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 painted in garish colors. He can't help himself.

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, and a Ben Affleck video worth looking up.

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 double duty with a camera, and why he missed a few recording days.

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.

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.

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.

Chip spends three weeks in Kyiv during the war and discovers that fear has a proximity effect — the closer you get, the less terrifying it becomes. Air raid alerts, Telegram threat assessment, a 5am walk to an empty shelter. And a man foraging on a prosthetic leg who refused to let the Russians take the forest from him.

A Saturday night at Nemdebar — one drink in the cold, a bar the size of a caravan, and a table of holiday-primed strangers generous with their company and their pathogens. Ten days of Magyar head cold followed: sleeping until 3 PM, a writing schedule in ruins, and one man's lungs working overtime. He's back. Mostly.