I just finished my first week back in New York and my first week of my internship at Fake Love. I don’t know how much I can talk about it, since I’ve been sworn to secrecy in my contract. I think I can say that it’s been a great and inspiring experience so far. The company is fantastic– smart, energetic people able to invent clever, nuanced ideas at the drop of a hat. They’ve got a lot of really fantastic toys, too: 3D printers (one of which I disassembled, fixed and reassembled, thank you very much), Kinect 2s, Oculus Rifts (Oculi Rifts?), LCD panels and much more. In down time, they encourage staff (interns included) to work on personal projects. I’ve proposed a couple I plan on refining and tackling in July. Another intern is working on a cool iPad music app. It’s a little sleepy there at the moment, but there are a couple very cool projects that are getting started that should keep us busy through the rest of the summer.

One of the best parts of the week, though, was the OpenFrameworks meetup they hosted on Thursday night. I thought it was just going to be a bunch of random people interested in OF, but instead, many of the OF bigwigs were there, the creator, and many prolific contributors to the community. It was really bizarre to put faces and physical bodies to the names you see on the forum and the projects you see on creativeapplications.net. They shared their work and hung out for a couple hours. Very cool and inspiring.

Other than the internship, being back in New York is a little surreal. It’s been great seeing friends and getting reacquainted with Brooklyn, but it’s weird sliding back into the life I left for grad school. It’s almost as if the past year didn’t happen. Brooklyn’s also now littered with emotional landmines, which I’m slowly trying to defuse. It’s also a weird experience going back to an office environment for work, and to be back in the role of an intern. These things have combined to make for a very weird start to the rest of the summer, but I think I’m figuring out how to navigate them.