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.
It has been a year an a half living in Osaka, crazy how time flies. I remember releasing the Plastic Fulvia just before leaving Toronto, a product that I could argue changed the trajectory of everything. At that moment, Luftverk grew exponentially, with the support of retailers around the world. At that moment, I developed so many behind the scenes processes for management that it became much more of a corporate job then a creative one. Huge projects like Cheatcode, and the CLYW collaboration definitely had its creative sides dont get me wrong, but the addition of moving to a foreign city, learning a new language, pursuing motorsports and delegating tasks behind the scenes with razor sharp margins meant for a lot of it I was on the brink of burnout. I questioned if I even still liked doing yoyo stuff at all, or if it was just to keep food on the table.
Crazy to think it has been 2 years since the original release of the Plastic Fulvia and Plastic 000. Both models as of now are pretty much sold out everywhere, and I knew it was about time to update both with a small batch of new colors as well as fix a few small issues with the first designs. I appreciate everyone who has reached out anticipating a restock of these - as the manufacturing process is very timely for sure so restocks can't happen as quick as I'd like.
In January, I released the AKURA MG, a yoyo made from Magnesium. This material has a very low density and I talked about how it performs more like a plastic than anything else. But what made that yoyo really special is the aesthetic. I loved the lines on that yoyo. The proportions with the chunky rims were just perfect. One of the biggest aesthetic challenges though were that after the ceramic coating the lines were quite subtle which hid the design.
Jeffrey Pang
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