist in me has a paralysing effect on my ability to be production, to write, to create content. The thing I have to train myself to do is to connect my head straight to my hands so the work flows straight onto the page. I am sure I am not the only one. We all have mental gatekeepers that prevent us from taking certain actions, and if you are a content creator, all that doubt it creates for you about the quality of your content will probably lead you to spending days or weeks making sure that you have something that is in the perfect condition, only for that content to not connect with the audience, which unfortunately is an important metric at the end of the day. Do not punish yourself for the perceived lack of quality and instead understand the basic truth that the audience you are trying to connect with is a a fickle lot and you never truly know what connects - it all ends up being a numbers game in the end. You have to think about the barriers that are stopping you from doing what you want to do, right now, regardless of the perceived low quality of your content. There are reasons why some Tech YouTubers and podcasters use the same equipment they used five years ago. By keeping the production value low, the quality of the product is diminished but you add spontaneity, and more importantly, you never fail to produce.

Learning what to learn is just as important

There are always new things you can learn, or in most cases, we learn variations of what we already know, but we have fallen behind in our knowledge. I feel that with photography a lot of times, there is so much to learn and even then, one has to wonder whether or not to learn it, because there are many different formats to pursue and then technology moves at a rapid pace and makes what you know somewhat obsolete. Do I pursue film photography, or do I continue to pursue smartphone photography because technology has closed that gap. Traditional photography as we understand it still has many uses, and good glass will always be a useful tool, whatever the body. Because there is so much to learn, we always need to make a choice about what to learn and that’s what I struggle with these days. I am paralysed by forecasting and research, because a lack of that was the mistake I made in the past. I am so much more aware of how important it is to decide what skills to learn and I spend almost as much time researching whether or not to pursue a path than pursuing it. I’m still experimenting, looking at metrics to see which of my content is performing better. I know it’s probably not the best way to judge, but I’ve made the mistake in the past of not forecasting whether a skill is useful before jumping in. I went into the construction industry which was not the right decision for me. Now I’m actively picking up skills for a marketing career. It’s the reason why I’m experimenting with TikTok, because I have fallen so far behind on the YouTube that I don’t know if it’s worth pursuing anymore. I am aware that I should just pick something that I enjoy and just make content that I am both somewhat good at producing and passionate enough about that I don’t mind not having an audience. That’s all well and good, but doing something without an audience when you could pursue a variation with a greater audience is not the best choice. The way I see it, there’s balance between being niche enough to have a target audience, and being too niche. Being a vegan chef is a great place to be, being an expert at making gluten free bread is not. There are exceptions, I know; many things don’t work on paper - like Billie Eilish, yet they do. If I could find a variation of what I want to pursue that has large target audience, I will move in that direction. So far, I’m still experimenting.

A very different Good Friday...

I haven’t been out so much in ages. I mean, of course, the actual outdoors, not an event, not somewhere, just outdoors. Appreciating nature is something that we should all do a lot more, but rarely do. It’s a bit of an overused cliche by now that we’re all enjoying the simple things, that there is a lot of beauty to be found in nature, because that is all we can do now. I find myself taking so many more photos, and actually seeing beauty in the outdoors, with the fantastic weather that we are having right now. It feels like summer has arrived early, even though it is meant to be spring. It reminds us that when the sun is out in Britain, it is breathtakingly beautiful and there’s no need to fly to Spain in search of summer sun. At the best of times, it feels likes we’re all enjoying a lovely staycation, and in light of the worst possible circumstances, a lot of us have found out how nice it is to slow things down a bit. It is also an indictment of the way we live that it takes such extraordinary circumstances for us to slow down and appreciate nature, and take pleasure in the little things. I truly hope that I can can maintain this newfound appreciation beyond this crisis because it would be a shame to forget how much I appreciate the outdoors, the fresh air and the amazingly nice, warm British weather (global warming be damned, although seriously, that’s the next crisis, and based on how this crisis was handled, it does not bode well for the international community) that has definitely helped to make the lockdown more bearable. We’re often told that if we can’t be thankful when life is going okay, we won’t be able to be thankful when times are truly terrible. Despite all the troubles I face at the moment, life is okay. I don’t have anything going on, but I have the outdoors. And so it is that I spend Good Friday this year appreciating nature, as The Almighty intended.

What is wrong with young people just wanting to be influencers?

There is this trend for media people and adults in general to describe young people’s digital landscape in dystopian terms. They talk about how dumb young people just want to be influencers now. They talk about the detriment to their mental health, of growing up in a social media landscape that forces them to be constantly exposed to the public, which forces them to prevent a front, and to create content to broadcast and that’s ignoring the more scandalous content that is often broadcast privately.

I could make a pretty solid argument that the choices teenagers make now with social media will stand them in good stead for the future. As I myself try and struggle to build and maintain a social media profile, I realise, as I should have known, that it is very difficult. The “youths’ are able to do this because they were born in it, or to paraphrase Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, people of my generation merely adopted social media, young people were born in it, moulded by it. So I struggle, but better late than never, I have begun what is an arduous journey to develop a personal brand, because if there is a truism that I have learnt, it’s this - if you don’t exist online, you don’t exist.

The other thing that I had to learn the hard way is the importance of personal branding, and building that brand, whatever it may be. In life, you want to be someone that people have heard of, someone people seek out, and much like earned media for companies, you want inbound traffic to your profile, your services. In short, you need people to approach you because the converse is so, so expensive. At a certain point, it becomes very expensive for all of us to spend our increasingly valuable time to seek people out, to find clients, to reach potential customers for our message and our services.

We all need to build a personal brand because you want people to seek you out, not the other way round, and this is the argument I am making for today’s youths. What is wrong with young people just wanting to be influencers? Influence is just another for of personal brand and gaining followers is just another form of brand building. In brand building, it is really important to have a head start in this, and the “youths’ of today have the benefit of that head start.

A generation before, millennials and people broadly of my generation dreamed of being professional footballers or professional sports people in general, and what’s wrong with that? Professional footballers continue to be paid more and more so financially, at least giving yourself a change to reach their level is worth a shot, and there is nothing wrong with becoming fit and healthy in pursuit of that dream. Being an influencer is, if anything, easier than being a professional footballer, there are more opportunities available, and the personal brand that is built in pursuit of being an influencer is invaluable.

There are many, many careers where the added exposure and a large following would be incredibly useful and I, for one, would not rule out hiring someone just because of the large following. There is a timelessness to personal brand building - it has always been useful, and it probably won’t be any less useful in the future. I only wish that I knew this earlier. So to those who say that the “youths” of today are growing up in a technological dystopia where they just want to be influencers I present my argument that influence is just another form of personal branding, and that will never not be useful.

Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, the simulation and screenwriting tropes

In screenwriting, there is a trope of making the heroes and villains opposites of each other. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this trope is reflected in the fact that the villains have the same powers as the heroes, but eeeevil. In The Dark Knight, there is the famous refrain by the Joker that he and Bruce Wayne were the same, and that the latter completed him, and why so serious, etc. The point is, the simulation in which we all live (because there cannot be an explanation for the narrative convenience it all) has thrown up the same characters, the heroes and villains being mirror opposites of each other, and sharing the same powers, and every other screenwriting trope we are all starting to see the simulation as it truly is. Are we to believe that it is just a coincidence that the UK and the US both have a blonde haired populist right winger supported by boomers and a white haired populist left winger supported by young people? Much like the end of Avengers: Infinity War, the heroes have lost for now with the departure of both Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders as viable contenders. You may argue about that but this is not a politics piece - I have avoided calling anyone villains and I’m going to argue that Thanos is the coronavirus instead of Trump, so that’s my attempt at political impartiality. This piece is more of a discourse on simulation theory and bad screenwriting tropes, and my hope is that I go on to become a better screenwriter than whoever’s writing the script for this simulation.

A new PS5 Controller and putting away childish things

Sony made a strange announcement about their new generation console, teasing us with a BMW i3 inspired controller, with a slick dual tone design. This, combined with the news of the release of Modern Warfare Season 3 in tandem has led me to the realisation of a simple fact: I couldn’t care less about video games any more. It’s a weird feeling, because there may still be a day when I want to pick up a controller (what will controllers look like in the future? What cars would their design be based on?) and play a first person shooter, idling in my living room, or training myself to get better in the hopes of being a Twitch streamer (if Twitch is still around…), but right now, I know that there are more productive ways to spend my time. Mine is a lost generation of gamers who spent a lot of our time playing first person shooters without the opportunity to get rich the way gamers today could. There were still wealthy gamers, but there wasn’t the same amount of money in the game, much like modern footballers, earning an order of magnitude more money than footballers in the past. There were millionaire footballers back then, but now even the worst premier league clubs pay their players seven figures. Simply put, video games did not provide me and other gamers a legitimate career back then and now I’m properly past it. There are better hobbies, and better ways to waste your time. Even making stupid TikTok videos would probably stand me in better stead for the future. So be it, then, it’s time to put away childish things, permanently, for now.

Cruising into recovery in the post corona world

I haven’t been on a cruise for over a decade, because, you know, I’m not a retiree. Not that cruises are just for old people, there is actually a compelling case for why cruises should appeal to everyone, including young people. It’s like a much more comfortable version of a sleeper train, or the glamping version of backpacking.

Why carry everything on your back when you can just leave everything in your travelling hostel? Why go interrailing through landlocked Europe when you can just go to the nicest port cities around the Mediterranean? It makes even more sense if you’re in America, and you’ve got the ability to stay on a floating hotel whilst travelling around the Caribbean.

So it should come as no surprise that a company like Carnival Cruise will be able to make a case to young people in the long term, and should be able to recover in a post corona world. Yes, at the moment it’s a terrible idea to go on a floating hotel, with narrow corridors and spaces intended to be packed with diners and audience members. but hey, how’s that different to buildings on land?

I know people who works on cruises and it’s a close knit crew, so sure, having so many people working in close proximity is not a good idea, but people staying in their rooms? I mean, there are lots of balconies, after all. So Carnival stock will likely go back up because people will take cruises again. A lot of reputational damage has been done to the idea of the cruise, but I would make an argument that if airlines could recover, and they will recover, then so will cruises.

People will fly again, less people, sure, but it will survive. People will want to travel again, less so, but they will do it. Make sure everyone’s health is monitored whilst on a cruise, make sure only healthy people can get on, but you can’t fly without going through an airport, and security and health checks is not exactly perfect there either.

This is an opportunity for us all to ponder when industries, despite the conventional wisdom, will actually recover, and I can tell you that working in architecture, I worry a lot more about the construction industry as a whole than I do about the travel industry.

We all know how to use Zoom meetings now...

Human beings are endlessly adaptable, and we are able to learn new behaviours and new tools on a continuous basis long into old age. That is why, in this new world of working from home and staying home, we have all learned how to do Zoom meetings. Everyone from workers, family members and podcasts are using Zoom meetings to do what they used to do in person. The question I have, though, is how did this happen? In the past year, I have used about 10 different video conferencing applications. We’re talking Google Hangouts, Slack, Skype, WebEx, GoToMeetings, House Party and several others. This has led me to wonder how this happened, how did we go from a duopoly of Skype and maybe one other video conferencing tool to this fragmented, balkanised, world of video conferencing. There are so many options, and it feels like every month, I’m being asked to learn a new one. Now I pride myself on being an autodidact that enjoys learning new tools, but when even I forget where the screen share button is in the latest video conferencing tool that I have been sent a link for, it shows that there is a limit to learned behaviours. We know how the tool works, but the buttons are all in a slightly different place. The user experience for all these tools are similar, but just different enough to annoy us when we are sent that link to yet another new tool. This is a good reminder that UX designers are really important in the development of a product. An app or a website should be designed in such a way that people can just pick it up because that’s how intuitive it is. So I applaud the UX designers behind Zoom for making it as intuitive as it is, to the point where people of all ages, from school kids to their grannies, are able to use it for everything from classes to weddings; thanks to Zoom and its excellent UX, we are all able to do all these things and more, but please, please, can we just decide on one or two video conferencing tools, and stick with it? If we all know how to use Zoom meetings now, let’s just stick with it.

Coronavirus has stopped us spending most of our lives in the dark

It feels like summer already. Right now, in April, the UK is getting the same amount of sunlight as the summer months, when the sky is bright until the late hours of the evening, and a blue blanket lights the city streets until 10pm. In Hollywood, they call it the magic hour, and in this one and only aspect, London can feel like Los Angeles. Magic hour, or blue hour reminds us what we missed in the winter months, the ability to actually experience sunlight. As many of us have experienced, most office jobs require us to leave the house at a certain time and leave the office at a certain time. In winter, this just so happens to coincide with the amount of sunlight we get. It means that many of us are in the unfortunate situation of going to work in the dark and leaving work in the dark, as the hours of sunlight shrink to 8.30am-4.30pm. It is a horrible feeling that is only tolerable because we have a weekend that allows us to experience sunlight during office hours at least twice a week. In the gran scheme of things, this is a pathetic amount of time, and it is quite sad to realise just how much of our time is spent inside a building, and how half of our lives are spent going to and from our homes in the dark. As the coronavirus shuts down offices, it is a good reminder that we rarely get to feel the sunshine during office hours, and a reminder of the toll on our bodies to spend so much of our lives commuting to and from work in the dark.

The Coronavirus, Best Laid Plans and Amateur YouTubers

There are many times in life when life turns down your best laid plans, your best intentions, your best wishes. The coronavirus has presented one of those times, and it forces us all to examine those plans. Do we recover by being the same person we were before, or do we emerge a different person. Do we change our plans? None of my plans have played out as I intended and the crisis threatens to erode them completely, but what if that’s the point? When all the doors you wanted have been slammed in your place, what doors are left opened? For years, I have wanted to make a website to store my life’s work and to create and to write and I did none of it. I always thought that it needed to be polished, to be in the right format, but when TV shows and personalities like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Late Night with Seth Meyers are reduced to looking like amateur YouTubers, I realised that the perfectionist in me had stopped me all these years. This website, the work on here and these words represent my best laid plans being dashed, and in its wake, I actually got to doing what I wanted.

Becoming a better cook in quarantine...

Now is the time to become a better cook. I’ve cooked more than I have at any other time in my life. It’s only now that I realise how often I eat out. The first thing I’m trying to do is perfect my egg fried rice, which I’ve avoided cooking my whole life. I think fried rice is a bit like the chinese version of fried chicken, it’s saddled with racial connotations that belies its simplicity as a dish. For an asian person, you really don’t want to be seen enjoying it as it feels a bit like living up to a stereotype; I’ve recently learned from an episode of David Chang’s ‘Ugly Delicious’ that it’s the same case with fried chicken to black people. In quarantine, however, I don’t really care - it’s really easy to cook.

Time to learn new things...

So today I created a TikTok account and created my first TikToks. Why? Because this is the time to learn and do these things. If not now, when? Right here, sitting next to City Road Basin, I pushed myself to engage with the new and you know what? I didn’t completely hate it but unfortunately it’s going to take time. That’s one of the things about learning new things, it takes time when it’s not something that’s forced upon you. It’s an investment of time, which means that you can’t learn everything. You have to choose what to invest your time in, and learning to use TikTok is definitely a waste of time, but we’re all doing it, so we’ll see where it goes. We’re all investing a lot of our time learning, producing content, and then what? Then again, with nothing else to do, why not?

Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

Everything’s shut. Nothing’s opened. Another day goes by as I take the route along the canal, occasionally going off the path to take a look at some of the pubs that have shut up shop. Where once we had a bustling high street, we now have eerie, Hopperesque scenes of life without life, establishments without patrons, and empty chairs at empty tables.

Regent's Canal Part I

Sometimes it takes some time inside to really appreciate nature again. Regent’s Canal is one of those places I have been lucky enough to live near. It really is an underrated part of the London; an area with beautiful boathouses each with their own unique character set against a canal that at night is filled with rippling reflections of the sunset. I loved walking past it during the time before the quarantine and I love it even more now.