“What were you most excited about when you thought about coming to New York?” I asked.
“The snow,” she said. “Growing up in Singapore, I’d always see movies of the snow, but I’d never seen it in person. Tbe snow is always this beautiful white blanket that comes out and coats everything.”
“What disappointed you most about New York?” I said.
“Right after it snows, it turns into this big brown mush the next day.”
That’s how New York winters work. We get a whole lot of snow. It turns to mushy brown slop. Then it melts and goes away.
Except for this year.
This year, the snow fell and stayed. Not for a day or two, but for weeks. It piled up on the sides of the sidewalks and just sat there, like big white bumpers at the bowling alley. This is the type of thing that happens in places like Toronto. When we visited my sister early this year, I was surprised to see construction happening while it was snowing—because in Toronto in the winter, it’s always snowing.
It wasn’t just New York. Dallas closed schools for four days due to snow. Schools closed in Columbus and Chicago due to the cold. When the wind chill is -25 or below, schools close because it is simply too dangerous to walk to school or wait for a bus. The National Weather Service called one stretch of it an “epic, generational arctic outbreak.” Two hundred million people across the country were under some kind of cold-weather advisory at one point.
This was a real winter, the kind you see on ski mountains.
When it started to melt, this was like nothing I’d ever experienced. The closest reference point I had was the Great Thaw in the movie Frozen. In Scandinavia, where Frozen came from, the winter melt is a big thing. The winters there are long and genuinely dark, months where the sun barely shows up and the cold is something you live inside rather than pass through. Before Christianity arrived, Norse communities celebrated Dísablót, a festival marking the transition out of winter, a collective acknowledgment that the dark season was ending.
That’s what this felt like when the snow started to melt.
So I started taking pictures. I got some good ones, but I couldn’t really capture that feeling. What I really wanted was a time-lapse of the snow melting, and that wasn’t going to happen with my camera alone.
So I used Grok. I took an initial picture and told it what I wanted: “A time-lapse photograph of the snow melting throughout the day.” I had an image in my head of what that thaw looked like, the feeling of it, and I wanted to show someone else. I didn’t want to document the thaw. I wanted to express it. Grok gave me that, more or less, with a few gloriously wrong attempts along the way that you’ll see below.
There isn’t really a better tool for that right now.
The AI blooper reel is below.
You must be logged in to post a comment.