Budapest Unscripted: An Audio Documentary

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A working session with the morning's vocabulary — each sentence read aloud in Hungarian, translated, annotated with Chip's commentary. No narrative arc, no story. Just the work itself, captured and shared. A timestamp of where the language lives right now, and what learning it actually so…

November 22nd — first snow of the season, chest cold, duvet mode. A meditation on how long it takes to build community when you expatriate alone. For everyone eyeing Europe after the election: the loneliness is real, the language matters, and the English-speaking expat bubble is a trap.

Back in Budapest after Ukraine and a summer stateside sorting out the visa. The novel is on page 290, the Bullet documentary is in preproduction, and there's a pile of un-shared media becoming digital crud. Ambient sound recorded at a bar called Zsír — Hungarian for lard. A photo dispatch from…

A year ago today Chip boarded a plane to Budapest. Today he's under a blanket with a cold, watching the rain, thinking about what expatriation actually feels like — the absence of depth, the vertigo of starting over, and why challenge accentuates everything. Also: Greek temple friezes were pai…

On Saturday morning Chip woke up wanting a better Hungarian flashcard app and, knowing nothing about coding, decided to build one with ChatGPT. By Sunday night it existed. What followed was a gray foggy Tuesday meditation on AI — what it's genuinely good for, what the hand-wringing gets wrong,…

Day 360 opens with a dream — a blurred Hungarian in a rabbit mask who appropriated all the furniture for mailbox-related reasons. Then the actual news: a green light to move into development on the Bullet documentary. Who is Bullet? Chip tells you. Also: the human rights film festival, a week of do…

Day 356, continued. Thirty years into a daily writing journal, something unexpected happens when you play back your own voice instead of reading your own words. A coffee malfunction, a film festival at 9 PM, and a case for feeling nostalgic for today — right now — before it becomes the past. This i…

Day 356. Watching the courtyard trees go bare and thinking about autumn in Appalachian Virginia — and whether the version in memory is any truer than the one outside the window. An honest look at the resistance that follows a creative through every project, every season, every country. This is a pu…

Day 353. Making a smoothie at 9:47 AM on the morning after Trump's reelection. A digression about Barack Obama's precise almond discipline leads somewhere unexpected — into what it means to stay sane when the news machine runs on your anxiety. Strange times in Budapest, November 8, 2024. …