I have lived 30 minutes away from Toronto for 22 years. If anyone has visited before, the first thing you'd probably notice is the huge needle thing in the skyline. For whatever reason I never had any interest in it before. It was just always there. Last week I got stuck in Toronto with nothing to do. I sat in a parking lot contemplating on getting food or hit up a bar for a pint. I sat around for 30 minutes, then I looked up. Somehow it looks so much bigger when you are near the base of it. From a distance, it looks kind of small, almost like a taller skyscraper. When I was in Seattle, I went up the Space Needle. While that thing is definitely a tall structure at 184 meters, the CN tower is - wait for it - 553 meters tall. In your face Seattle.
The walk to the base of the tower was pretty interesting. You really get an idea of how god damn big this thing is. Its massive. To get to it you have to cross a bridge over some train tracks. It isn't far from Union Station, so you will see the iconic green GO trains pretty frequently.
The security made me feel like I was in an airport. X-rays are performed on your stuff, and you walk through this weird machine that puffs air and sniffs for explosives. I think I only have had to do these during international flights - and I guess now, for the CN tower.
Up we go. Fastest elevator I have been on. You can feel the pressure in your ears, like flying in a plane. The glass floor didn't help.
Once I got off, I looked around for the famous glass floor. I'm not exactly scared of heights but this made me shake a bit. I still jumped up and tried breaking through it. No luck. It is 2.5 inches thick which doesn't sound like much, but apparently can hold me. The chart showed how many animals it could hold - Of course the species are all very, very Canadian.
Scarily Relevant. Prague - Rome - Tokyo
The view from the window was amazing. You can see people all over the city like ants. I must have spent an hour just people watching out the side. The height makes you feel like you are in a helicopter or something - it just feels that tall. Watching the sun set was pretty spectacular.
It really makes you appreciate the beauty of modern architecture. Ive heard Toronto be called the Glass City and the view really shows the accuracy of that. Definitely gave my inner Engineer a hardon. If you are ever to visit, Id recommend it. It was definitely way cooler than I expected. Anyway, I will leave you with some pretty awesome Day/Night images I took.
Its wild to think that the Fulvia design is now 8 years old - originally released in 2016. This design was developed in titanium with the pursuit of rim weight and stability. So much has changed since then. 2024 was an interesting year with the challenges of moving to a new country while maintaining releases. Not many people realize but I often prototype yoyos for myself and they just never get released. Often they join the rotation of throws I have on the shelf, which never make it to production. The monometal 000 and Fulvia was exactly that - prototypes that I submited earlier this year that just never ended up making it to production.
Been a long time since I released much. A lot of things have been going on behind the scenes but a lot of it has to due with either financial or business legal stuff. Both that are not as interesting as I would hope but is definitely necessary going forward. I actually prototyped the initial plastic Stelvia design way earlier on in 2023, but only picked up working on it again at the start of this year.
It has been a while since Ive written much - the second half of 2023 was insanely busy with project management. Since the release of the plastic lineup, I had very little time to focus on the roots of what made Luftverk so exciting. I realized this was a huge problem - I needed to guide Luftverk back to it's roots of exploring new materials and build product lineups that told a story stemmed from exploration. I had done this with plastics last year but in 2024 I would like to also focus back onto some more products that use exotic materials. While being incredibly late to the party this recent project is Luftverk's first Magnesium ever, which was at first canceled and almost never released.
Jeffrey Pang
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