With the lowest payroll, worst attendance and worst record in baseball, the A’s were finally on a six-game winning streak as they got ready to take on the Tampa Bay Rays, the team with the best record in baseball. But that’s not why the parking lot was so crowded.

“Get your shirt and put it on!” shouted Tyrone Moore-Perez, a volunteer with the Oakland 68s sports fan booster club.

“One per person, so we have enough for everybody!” shouted fellow volunteer April Kenton, as she balled up Kelly green T-shirts and threw them to fans entering the sprawling tailgate party. “Make sure you guys put these on! Put the shirts on, guys!”

“I’m a third-generation A’s fan, and I’m here to do my part to keep my team in Oakland,” Kenton explained.

“I love my team, I’ve been a fan since I was a kid, I don’t want to lose them,” Moore-Perez said.

As he spoke, Moore-Perez held up his own Kelly green shirt, with one word on it: “SELL.”

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Volunteers gave away 7,000 of the T-shirts, made at cost by local clothing retailer Oaklandish, as part of a protest they’d been planning since April when the A’s ownership announced plans to leave Oakland and move the team to Las Vegas. Already angry at owner John Fisher for trading away the team’s best players while raising ticket prices as the Coliseum continues to slowly decay, many fans had stopped coming to the ballpark altogether, leaving the A’s with an average Tuesday attendance of just 3,913 before the June 13 game.

But a tweet from A’s fan Stu Clary changed all of that for just one night. Clary suggested a “reverse boycott” — packing the Coliseum full of A’s fans for one randomly chosen weeknight game — to let Fisher, Major League Baseball, and the rest of the world know that Oakland has plenty of baseball fans who love their team, even if they hate its owner.

“I’ll be honest and say I didn’t think the organizers could pull this off,” said Nick Danoff, co-founder of a group that’s been working to secure the A’s a new ballpark location on Oakland’s waterfront. “Getting this many people here for a Tuesday night game against a team with no local fan base? … It’s incredible what they’ve done, and it shows there is that community here in Oakland that supports the team, and we just need to be given the chance.”

The official recorded attendance for the game was 27,759 — the Coliseum’s biggest crowd of the season. The Kelly green “SELL” shirts were visible from numerous camera angles in the game broadcast, and chants of “Sell the team!” could be heard loudly behind the announcers’ commentary.

“We’re getting national exposure,” Kenton said. “And we’re helping people understand that a team is more than just the ball players on the field or the owner. It’s also about the community around us.”

Inside the hulking concrete stadium where the A’s have played ball since 1968, the energy was electric and the noise was deafening.

“This literally feels like a normal A’s game,” said lifelong fan and Oakland 68s member Anson Canasnares.

In the section behind home plate, Hal the Hot Dog Guy, a beloved former A’s food vendor, stood up on his seat, leading the crowd in chants of “Stay in Oakland! Stay in Oakland!”

And in the right field bleachers, the Oakland 68s brought back their notoriously loud drums — a daily fixture at A’s games for more than 20 years until the team announced its Vegas land deal in April.

“We took the drums away — it was a really hard decision,” Casanares said.

“It’s been very effective to have the drums be gone,” said one of the drummers, a woman who told us she’s been coming to A’s games since the drumming began in 2000. “Silence is a weapon, and we’ve been using that.”

“We’re not gonna bring it to Vegas,” Casanares said of the drumming tradition, which has always been an unofficial, fan-led activity.

But as if to show Fisher and the world what they’d be giving up if the team moves to Las Vegas, the drummers came back for one night, as loud as can be.

“John Fisher’s trying to take this away from us,” said another one of the drummers. “You really want to leave all of this —all of this fun — for some tourists in Clark County, Nevada?”

The A’s pulled ahead of the Rays in the 8th inning, and the crowd got louder. Some commented on Twitter that it felt like playoff energy inside the Coliseum that night.

“This is more than a championship game,” said one excited fan. “This is our lives. We need this team to stay!”

The game stopped briefly as a fan in a green “SELL” T-shirt and black running shorts sprinted across the field, chased by security guards, as the crowd laughed and cheered him on. Then, it was back to baseball, and ultimately to a 7th straight win for the A’s. Fans immediately chanted “Sell the team! Sell the team!” at the game’s conclusion.

As fans from the right field bleachers spilled out into the walkways and the concourse of the Coliseum’s main level, still cheering and beating on their drums, a metaphorical dark cloud loomed over the Coliseum in the chilly night air: Sometime earlier that evening, while the A’s were warming up for their 2-1 victory over the Rays, the Nevada state senate passed SB1, a bill that would go on to be signed by Governor Joe Lombardo, approving $380 million in public funding for a 30,000-seat ballpark on the 9-acre Vegas Strip site where the Tropicana hotel now sits. It moves the A’s even closer to an exit from Oakland, even as fans rejoiced over their team’s unlikely victory and the success of their grassroots protest.

“This at least feels like a celebration,” Danoff said. “Maybe a last hurrah here? It’s worth doing — but this might be it.”

“It’s so wonderful,” said another fan outside the Coliseum. “And all I can tell people that say, ‘Oh, it’s done,’ — it’s not over ’til it’s over.”

NBC Bay Area’s Consumer Investigator Chris Chmura has built up a library of helpful “How To” explainer videos on a wide variety of topics, with advice on how to best navigate these pesky consumer pain points.

Digital Correspondent Abbey Fernandez sat down with Chris to discuss three of his “How To” explainers on topics related to job scams, flight delays, and cancelling gym memberships. Watch their conversation now in the video player above.

You can also explore all of his “How To” videos at NBCBAYAREA.COM/HOWTO.

And though their bid to leave town and move to Las Vegas has dominated Bay Area sports headlines since late April, the A’s have been looking for a new ballpark for much longer than that: more than 20 years, to be exact.

Failed Ballpark Plans: A Timeline

The search started in earnest sometime around 2001, when the A’s began to explore leaving the aging Coliseum for a new ballpark near Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood. Former California Governor Jerry Brown was mayor at the time, and he rejected the plan, because he wanted to see a new housing development built on the land the A’s were eyeing.

It was the first of at least eight different ballpark plans to fail over the next two decades.

In 2005, the A’s looked at land across the street from the Coliseum at a site on 66th Avenue — but the owners of the land decided not to sell. Then, a year later, the team announced plans to build Cisco Field in Fremont, on land owned by the computer networking giant. 

When that fell through amid public resistance, the A’s started looking at land near Jack London Square, and then in 2012, announced they had their eyes on San Jose, near SAP Center.

That led to a legal fight with the Giants, who claimed exclusive territorial rights to San Jose — rights the A’s originally agreed to let them have in the 1990s, as part of a plan to dissuade the Giants from moving to Florida.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Giants, so the A’s signed a ten-year lease extension back at the Coliseum, thinking maybe they could build a new ballpark in one of the sprawling parking lots next to the hulking concrete stadium they shared with the Raiders.

Years later, Raiders owner Mark Davis blamed the A’s lease extension as part of the reason his NFL team gave up negotiations with Oakland and moved to Las Vegas.

He said the Raiders were ready to talk business with the city on plans for a new football stadium where the Coliseum currently sits, but as long as the A’s were using the Coliseum, the Raiders were stuck — and in 2017, the Raiders announced their move to Las Vegas.

That same year, the Warriors broke ground on the Chase Center as part of their move to San Francisco, leaving the A’s as the last team standing in Oakland’s once-bustling Coliseum sports complex.

Meanwhile, the A’s kept trying more sites in Oakland: First, what was known as the Peralta site near Lake Merritt, on land owned by the Peralta Community Colleges. The community college district ultimately voted not to sell the property, leaving the A’s with one final option: a former shipping facility on Oakland’s waterfront called Howard Terminal.

The plan for a waterfront ballpark, housing and entertainment complex was actually moving along — but then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and progress slowed to a crawl. There were missed deadlines, lawsuits and finger-pointing, and at some point during that time, the A’s quietly began their talks to move to Las Vegas.

A Ballpark With a Strip View

The pandemic did a couple of things to the Howard Terminal negotiations: first, with all the delays, Major League Baseball got impatient, and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred gave the A’s the go-ahead to start looking elsewhere. And second, a piece of land near the Vegas Strip that was previously slated for a future casino suddenly went up for sale.

The land had all the trappings of an ideal Las Vegas ballpark location: just a 15-minute walk from the Strip, right next to the hockey arena where the Golden Knights play, and just a stone’s throw from the Raiders’ new football stadium. And so the A’s signed what they described as a binding agreement to purchase that land, and announced plans to build a $1.5 billion ballpark there with a retractable roof and room for 30,000 to 35,000 fans.

But then, not even a month later, the A’s announced a different land agreement: this time, it was a smaller piece of property directly on the Strip, at the site of the Tropicana hotel. The owners would demolish the 66-year-old hotel, build a ballpark that opens out onto the strip, and then build a new hotel next to the ballpark, roughly the same size as the old one.

In announcing their new focus on the Tropicana site, the A’s said they had backed out of the first land agreement — meaning it wasn’t as binding as they originally made it out to be.

Hundreds of Millions in Tax Dollars

But if the A’s are going to move, buying the land is just the first step. The next step is getting approval from state and county lawmakers in Nevada, which involves getting them to fork over $395 million in public money — something Oakland flat-out refused to do.

In Vegas, though, getting tax money to build sports and entertainment venues is much more plausible, if recent history is any indicator. The state and county already gave $750 million to the Raiders to build Allegiant stadium. The Raiders had to guarantee they’d stay in southern Nevada for 30 years, until the stadium is paid off by means of an extra hotel tax of just under one percent in the area surrounding the stadium.

The A’s could ask for a similar deal, and have indicated they’ll pursue making the ballpark and its on-site stores and restaurants into a special tax district — adding an extra tax onto purchases made there, and using that tax to gradually pay off the ballpark’s construction.

If the A’s can’t get public money, they’ve already explored a backup plan: a piece of land that’s one mile, or a 30-minute walk, from the Strip, on the grounds of the Rio hotel. The hotel’s owners had offered the land to the A’s for just one dollar — no public funding required. Upon announcing the Tropicana site, the A’s said they were laser-focused on a ballpark with Strip views, and were not actively pursuing backup options.

If the A’s can get a deal inked for a piece of land, and secure the funding to build on it, they’ll still need a vote: at least 22 of the other 29 Major League team owners would have to approve of the team’s relocation. It would make the A’s only the second Major League team to relocate across state lines in more than 50 years. (The other team was the Montreal Expos, which crossed the U.S. border with Canada to become the Washington Nationals in 2005.)

Where to Play in the Meantime

So, what if the A’s get the land, get the funding, and get the go-ahead from other MLB owners? Then they’d start construction. They’ve indicated they want to break ground on a new ballpark in 2024, but it wouldn’t be ready to open until 2027. The A’s would need to figure out where they’ll play ball until then.

One obvious choice is to stay put: The A’s could extend their lease at the Coliseum, which expires in 2024, to play an additional three seasons until a new ballpark is ready.

Another option is to play at the minor league ballpark in Las Vegas, currently home to the A’s AAA affiliate, the Las Vegas Aviators. That ballpark only has 10,000 seats, but average attendance at A’s games was only around 9,700 in April and May. (The A’s have the dubious honor of having not only the lowest payroll and the worst record, but also the lowest attendance of any MLB team.)

Wherever they choose to play for the next three seasons, the deadline for the A’s to set this all in motion is January 2024. That’s when Manfred said the A’s need to have a signed agreement for a new ballpark, or they’ll lose the revenue sharing they’re getting from other teams.

The commissioner says he doesn’t care where that new ballpark is. So, technically speaking, the door is still open for the A’s to strike a deal in Oakland.

You could blame the Warriors’ NBA playoff game happening that night for the low attendance, but that wouldn’t tell the whole story. The A’s have drawn the smallest crowds of any Major League Baseball team this season, averaging just over 10,000 people in a stadium built to hold more than five times that many.

Still, despite its unremarkable attendance, this game was remarkable in a different way: in the days since the A’s last played at home, news had broken that the team had signed a binding agreement to buy land near the Las Vegas Strip, where owner John Fisher wants to build a brand new, retractable-roof ballpark with help from Nevada taxpayers.

In the Oakland Coliseum’s right field bleachers, where die hard fans wave flags and beat drums throughout home games, it wasn’t business as usual. Instead of showing up with drums, those fans showed up with green T-shirts bearing the word “SELL.”

“We want John Fisher to sell the team to a local businessperson who can afford to get (a new ballpark built) and keep the team in Oakland,” said Jorge Leon, a lifelong fan wearing his “SELL” T-shirt with a green and gold A’s scarf.

Fellow lifelong fan Anson Casanares helped organize the T-shirt campaign.

“They mentioned Vegas, and it was like, okay, we have to do something,” Casanares said. “And this is it, right here.”

Chanting, “Sell the team!” and “Stay in Oakland!” the fans occupying the right field bleachers poured out into the aisles of the near-empty Coliseum, carrying signs, ringing cowbells, and getting the sparse crowd riled up as they marched through the seating sections surrounding the infield.

“The A’s are very important to the Bay Area, to the East Bay,” Casanares said. “I don’t understand how we can let this go.”

But those fans — even the ones too young to remember the days when the A’s played for sold-out crowds — say they’ve had a difference of opinion with Fisher for a long time.

“He sells away all our best players,” complained 14-year-old Nolan Walsh.

“We were a postseason team, and now we might be the worst team in baseball,” lamented 13-year-old Jack DeAngelo.

“It’s like that movie, ‘Major League,’ where they really want the team to fail,” observed a woman holding up a handmade, sequin-studded Oakland A’s blanket.

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Still, despite a dismal record and the lowest payroll in Major League Baseball, the A’s mean something to the city where they’ve played ball since 1968.

“When you see an A’s hat walking down the street, you don’t think of who pitched last night — you think of Oakland,” said Alan Wilk, one of the dozens of fans who protested outside the Coliseum before the game.

“Oakland has character — it’s got personality,” said Justin Matoska, a longtime fan who added he won’t go see the A’s play in Las Vegas if they move there.

“The people here — they’re real fans, they’re die hards,” said Andy Belsky, who was visiting from Boston on a tour of all 30 Major League ballparks. If the team were to move to Las Vegas, he asked, “What’s gonna happen to all these fans that are here?”

“Heartbroken,” a lifelong fan named Diego said in answer to that question. “One hundred percent heartbroken. … First it was the Warriors, then the Raiders, then the A’s.”

“We’re losing everything in Oakland, we can’t lose the A’s,” another man chimed in from the next section over.

Fans like Casanares say they’re resolved to make their voices heard, and hope Fisher listens. Leon would like to see the team stay in Oakland too, though he admits the odds don’t look good.

“It’s horrible, but I think there’s resiliency here in the city of Oakland,” Leon said. “And I think we’ll be all right.”

4/20 has long been an unofficial holiday to celebrate the enjoyment of cannabis in San Francisco, but now that weed is legal across California, the event has become a much bigger affair. As many as 20,000 people were expected for 2023’s free celebration, with over 100 security guards and dozens of vendors — selling both food and weed.

“I think this is the one holiday San Francisco celebrates more than any other holiday,” said a young woman wearing large flower-shaped earrings as she lounged on the hillside.

Of the thousands in attendance, many we spoke to said they were there for the first time.

“It is so much fun, this is my first time being here,” said a woman who told us she dyed her hair green just for the occasion.

Cannabis-themed outfits and anything green were the fashion trend of the day — even if it meant improvising.

“I’m not an A’s fan,” said a man wearing an Oakland Athletics jacket just hours after learning that the team had struck a deal for a ballpark site in Las Vegas. “Just green, just (wearing) green.”

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Though lines were long for the cannabis dispensary booths selling pre-rolled joints and edibles on site, lines were even longer for the vendors selling piping hot food.

“I’m just gonna smoke weed and eat some fries,” said a man about to get in the rapidly-growing line.

“Garlic fries!” exclaimed one man who finally made it to the front of the line. “I think they’re amazing, and I haven’t even tried them yet!”

Nearby, another man had just finished dressing two hot dogs with a mountain of condiments and was preparing to chow down on them.

“We got ketchup, relish, sauerkraut, a little mustard on top just for the finish,” he explained.

As 4:20 p.m. drew near, the crowd began making plans for the big moment — rolling joints and figuring out who to share them with.

“I’ve got the biggest joint here,” proclaimed a man who said he’s a five-time joint rolling world champion.

He held up a giant joint shaped like a cannabis leaf that he said contained half a pound of weed — a quantity worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. He designed the joint to be passed around and smoked through the leaf’s stem.

“The whole crowd’s gonna hit this thing,” he said. “We’re gonna spark it right at 4:20.”

With help from the emcee onstage, the crowd counted down from 10 as a gray haze rose up over the park. Then, it was time to go back to doing what they came there for:

“Just relaxing, smoking, having a good time,” said a man hanging out with the green-haired woman we spoke to earlier.

Nearby, another man taking a deep hit off a vape pen proclaimed, “God bless America.”

And nearly every Easter Sunday, the city reaffirms its weirdness with an event that could only take place here.

Though Lombard Street has long claimed the title of “crookedest street in San Francisco,” longtime residents know the city’s true crookedest street is the lesser-known Vermont Street in Potrero Hill, snaking its way down a steep hill with hairpin turns.

It would be the perfect place to go skiing, if only San Francisco had snow. But lacking that, the creators of this annual event came up with the next best thing: Bring Your Own Big Wheel.

By most accounts, the event was first held in 2000. It’s run by volunteers, and advertised mainly by word of mouth. Organizers obtain a permit to close off Vermont Street for a few hours, and line the curbs with hay bales. Pads and helmets are optional, but signing a liability waiver is required: you ride at your own risk.

Spectators show up far in advance, staking out spots with blankets and camping chairs. The kids ride first, at 2 p.m. Then come the grown-ups — riding kid-sized trikes and toy cars — and that’s where the real spectacle happens. While the kids often make it down the hill just fine, there’s a certain truth to the saying, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” The grown-up portion of event is pure, hilarious, gravity-fueled chaos.

The organizers only stipulate one rule: all vehicles and their wheels must be made entirely of plastic. The scraping sound of hollow plastic wheels clattering along rough concrete echoes through the neighborhood, along with the cheers of the crowd gathered on hillsides and stairways. Because it’s San Francisco, it should be no surprise that many riders come in costume, and get fully into character as they fly down the hill.

In 2023, the cast of costumed characters included several Easter bunnies, at least two nuns, a human BART train, two police officers on a high-speed chase (with sirens blaring), Rocky Balboa complete with his boxing gloves, and an inflatable T-Rex with a bad habit of chewing on other riders’ heads. It would be easy to go on about them all for many more paragraphs, but Bring Your Own Big Wheel is a spectacle that’s hard to fully grasp through words alone — so check out the video above to see it for yourself!

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But the Giants home opener holds a special place in the hearts of fans, whether it’s their first or their 40th.

“It’s opening day — you’re excited, you’re ready for the season, you’ve got that extra little bounce in your step,” said one longtime fan who said he used to climb through a hole in the fence to watch games at Candlestick Park as a kid.

His friend hurried to join the line at the Willie Mays Gate, sporting an orange and black jersey he said was 40 years old.

“Now I can fit back into it,” he said proudly. “I lost a few pounds!”

For many fans, attending the Giants’ first home game of the season is an annual tradition — and one they pass onto their children.

“This is his second (opening day) — he’s two,” said a father who just finished taking a selfie with his two sons. “This is his seventh — he’s seven.”

The Giants lost their home opener to the Kansas City Royals 3-1, but there’s a lot more baseball to be played this season — and fans say they’re fired up for it.

Asked about hopes for the season ahead, one fan quickly answered, “Winning the World Series!”

Another replied, “108 wins!”

And a third simply pointed to her four fingers and said, “Another ring.”

As players lined up to try the latest VR demos from big sponsors including Meta and PlayStation, one of them summed up a major theme of the show: “We’re building games that interact with our actual world.”

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, players could only enter the virtual worlds of video games through a handheld controller and a living room TV.

“It was the golden age,” quipped a developer playing Super Mario World on a Super Nintendo at the conference. “We thought these graphics looked like real life.”

The Super Nintendo console was part of an exhibit of 8-bit and 16-bit video games set up by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland.

“We hope to kind of inspire that next generation by helping them look back in a way that’s useful,” said Rob Curl, the museum’s historian. “People had to be creative in a different way when they were making games for these older systems.”

Video games of the 1980s didn’t have music recorded with acoustic instruments, or lifelike 3D characters. But this year’s GDC featured an entire section of the Moscone South convention hall devoted to game audio, and an eye-catching display of skateboarders doing tricks on a ramp as high-speed infrared cameras recorded them from numerous angles.

“To measure their position in 3D, in real time, so that we can capture their exact movements,” explained OptiTrack sales director Thierry Chevalier. “We would then be able to get pro-level skaters to have their own signature tricks within the game.”

3D motion capture is also playing a role in developing video games based on a hip hop dance show called “Fray” about the life and challenges faced by two brothers who build video games.

“It just started as, ‘Hey, we should put a video game in the show — that would be interesting creative storytelling,'” said Kate Duhamel, the founder and creative director of Candy Bomber Productions. “And then it was like, ‘No, we should actually make a real game.'”

They wound up making two games — including the mobile rhythm-based game “Fray Jam,” now available on Apple’s App Store, and a more intricate PC game that’s now in the final stages of production, Duhamel said. The games follow the storyline of the dance show, and share some of the choreography too.

“You turn on music and you ask them to freestyle,” Duhamel said of the motion capture process. “So you create a whole library of movement … for the avatars in the game.”

Across the street from the conference, Epic Games showed off its latest tech for facial performance capture and photo-realistic human avatars. It was Epic’s first time giving a keynote at GDC in four years, and the presentation focused on the latest in 3D rendering tech, and ever-expanding metaverses including the virtual world of Epic’s own hit game Fortnite.

With all the focus on emerging technologies like VR and AR headsets and NFTs, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney reminded the audience that millions of people already immerse themselves in wide-open metaverses every day using only their smartphones and desktop computers.

“(There are) over 600 million active users in these virtual worlds,” Sweeney said. “This revolution is happening right now.”

But the new technologies are evolving quickly. At GDC, the latest virtual reality hardware on display featured eye and hand tracking, gloves and vests that thump and vibrate when a player gets hit, and a new motorized swivel chair that lets players move around in virtual space without bumping into real-life walls and coffee tables.

“You’re stationary, but you have infinite movement,” explained PNI sales director Won Cho as he demonstrated the new chair. “When you press the pedal down, (your game character) goes forward. When you press it backwards, it would go backwards.”

Down the hall, new and experimental forms of game control were on display at GDC’s alternative controllers exhibition, aptly named “Alt.Ctrl.”

“We created this whole installation just to play our game,” explained Sara Brugioli, gesturing toward a contraption that resembled a life-sized grocery cart stuck in a doorway, made entirely out of plywood.

The wooden shopping cart is part of a two-player video game called “Grocery Trip” that began as a student project. One player pushes and steers the cart, while a second player sits in the cart, grabbing items from shelves and punching other customers who get in the way. Brugioli said it was inspired by real-life events.

“A guy at the shopping center actually stopped in front of me,” in the middle of the aisle to check his phone, Brugioli explained. “And I was like … this is so annoying. I wish I could punch you right now.”

Brugioli said that’s when the proverbial light bulb went on.

“And I was like, ‘Oh my God, that would actually be a good game,'” she said.

Some alternative control games could end up being made into arcade machines, while others serve to experiment with new ways of getting players to interact with each other.

“Haber Dasher” is a research project by Ph.D. candidate Erin Truesdell that requires two players to jointly steer a single avatar by placing their heads inside a giant shared hat. Nearly the size of a small car, the hat hovered high above the other exhibits, dangling from the ceiling on heavy duty steel cables. Players shouted directions to each other as they attempted to tilt the hat brim in different directions to navigate.

“It’s been really great watching people make friends in line as they find someone to play with,” Truesdell said. “It’s a hat that’s also a networking opportunity.”

Like most of the alternative control games on display, Haber Dasher is built to get players engaged and immersed in the game through how they control it — not through photorealistic graphics or surround sound. Rob Curl was quick to point out that games of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t have that sort of realism either — and yet, today’s kids still enjoy playing them.

“These games are still fun,” he said. “They still provide that similar sort of emotional reaction. No matter your age.“

“Before COVID hit, I was a freshman in university,” said Lexa Gluckman, a game design student at NYU.

“In 2019, I was in high school,” said her classmate Chase Dodge.

In 2019, the biggest Game Developers Conference ever drew a crowd of more than 27,000 to San Francisco. But the following year, GDC 2020 was among the first major events to be canceled amid growing concern over the spread of COVID-19. And though the in-person conference returned in 2022, only 12,000 people attended. This year, attendance has passed 24,000, including many like Gluckman and Dodge who’ve never been here before.

“Not only is this my first GDC,” said game developer Chase Cavender. “This is also my first industry event in gaming ever.”

Cavender said he began building games during the pandemic, when stay-at-home orders left him with a lot of time on his hands.

“When you’re stuck at home, one thing you can do at home — you can make video games,” he said. “You can make some really cool video games too!”

Others who’d been dabbling in game development took the plunge into full time work while the world was shut down — and did it without leaving home.

“The studio was remote,” said a developer who goes by Son M. “I’m one of the few Americans on the team.”

During the week of GDC, events around San Francisco showcase indie games for reporters and other developers to play.

“If I pass someone on the street, they’re probably here for GDC, and they make games too, which is a really nice feeling,” Gluckman said. “It’s hard to meet other game designers.”

Some of the games on display at those parties and happy hours are seeing the light of day for the first time.

“We’ve been working on this for so long, so many years,” said Z. Yang, a developer on the space adventure game Lifeless Moon. “It’s a huge payoff to be able to see people get so excited for it.”

Though there are fewer travel restrictions than last year, coming to GDC from other countries can be expensive — so some governments have set up scholarship programs for first-time attendees, including the government of Poland.

Partnering with conference organizers, the scholarship program offers recipients travel and lodging, along with coaching on how to make the most of the conference.

“How to do business meetings with American partners, because it’s slightly different than in Europe,” said Jakub Marszałkowski of Indie Games Poland. “Asking ‘How are you,’ in Poland, we start complaining. No, you should not complain. In America, you just always say ‘fine’ and smile.”

Of course, many of the newest developers at the conference are smiling anyway, at the chance to finally meet each other in person.

“It’s really just making connections,” Cavender said. “If those connections turn into business connections, that’s incredible.”

Sunday, on the eve of the first conference sessions, the line for badge pickup stretched around three sides of the block, and at once point reached nearly half a mile long.

“This year, we’re fully focusing on the in-person experience,” said event production director Stephenie Hawkins, noting that last year’s smaller in-person event had offered many sessions as part of a virtual program. “We’ll have over 330 exhibitors here at Moscone, which is the most we’ve ever had.”

This is the 37th GDC — an annual event that began in a San Jose living room in 1988. The conference is “for game developers, by game developers” — including all of the artistic and technical disciplines that go into making games.

“The creative energy at GDC is fantastic,” Hawkins said. “You’ll see people walking around with different-colored hair, and all kinds of funky outfits.”

The 5-day event is a place to learn and network, but also a place to reunite with old friends and colleagues.

“I get to see friends who I only get to see once a year, at the Game Developers Conference,” said Ashley Corrigan, the conference’s senior producer.

Corrigan said among the topics sure to be discussed at the conference is the buzz swirling around generative artificial intelligence — the kind of AI used in chatbots like ChatGPT. Other bots using the technology can create images based on a user request.

“Generative AI is a big topic right now, especially with everything that’s going on with the relationship between artists and AI,” she said. “I think that we can expect to see AI in the game industry, and used as a tool. But what’s important is figuring out how to use it in an ethical and inclusive way.”

Aside from the talk of AI, the conference has three “official” themes, Corrigan said: community, jobs and accessibility. The focus on jobs is especially key for universities bringing delegations of students to the conference with their games and art portfolios.

“We have 13 students traveling with us right now,” said Heather Cole, an instructor in the game development program at West Virginia University. “Getting to see that, hey, this is a career — and look at all these other people who are also here as part of their career. Because back in West Virginia, you don’t always think that (building video games) is a career.”

For those students, and for professionals, Hawkins said the in-person networking experience at the conference is one that can’t be found anywhere else.

“I’m so excited,” she said. “I’m ready for everyone to get here and experience the GDC magic.”

Here’s what to know about how the state decides what’s a drought and what’s not.

The Golden State is, of course, no stranger to droughts: we’ve been living through them for most of the last decade. They can mean big wildfires, bad growing conditions for farmers, and water restrictions.

Three Kinds of Drought

Droughts can be measured in a lot of different ways, but there are three basic kinds of drought that scientists look at.

• A meteorological drought means a lack of rainfall. In this case, those big storms left California doing just fine in that department.
• An agricultural drought generally means there’s not enough moisture in the soil, which makes it hard for plants to grow.
• A hydrologic drought means that rivers, streams and groundwater are lower than normal.

The U.S. Drought Monitor

All three of those factors go into something called the U.S. Drought Monitor. It’s a map that comes out every week on Thursdays, and you might’ve seen it in our weather forecasts here at NBC Bay Area.

It breaks up the country into color-coded areas — from yellow, which is just abnormally dry, all the way to a deep red color that signifies an “exceptional” drought — the kind where entire crops die off, and wells run dry. 

Right after the heavy rains in January 2023, the U.S. Drought Monitor map showed most of California in a “moderate” drought, and left a few places in a “severe” drought — the kind where fire danger is high, and fire season lasts longer.

The rains did manage to eliminate the areas of “extreme” drought, which is when fire season can last year round.

Reservoirs and Snowpack

The U.S. Drought Monitor is a national index. But here in California, there are other things state regulators look at.

First, there are reservoirs, including the big ones that are part of the State Water Project. Even the biggest rainstorm is not enough to refill the state’s largest man-made lakes after a multi-year drought — but that incredibly wet January got close, and brought them to 96 percent of their historical average.

Then there’s the Sierra snowpack, which actually makes up 30 percent of the state’s water storage. A month of storms at the start of 2023 put that above its historical average, at 138 percent by mid-February.

But the more important snowpack measurement happens in April, at the end of snow season, because snow can start to melt early during a warm winter. Water managers want it to pile up and stay frozen, so it can melt in the summer, and run off into creeks and streams that feed the state’s water system.

Wells Running Dry

In just the last decade, the state started tracking another indicator: problems with wells — especially in areas that depend heavily on groundwater, like the Central Valley. Some communities get most or all of their water from huge underground lakes that both homes and farms rely on, and those subterranean bodies of water can take a lot longer to fill back up than lakes on the surface.

In the summer of 2022, there were more household wells that literally ran out of water than any other quarter since state authorities started keeping track. And even after the big storms a few months later, almost two-thirds of the wells the state uses to measure and monitor groundwater were below their normal level.

It all means the wet start to 2023 got California closer to being out of a drought, but not all the way there. Droughts are stubborn, and even those unprecedented storms left the state needing more rain and more cool temperatures to officially get out of drought status. 

“During the pandemic, technology products like PCs and smartphones became incredibly important — and everybody bought new ones,” said tech analyst Bob O’Donnell, president of Technalysis Research. “The problem is now everybody’s got all these devices, and we’re in a tougher market.”

O’Donnell said Samsung needed to make a case for why users should buy even more technology — and it did so by leaning into its highest-performance products, aimed at content creators and power users. In a three-story pop-up near Union Square, Samsung is running interactive exhibits that tell the story of these new flagship devices, and show visitors what they can create with them.

Big and Bold

“The ‘Ultra’ brand means ‘big,’ it means ‘bold,’ it means the the best of the best,” said TM Roh, president of Samsung’s mobile electronics business, at the launch event called Galaxy Unpacked on February 1.

Roh spoke to reporters and analysts gathered inside San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium, high atop Nob Hill. There, Samsung took the wraps off its Galaxy S23 series of Android smartphones and Galaxy Book 3 series of Windows laptops — including a pricey and powerful Ultra model at the top of each lineup.

The $1199 Galaxy S23 Ultra smartphone has a huge screen and a massive battery, but Samsung thinks users will buy it for the camera — and O’Donnell agrees.

“When you ask people about buying a new smartphone, other than because it’s got a cracked screen, it’s because they want a better camera,” he said.

The phone’s main camera can shoot 200-megapixel photos and 8K video, and has special lower-resolution modes for better shooting in low light. “Expert” modes allow manual control over many of the camera’s settings, like shutter speed and white balance — and Samsung went out and found real experts to demonstrate it.

Seeing is Believing

“You do not have to take my word for it,” Roh told the crowd. “Seeing is believing.”

During the one-hour presentation, Samsung showed clips and behind-the-scenes action from two short films made by award-winning directors Sir Ridley Scott and Na Hong-Jin. Each film was shot entirely with Galaxy S23 Ultra smartphones, and so were the promotional shots and interviews shown during the unveiling.

“I think they’re doing it to prove a point,” O’Donnell said. “I don’t think you’re going to see Hollywood replace all their big cameras with these. … But what you are going to see is young filmmakers who can’t afford that big equipment, being able to create the same quality as the professionals.”

If the newest phone is intended for shooting epic movies, Samsung’s newest laptop is intended for editing them. The Galaxy Book 3 Ultra was on display after its unveiling, running Adobe Creative Cloud apps and interacting wirelessly with the latest Galaxy phones and tablets. The $2199, 16-inch laptop weighs almost a pound less than Apple’s comparably-sized MacBook Pro, and clearly takes aim at Apple’s tightly-integrated ecosystem with some magic tricks of its own.

Wireless Magic

“Once you’ve signed into that Samsung account, those devices then can work together,” explained Samsung product trainer Amy Brake, showing how users can use move the laptop’s mouse pointer onto the phone’s screen, grab a photo, and drag it back onto the Windows desktop. “Now you never have to email a photo to yourself again.”

The new devices also include a function called QuickShare that can generate a QR code to instantly share full-sized photos and videos to non-Samsung devices. (Samsung devices can use a fast direct Wi-Fi transfer similar to Apple’s AirDrop.)

Seamless interaction between devices is a luxury that’s been a competitive advantage for Apple for quite some time, O’Donnell said. And there’s a reason it’s taken this long for Samsung to catch up: Samsung’s phones run Google’s Android operating system, while its laptops run Windows, which is made by Microsoft.

“Apple controls their whole ecosystem,” O’Donnell said. “When it comes to partners like Samsung and Google and Microsoft, there’s a lot more work to make that a seamless experience, so it’s a lot harder for them.”

Pop-Up Inspiration

Samsung hopes the easy part will be imagining what you can do with its high-tech devices. But in case you need inspiration, the downtown San Francisco pop-up is filled with it. Visitors are invited to walk through three floors of short experiences centered around the new phones and laptops. You can photograph tiny extraterrestrials on an elaborate moonscape, sit for portraits in a high-tech studio, and check out the phones’ low-light capabilities on a stroll through a neon-lit side street in Seoul, South Korea.

Samsung’s “Galaxy Experience” pop-up is scheduled to be open through February 25 at 111 Powell Street in San Francisco. Samsung is already taking preorders for the new phones and laptops, and both Ultra products are slated to begin shipping on February 17.

As the clock ticked down on the 49ers’ 19 to 12 playoff victory against the Dallas Cowboys, raucous cheers and the unmistakable sound of a foghorn echoed off the glass and concrete of San Francisco’s tallest downtown buildings.

“What a game!” exclaimed University of San Francisco student Kyle Martinez. “I almost had a heart attack, I’m not gonna lie!”

Martinez and his friends were bundled up in their warmest 49ers gear, watching the game on giant LED screens at one of the Niners’ official playoff watch parties. This one took place at the outdoor event space called The Crossing at East Cut, on the site of the former Temporary Transbay Terminal.

“We know that San Francisco is our namesake, so we want to be able to create an atmosphere up in San Francisco like Levi’s Stadium,” said 49ers senior fan engagement manager Nick Clarke. “You’re going to hear some of the sounds that you would hear at Levi’s Stadium — not just fans cheering, but some of the touchdown songs and the starting lineup, everything like that.”

San Francisco is one of three cities where the 49ers are holding official watch parties throughout the NFL Playoffs. Just up the road from Levi’s Stadium, they’re also welcoming fans at San Pedro Social in San Jose, and after the Niners played in Mexico City last November, the team wanted to hold playoff watch parties there too. The parties include giveaway items at the door and raffles for special prizes including autographed memorabilia.

“We know there’s millions of 49ers fans, and we’ve only got 70,000 seats here, so what can we do beyond Levi’s Stadium? That’s where it comes in with the watch parties,” Clarke said. “We want folks to wear red, get loud and bring the energy.”

In San Francisco, the team got its wish. Fans wearing new and vintage 49ers gear showed up with wool hats and blankets and crowded around patio heaters, but once the Niners began scoring points, the cold weather seemed the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

“Dude, I’ve been a 49er fan since I was a kid,” a fan named Alejandro told us. “I had an older cousin try to turn me into a Raider fan. Didn’t work! … I’ve never heard a 49er fan leave to root for another team. But everybody wants to come root for us!”

The 49ers will hold their next round of watch parties on Sunday, January 29 when the team takes on the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC Championship at noon Pacific time.

“The jerseys have been flying off the shelves as fast as our retail team can make them,” said Nick Clarke, senior manager of fan engagement for the 49ers. “Okay, they’re here! Buy, buy, buy, buy! Okay, they’re gone, let’s see if we can get more!”

Leading up to game days, fans have been filing into the team’s official retail store on the ground level of Levi’s Stadium and snapping up the #13 jerseys long before closing time.

“There were no Purdy jerseys,” lamented Bay Area native Kiko Lomeli. “I wasn’t sure how big the hype was, but apparently, it’s pretty hyped.”

After an early season plagued by injuries, fans shopping at the store said they were thrilled to see the 49ers in the playoffs again, with a hero they never saw coming.

“We got through the injuries, and we got a quarterback, Brock Purdy, that’s phenomenal,” said lifelong 49ers fan and Levi’s Stadium worker Greg Campbell.

Purdy was the last pick in the NFL draft, earning him the nickname Mr. Irrelevant. But after becoming the first 49ers quarterback in team history to win his first three starts, Purdy has made himself relevant indeed.

“We were big Trey (Lance) supporters in the beginning,” said Amanda Mussynski. “And now we have Mr. Relevant.”

The team has managed to catch up with demand for some of the other hot jerseys, including newly-acquired running back Christian McCaffrey’s #23. That was good news for McCaffrey’s rapidly growing fan base, including some who came into town just to see the 49ers’ playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys. A young boy proudly showed off his pint-sized #23 jersey before carrying it to the cash register.

“He’s been saving up for his McCaffrey jersey, so we got off the plane literally an hour ago, and this was our first stop,” his mother explained.

“We came all the way from Arizona,” the boy added.

After all the team has overcome, Campbell said he had a good feeling about the NFL Playoffs.

“I feel like it’s Super Bowl or bust,” he said. “So we’re not gonna worry about the bust — it’s all Super Bowl. Super Bowl champions.”

On a chilly spring morning at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, a thin line of pure white fog stretched its way under the bridge deck and out toward Alcatraz.

As the waves crashed up onto the pavement at high tide, a man in a paint-spattered hoodie and a warm hat delicately traced the path of the fog with a brush, making a tiny oil painting of the fleeting image on a wooden board.

“There was this line right here,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking I was going to paint the bridge today, but I did see this, so I thought that was kind of remarkable to paint, that moment.”

Nearly as soon as he finished painting, the line of fog was gone — morphed into a totally different shape that now obscured the tops of the bridge towers, and muted their brilliant orange color.

The artist, John Paul Marcelo, quickly began to make a second painting as we talked.

“Claude Monet mentioned that London was one of his favorite places to paint, because of all the shades of gray,” he mused as he mixed four different shades of gray and began applying them to the outlines of the bridge and the shore.

Landscape paintings are Marcelo’s bread and butter. And landscapes that feature the Golden Gate Bridge are among his favorites.

“It’s always changing,” he said. “I’ve painted this well over a hundred times and I never get tired of it.”

But when he’s not painting scenes of San Francisco, its fog and its landmarks, there’s another subject Marcelo often paints.

“I’ve done some natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina,” he said. “And more recently, the fires up in Sonoma County.”

His paintings show the destruction to homes, vehicles and neighborhoods after deadly disasters that wiped entire communities off the map. Though he documents disasters of all kinds — natural and man-made — those two are among the worst, and have both been widely attributed to climate change.

“Many of these places are totally uninhabitable now,” he said. “You know, we think of climate refugees in places like Africa … But this is happening here in the United States as well.”

As he put the last brushstrokes on his second painting of the day, the Golden Gate Bridge wrapped in cool gray fog seemed a world away from the scenes of rubble and destruction he sometimes paints. But with his paintings of changing fog at the Golden Gate, Marcelo might actually be documenting yet another casualty of climate change.

The Fog Was Changing

“We had a hunch that the fog was changing, but we didn’t really know how,” said Todd Dawson, a plant ecology professor at U.C. Berkeley.

We spoke in a grove of redwood trees outside Dawson’s office, as a cool breeze from the west filtered through the foliage, bringing a slight chill to the sunny afternoon. Berkeley sits directly across the Bay from the Golden Gate Bridge, and is one of the first East Bay communities to feel a temperature drop as fog rolls into San Francisco.

Dawson knows the first signs of a fog event well — almost as well as he knows the redwood trees around his office. And he began to wonder if the two were connected.

“We got very interested in how the redwoods are interacting with the summertime fog,” he said.

Summertime fog is a well-known phenomenon in San Francisco. It’s the fog that rolls in off the ocean and over the hills in the afternoon, enveloping the city by nightfall, and hanging silently in the air until it slowly dissipates in the morning sunshine. Hike out past the Golden Gate to Land’s End, and you might find Nancy Hale — a San Francisco native who’s 70 years old, and has spent her whole life around fog.

“I mean, it’s pouring over the hill,” she said of the fog’s arrival in the mid-afternoon. “It looks like it’s almost solid because there’s so much fog.”

And just like Marcelo’s delicate brush, the fog has been painting the city in shades of gray — all summer long, for generations.

“The fog is our friend,” Hale said. “You could probably talk to 25 people in the city and they’d say, ‘Oh, this is my favorite place to watch the fog.”

Though a lot has changed about San Francisco in Hale’s 70 years, there’s one thing that hasn’t: Golden Gate Bridge workers still turn on the bridge’s two sets of massive foghorns manually when they notice visibility is reduced — and make a note of the weather in paper log books. Many of those logs have long since disappeared. So if Dawson wanted to find out how the fog was changing, he knew he’d need to find that data somewhere else.

It turns out there’s another place where workers are always watching the sky: airports. Dawson said some of the Bay Area’s airports had meticulous records that went back decades.

“The airport records were definitely making note of fog, and they were actually noting the height of the fog,” Dawson said.

Piecing together airport data with temperature records from weather stations, Dawson and his team were able to reconstruct a historical record of fog in the Bay Area all the way back to 1951 — the year before Nancy Hale was born.

“And it really did surprise us,” Dawson said. “We saw that fog had been on a perpetual decline in coastal California. It had declined by 33 percent over a 60-year period.”

The study was widely publicized. Nancy Hale, already concerned about climate change, found the news upsetting.

“The idea that I might be giving up my fog to climate change?” she said. “It makes me somewhere between disconsolate and angry.”

When Karl the Fog Takes a Vacation

Dawson’s research raised the possibility that San Francisco’s most celebrated resident might be moving out. The fog has long been talked about as a mysterious being of sorts, with a mind and a personality all its own. But since 2010, it’s also had a name: Karl the Fog.

Karl first appeared on Twitter in August of 2010, or “Fogust,” as Karl prefers to call the historically foggy month. Interviewed during that same month 12 years later, visitors to the city’s northern waterfront instantly recognized Karl’s name, and had heard all about his power to control the weather.

“It’s summertime, but it’s cold,” complained a woman in sunglasses.

“Certainly colder than I expected California to be,” a man named Johannes concurred.

Now on multiple social media platforms including Instagram, Karl the Fog had been posting photos of his cold gray antics around the city all throughout the summer of 2022. But when the end of Fogust rolled around, something unexpected happened: Karl abruptly took a vacation.

“It’s hot as hell out here,” said Julia Marshall. “I’ve never seen it this packed before.”

Marshall lives near Crissy Field’s east beach, a narrow strip of sandy shoreline in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge that’s a favorite launching spot for windsurfers and kiteboarders. It’s often chilly and rarely crowded. But on Labor Day, umbrellas and beachgoers in colorful swimwear dotted the sand and the shallow water as far as the eye could see. Entire families stood waist deep in the chilly Bay water, attempting to find relief from a record-setting heat wave.

“It’s a lot of people out here,” said another longtime neighborhood resident. “Usually it’s cold, foggy.”

“It’s wonderful until you have to go home to sleep with no air conditioning,” said another neighbor, who added that she’d already ordered a tiny portable air conditioner for her home.

A generation ago, it was unthinkable.

“Air conditioners were not in anybody’s mind in San Francisco,” Dawson said. “Well, a decade from now, probably everybody is going to be putting A/C in their house. Because it’s going to be a lot hotter in the summertime.”

Tiny, Tiny Water Droplets

Though Karl the Fog may live in San Francisco, the effects of his presence — or absence — are felt all over the Bay Area. NBC Bay Area meteorologist Rob Mayeda has the difficult task of forecasting the fog and its effects on temperatures all over the region.

“It’s a critical tool not only for maintaining a mediterranean climate, but in some ways reducing fire danger,” he said. “And preventing inland temperatures from hitting all kinds of excessive heat warnings.”

Mayeda sometimes refers to fog as “ocean air conditioning” that brings both cooling and moisture to the Bay Area during the hottest and driest part of the year.

“Fog technically is tiny, tiny water droplets,” Mayeda said. “And for the Bay Area, our fog, the technical term is ‘advection fog.’ And that’s just a fancy way of saying it’s moving.”

In fact, it’s the inland heat that moves the fog, creating a vacuum that pulls it in from the ocean.

“As that warm air rises inland, the cool marine air starts pouring over the hilltops,” Mayeda said. “So it kind of comes in and replaces it.”

Dawson calls it the “fog conveyor belt,” and says the bigger the temperature difference between the cool ocean and the warm inland valleys, the faster that conveyor belt moves.

But in recent years, Mayeda says the fog has looked different. On days when the ocean is too warm, fog may not form at all. And even when it does, sometimes it’s getting flattened by stubborn areas of high pressure lingering over the Golden Gate.

“Strong high pressure acts a bit like a ceiling,” Mayeda said. “So if the Bay Area, the mountains on all sides are like walls to the room, when high pressure is strong, it can squish that layer down pretty easily so that the cooling effects are just limited to the inner bay or the coast.”

That means on a hot summer day, San Francisco might still see some cooling effects from the flattened fog, but Livermore and Pleasanton might be left to swelter in triple-digit temperatures. Those inland areas might also miss out on the moisture carried in by the fog — moisture that, until recently, had never really been measured.

“When we started to study it, we realized that fog comes in horizontally off the ocean (but) rainfall comes in vertically,” Dawson said. “Our rainfall collectors are only getting rain, but they’re not going to get the fog.”

To measure the moisture in fog, Dawson realized he needed a new approach. The answer lay in a hand-built metal device he showed us in his office.

“This is one of the fog collector designs,” Dawson explained.

About three feet tall and made of commonly-available hardware store parts, the four-sided device has dozens of vertical strings like a harp, and a bottle in the center labeled “Fog H₂O.” The strings are intended to catch droplets of fog carried by the wind as it blows through. The water drips down the strings into thin metal gutters, and ultimately runs down into the bottle where it can be measured and analyzed, Dawson explained.

Once the fog collectors were placed out in the elements, Dawson said it didn’t take long to make a major discovery.

“One of the things that people assumed is fog wasn’t very much,” he said. “And we came to realize that, in fact, it constitutes somewhere between 30 to 40 percent of all the water that comes into coastal California.”

It’s water that blankets the redwood trees and, Dawson later discovered, keeps them alive through the driest part of the year.

“We can put a core into a tree and we can look at the rings,” he explained. “Fog water has a very distinct H₂O signal compared to rainfall. … We pick those up in the tree.”

By drilling tiny holes into trees and pulling out thin columns of wood to analyze the chemical signature of the water in their rings, Dawson determined that redwoods get a lot of their water from fog — but a little less every year.

“You can see a climatic change in the tree ring record, and that fog signal has abated,” he said.

What Can We Use Water For?

Redwoods may be the natural world’s best example of efficient fog collectors, but many plant species can benefit from fog. Even hardwoods like oak trees can absorb some water from fog through their leaves and branches. But on the campus of Cal State Monterey Bay, some recently planted oak saplings are getting a little extra help absorbing the fog from Dan Fernandez, a professor in the department of applied environmental science.

Next to each tree sits a tall rectangle of plastic mesh, stretched taut like a screen door, with a metal trough and a funnel at the bottom. Fernandez explained the devices are fog collectors, much like Dawson’s, but bigger. They catch moisture from the fog and deliver it directly to the roots of the young trees.

“The droplets get captured on the mesh,” he explained to a small group of students, using a miniature model of a fog collector and a spray bottle to demonstrate. “And then as they get larger and larger, they reach the point where gravity takes over, and pulls them down.”

Fernandez said there’s a surprising amount of water in the fog that can sweep through campus at night or early in the morning.

“When we have a fog event, (the oak saplings) may get a couple of liters of water during that time, that they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten,” he said.

A lot of Fernandez’s research is centered around the “how,” “when” and “where” of capturing water from fog. But when asked, “why?” Fernandez does what any good teacher would do: He answers a question with a question.

“I guess the answer to that question is: what can we use water for?” Fernandez replied. “Really, anything we can use water for, the water that we collect from fog, we can use that for. The question is: is there enough to make it worthwhile?”

And that second question has drawn interest from all over. Researchers from engineering schools including Virginia Tech and MIT have sent prototypes to Fernandez for testing in the California fog — which moves faster and contains more water than fog that occurs on the East Coast, Fernandez said. Getting the most water from a fog collector is a matter of materials, placement, orientation and, of course, size. And just up the road at U.C. Santa Cruz, an experiment is underway to test the effects of each of those variables — especially the last one.

Growing Tomatoes and Hope

“Farms use a lot of water, of course, and some of that water could be harvested from fog,” explained Peter Weiss-Penzias, a faculty researcher at U.C. Santa Cruz.

Weiss spoke to us on the university’s very own farm, used for all sorts of agricultural research, and situated not far from the Pacific Ocean, where the fog begins its journey. At the edge of the farm, Weiss and his students have built a tall wooden structure consisting of three large rectangles covered in black plastic honeycomb mesh. It’s a fog collector with a total size of about 13.5 square meters. And it’s an experiment being conducted in direct response to California’s recent string of unprecedented droughts.

“This thing’s really efficient at collecting the fog, so it drips off pretty fast,” Weiss explained.

Up close, the mesh is an intricate pattern of thick and thin strands, braided together. It’s designed in Germany, Weiss explained, and it mimics the needles of redwood trees.

“Something called biomimicry, where it uses these small filaments that lead to larger filaments,” he said. “Because especially redwoods, they have evolved with the fog.”

The structure is covered in scientific instruments, and each morning, it’s covered in water. The water goes into a rain gauge to be measured, and then falls into the soil where Weiss is growing a handful of potted tomato plants.

“We’re getting approximately five liters of water per night,” Weiss said with a slight smile.

The tiny tomatoes are starting to sprout, and with them comes hope, Weiss said, that the fog might not be just a victim of climate change: it could also be a solution.

The Driest Place on Earth

California isn’t the first place to experiment with harnessing the water in coastal fog. At U.C. Berkeley, a meeting convened in September to host a group of visiting scientists from Chile, a country where fog collection is nothing new.

“We have been doing this for several decades already, since the 80s,” said Juan Luis Garcia, a geography professor at Universidad Catolica de Chile, often abbreviated U.C. Chile (but not affiliated with California’s U.C. system).

Chile is home to the Atacama Desert, known as the driest place on earth. And there, U.C. Chile operates a remote research station that gets all of its water from fog.

“So when you cook, when you go to the bathroom and take showers, it’s all fog water,” said Sergio Guitart, U.C. Chile’s executive officer of field stations.

Pablo Osses, who runs the Atacama research station, said it’s high quality water with a unique flavor from the minerals it carries.

“It’s tasty,” he said. “It’s a bit sweet.”

But Osses said Chile’s environmental researchers can’t take credit for being the first to capture fog. Anthropologists have pieced together evidence that indigenous people in what’s now Chile were capturing water from fog up to a thousand years ago. Researchers found remnants of clay vessels placed at the bottom of flat rock faces covered in lichen — the colorful, moss-like organisms that are a cross between an algae and a fungus, and can sometimes have a hairy texture.

“So the lichen works like hair, catching the drops, and then (the drops) start falling … by gravity,” Osses explained.

People who wanted to capture the water would place clay bowls or sometimes leather bags at the bottom of the lichen-covered rocks, and wait for the water to fall into them.

A Tower of Fog

Chile and California are known as “transhemispheric twins:” two places with strikingly similar environmental features, on opposite sides of the equator. Because of their similar weather patterns, what works in Chile has a good chance of working in California — and that’s capturing imaginations, even outside the usual fields of study that focus on weather and water.

“Sutro Tower’s just giant,” remarked Eduardo Bendek, an optical scientist at NASA who attended the U.C. Berkeley meeting of visiting scientists.

The iconic communications tower on San Francisco’s second-tallest hill is often swallowed up by fog on summer afternoons. Bendek ordinarily studies the physics of space telescopes, but a recent physics project with one of his students landed right here on our own planet, envisioning Sutro Tower as a giant fog collector.

“You can think on the order of 5,000 gallons a day — which is not bad,” Bendek said.

The plan would call for retractable sheets of plastic mesh to deploy up and down the tower’s structure when it’s foggy out, and roll away when the skies are clear. Bendek envisions using gravity to feed the water to neighborhoods and parks on the adjacent hillsides.

“You have this source of water in the fog, that occurs in summer, when there’s a lack of water here in California,” Bendek said. “We have a drought, so let’s do something about it.”

Fogtober

We spoke a few weeks after the historic Labor Day heat wave, watching the tower become completely enveloped by fog throughout the course of our conversation. During a month that’s historically sunny and warm, Karl the Fog proudly announced his unexpected return to the city on social media, proclaiming it the month of “Fogtober.” Karl did his best to ruin spectators’ view of the Fleet Week Parade of Ships that month, and for the first time in recent memory, Karl wrought havoc on the Blue Angels‘ air show three days in a row.

It turns out that since Dawson’s first study, the fog has made a bit of a comeback — though not always during the months San Franciscans have come to expect it. And what’s more, some of the foggiest years have been the ones in which California needed water the most.

“When we had the drought between 2012 and 2016 here in California, there was actually a tick up in the amount of fog for that four-year period,” Dawson said.

“The question remains, will climate change always result in less fog?” asked Fernandez. “Maybe it’ll result in more fog at certain times, and then eventually less fog.”

And if it’s true that more fog might show up just when California needs water, then Bendek points out that the Blue Angels can teach us something about how to best collect that water.

“When the Blue Angels fly, and they pull a lot of G’s, you see this little fog running on the wings,” Bendek said.

Sometimes it shows up as fog trails on either side of the cockpit, he said. At other times, it shows up as a straight line of fog, just behind the leading edge of the wings. And that’s the teachable moment, Bendek says — because it illustrates the best place to put a fog collector. If a coastal hill is like a giant airplane wing, with air and moisture running over it as it comes in from the ocean, then Bendek says fog could be most effectively collected just behind the top of that hill — a little ways down the slope that faces away from the ocean.

“It’s where it’s most likely that the water density will be the most,” he said.

Bendek said he could envision retractable fog collectors lining the hills of the Bay Area coast one day. It could take decades of environmental studies and major regulatory changes in order to happen. But there’s an important small step that could happen first — and it’s just on the horizon.

Save Every Drop

“If the drought continues like it is, we’re going to be looking for all different ways to save every drop,” said Joshua Cosgrove, the acting water director in the water district that serves the foggy community of Daly City, just south of San Francisco.

Working with Weiss and Fernandez, Daly City and the neighboring community of Pacifica are already taking measurements, with small instrumented fog collectors on their foggiest hilltops.

“We have a lot of customers that potentially might be interested in putting a fog collector in their backyard,” said Adrienne Carr, the general manager for Pacifica’s water district, the North Coast County Water District.

The two suggested that fog water could be used in much the same way as stored rain water: to water lawns, flowers and fruit trees, offsetting domestic water usage the way solar panels can offset a household’s need for electricity from the power grid. If the measurements show promise, they’re prepared to look into offering fog collection incentives in the same way water districts in San Mateo County offer rebates for installing rain barrels.

“Potentially get kits together, and people can build them themselves,” Carr suggested.

Is This Where They Make Fog?

The Bay Area might be at the beginning of a long journey when it comes to harnessing the fog — and protecting it. But for Nancy Hale, the mission is much smaller than the vast Pacific ocean or the mighty Golden Gate Bridge.

For her, it’s about a future where her grandkids — and their kids — can cross that bridge into a city that’s painted in shades of gray, just like one of Marcelo’s landscapes — as they wonder where it all comes from.

“My grandson said, ‘Is this where they make fog? Right there?'” she said, gesturing to the hills at the north end of the bridge where thick fog pours down the slopes. “And I realized, see? Another generation, starting his own relationship and his own story about fog.”

The murmurs started a few years ago, when the initial deadline was looming, and crowds rushed to the DMV to wait in line for hours — scrambling to get the new kind of driver’s license that will soon be required to board a commercial airline flight. But the roots of Real ID go back much earlier than that.

What’s a Real ID?

The Real ID Act is a federal law passed in 2005, originally billed as an anti-terrorism measure after the attacks on 9/11. Some of the attackers are believed to have used fake IDs to board the planes they later hijacked. Supporters of Real ID argued that a more secure standard for driver’s licenses would prevent that from happening again.

The principle is simple: Your driver’s license is basically your key to everything. You need it to go to a bar, pick up a concert ticket, or get on an airplane. So, now the federal government wants to make that key harder to copy. They gave states a deadline to design a new, more secure driver’s license — and after most states missed that deadline, they extended it.

Fast forward a few years, and the deadline was extended again due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and then again in late 2022. Now, the deadline to get your Real ID is May 7, 2025.

Starting on that day, you’ll need a Real ID-compliant driver’s license to enter secure federal buildings, nuclear power plants, military bases, and of course, the big one: airport security. That means in just over two years, your old driver’s license will no longer get you onto an airplane. 

How to Get a Real ID

So, how do you get a Real ID? Basically, you have to prove that you’re… you.

First, you have to go to the DMV in person. They’ll take a brand new photo of you, and also capture your thumb print. Those go into a massive new database, along with copies of the documents you have to bring to the DMV with you. And that’s where it gets tricky.

The combination of documents you’ll need to bring looks something like this:

• The first document needs to establish identity. That could be a passport, a birth certificate or a green card.
• The second document needs to show your social security number. That could be a social security card, or it could be something from your employer like a W-2, a 1099 or a pay stub.
• The third thing you need is proof that you actually live where you say you do. A utility bill, a lease, a mortgage or any other official document with your address on it should suffice.
• You might need a fourth piece of documentation if you’ve ever changed your name — for instance, a marriage license or a court document with a record of the name change.

Of course, getting a Real ID is technically optional. You can still get a regular California driver’s license without the little golden bear insignia in the corner. But if your driver’s license doesn’t have the Real ID seal on it, it won’t get you through airport security. You’ll need to bring a passport to the airport instead.

Criticisms of Real ID

Real ID certainly has its critics, including privacy advocates, and those who say it will basically prevent undocumented immigrants from traveling by air. The Real ID Act is also the law that paved the way for former President Trump’s border wall — with specific language to let the federal government skip the environmental review process for roads and fences at the border.

It’s true that border security has little to do with your driver’s license, but the American political process can be a convoluted one indeed. Real ID is now the law of the land, and if you want to fly out of U.S. airports, you have until May 7, 2025 to get yours.

If you signed up to vote by mail, you’ll get your ballot in an envelope with an official “Election Mail” seal on it. Read it over, and fill it out carefully. Try not to miss anything, because the pages can be long, and they’re usually double-sided.

What if I make a mistake?

First of all, you should try not to make any mistakes on your ballot. If you do, and it’s early enough, you might be able to request a new ballot from your county elections office.

But in a worst case scenario, where you make a mistake and there’s no time to get a new ballot, you can try to cross out the mistake with an “X” and clearly mark your intended choice. Election workers will try their best to figure out what you meant, so they can count your vote.

How do I make sure my vote is counted?

Once you’re done voting, most counties have a receipt or a stub you can tear off. You’ll use that later to go online and see if your vote’s been counted. The state also has a website where you can sign up for text alerts about your ballot.

But first, here’s the important part: Fold up your ballot, put it in the envelope, and sign the envelope — using the same signature that’s on your driver’s license. If you don’t sign it, it won’t count. Then, seal it up, and get ready to send it.

Where can I drop off my ballot?

Once your ballot is completed and sealed, you have some choices. First of all, you can bring it to your county elections office. In San Francisco, that’s on the ground floor of City Hall.

Most counties also have official ballot drop boxes outside government buildings and other convenient locations.

But as the name “vote by mail” implies, you can also just drop your ballot in the mail — at any U.S. Postal Service mailbox. Your ballot return envelope has the same official seal on it as the envelope your ballot arrived in, and that means the Postal Service will deliver it to your local election office with no stamps required. It will count as long as it’s postmarked on or before Election Day.

Can I still vote in person?

Yes, you can — even if you registered to vote by mail.

In San Francisco, for example, you can bring your mail-in ballot to your assigned polling place, and you can either drop it off there, or you can trade it for an in-person ballot. Some other Bay Area counties will let you do that at any polling place.

If you lose your mail-in ballot, and there’s no time to get a new one, you can vote a “provisional ballot” — which will get counted after Election Night, once officials confirm that you’re registered, and make sure you didn’t vote twice.

The polls are open until 8 p.m. on November 8th. Then we’ll have live results on NBC Bay Area, and right here at nbcbayarea.com.

Article 34 Elections

Berkeley, Oakland and South San Francisco are all asking voters for permission to build public housing sometime in the future. They’re not asking to raise taxes, or proposing a specific development. They’re literally just asking permission — something that’s required under Article 34 of the California constitution.

California passed Article 34 in 1950, and no other state has anything like it. It says cities need voter approval to build affordable housing with public money. Critics have been calling it racist for decades, but courts have upheld it. So, for now, cities are using ballot measures like these to get permission from voters before they secure land, funding and contractors. State records dating back to the 1990s show that voters have approved Article 34 measures about 80 percent of the time.

In 2024, California voters will get to say if they want to repeal Article 34 entirely. 

San Francisco’s Two Competing Propositions

San Francisco already got permission from voters in 2020 to build affordable housing.

Now, two competing ballot measures, Propositions D and E, are promising to cut through the red tape and get that housing built more quickly.

Proposition D comes from Mayor London Breed, and most of its funding comes from tech executives. The mayor says it could cut the time to build housing developments from six years to six months, for projects in which a significant portion of the units are marked as affordable, and the workers building them are all making a living wage. Prop D also raises the income threshold for some of those units, so more people can qualify to live in affordable housing.

Opponents of Prop D say they worry it’s not picky enough: that it could end up fast-tracking a lot of small studios for middle income, young, single people, in buildings that also have luxury condos.

Proposition E was written by the Board of Supervisors, and it would fast-track some housing developments, but only the ones that meet very stringent requirements.

Compared to Prop D, a higher percentage of units would have to be affordable to qualify for fast-tracking under Prop E, and a certain number of those units would need to be 2- and 3-bedroom floor plans suitable for larger families. The workers who build the housing would have to be in a union. Prop E would keep a low income threshold, so not as many middle income renters would qualify.

Prop E’s opponents say they worry the rules are too strict — and because projects under Prop E can still be held up for environmental review, they worry it leaves too much red tape, so the housing the city needs wouldn’t actually get built.

Because they’re so similar, only one of these propositions can win. If both get more than 50% of the vote, whichever one gets the most votes will become law. 

So far, Prop D has raised more than $2 million, with endorsements including the Chronicle, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the Chinese American Democratic Club and State Senator Scott Wiener.

Prop E has raised more than $700,000, with endorsements from the San Francisco Democratic Party, a number of labor unions, the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Coub, and Assemblymember Phil Ting.

Taxing Vacant Apartments

Of course, the quickest way to house more people is if the housing is already built. So, San Francisco and Berkeley are both asking voters if they want to put a big tax on land owners who let rental units sit empty for months or years at a time.

San Francisco’s Proposition M comes from District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston, who estimates there are some 40,000 vacant apartments and condos in the city. The tax would aim to make it really expensive to keep units off the market — and if more units are for rent, proponents say, that could theoretically lead to lower prices. The money raised from the tax would go toward affordable housing.

Berkeley’s Measure M is similar: both measures apply only to multi-unit buildings, and both have a tax that increases the longer a unit is off the market.

The San Francisco and Berkeley measures are modeled after a vacancy tax in Vancouver, Canada, that took effect in 2018. The rental market there has improved since then, though economists say the tax isn’t the only reason why.

Rent Control in Richmond

For people who already rent a home, San Francisco and Berkeley each have some form of rent control. So does the city of Richmond — and there, Measure P could strengthen that law, giving Richmond some of the strongest rent control in the Bay Area.

Right now, landlords can raise the rent up to 6 percent on a rent controlled property, depending on the rate of inflation. Measure P would cut that in half to 3 percent — or less, if inflation slows down.

Inflation is, of course, the very reason the city council wanted to put this on the ballot. They say prices have gone up, and wages have not. Half of the people who live in Richmond are renters, so council members think this has a good shot at passing.

The formula specified in Measure P is the same formula that’s now used to calculate rent control in Oakland.

Housing for Teachers

Rent control only works after you’ve moved in. And now, a South Bay school district is worried teachers won’t move there in the first place if they can’t afford the rent. So the Alum Rock Union School District put Measure S on the ballot: a school bond measure with one unusual feature. 

In addition to funding classrooms and technology, Measure S would set aside money to build subsidized housing for teachers. School board members say they want to address a looming teacher shortage, by making it affordable for entry-level teachers to live in Silicon Valley.

Measure S needs a 55 percent vote to pass, and the local taxpayers’ association is opposing it, questioning the need for new classrooms and more teachers in a district whose enrollment has been declining.

In an ironic twist, some experts have postulated that the drop in enrollment is happening because there’s not enough affordable housing in the district.

Housing remains one of the Bay Area’s defining issues, and these measures are a lot for voters to digest. We’ll have complete coverage of what they decide as the results roll in on Election Night, right here at nbcbayarea.com.

While a lot of people were working from home for the last two years, some workers were using that time to finish up a big change to Highway 101. Where there used to be carpool lanes, now the Bay Area’s newest express lanes give drivers the choice to fly past the traffic for a price.

How do express lanes work?

The Bay Area now has 155 miles of express lanes, with more on the way. They all operate on weekdays from 5 a.m. until 8 p.m. During those hours, if you want to drive in those lanes, you’ll need to have a FasTrak toll tag.

You can move in and out of the express lanes anywhere there’s a dashed line. But be careful: in some places, there’s a double white line, and that’s illegal to cross.

Back in the old days, you just needed two people in the car to drive in most Bay Area carpool lanes — or you could buy a sticker for your electric car, and drive in the lane by yourself. But with express lanes, it’s a bit more complicated.

The signs have pricing on them, and the price is constantly changing from one minute to the next. If you’re driving by yourself in a regular car, you can move into the express lane, and you’ll automatically pay the toll that’s on the sign. If you have a clean air vehicle or a two-person carpool, you can pay half price if you have one of the newer FasTrak Flex toll tags. Buses, motorcycles and carpools of three or more people can use the lane for free.

How is pricing for express lanes determined?

But how do they come up with the prices? That goes back to why the lanes were created in the first place: they’re using the laws of supply and demand to make traffic move faster.

Caltrans did a study and found out the old two-person carpool lanes were just getting too congested. They could build new ones, but they’d be just as slow as regular lanes. Caltrans also studied the option of switching to a three-person carpool lane, but it turned out that would have the opposite problem: not enough cars would use it, and so the rest of the lanes — the “general-purpose lanes,” in transportation speak — would get slower.

But what if they could sell off the extra room in that 3-person carpool lane to drivers who are really in a hurry? It turns out that would take enough cars out of the general-purpose lanes to make everyone go faster, and it would also mean less pollution from stop-and-go traffic.

That’s the theory behind toll express lanes: a three-person carpool lane in which the leftover space gets sold off. But the theory only works in practice when the right balance of cars exists between the express lane and the regular lanes. That’s why the tolls are always going up and down.

When the express lane starts to fill up, the price starts to rise. It can go as high as $15, at which point most drivers will say it’s not worth it. So then, if the lane starts to empty out, the price goes down — as low as 50 cents. On a typical day, the average toll during peak commuting hours is about $7, all computed automatically, in real time, based on the traffic.

Once you enter the lane, you’ve locked in your price. Even if the price on the digital signs goes up, you’ll pay what the sign originally said until you get to the end of the current zone. Then, look up and check the toll for the next zone, so you can decide if it’s worth the money to stay in the lane, or move over to the right and save some cash.

What happens if you try to cheat the system?

But if you’re thinking of cheating the system, watch out. CHP officers are patrolling those lanes, and they’ll get a signal if you’re using the carpool switch on your FasTrak tag. If they pull up behind you and see that you’re actually all by yourself, you can expect to see some flashing lights and receive at least a $400 ticket.

NBC Bay Area’s sister station Telemundo 48 will air every game and will have complete coverage from start to finish. Our Digital Correspondent Abbey Fernández interviewed Telemundo 48’s sports anchors Carlos Yustis and Maximiliano Cordaro. They share their winner predictions, list of featured players, what will happen with Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo following the tournament, and more.

The interview is conducted in Spanish. 

Carlos will report from Qatar and Maximiliano from here in the Bay Area. They will have all the action. Be sure to give them all follow so you don’t miss out:

Carlos Yustis: @CarlosYustisTV

Maximiliano Cordaro: @MaxCordaro

Telemundo Área de la Bahía is your exclusive home for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Coverage starts November 20. 

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More young adults are facing lifelong crippling student debt, a volatile economy impacted by a global pandemic and a housing crisis forcing a majority of young Americans to live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression.

At 26 years old, Evan Fu was living in Northern California when he found himself grappling with a confluence of these crises. Put simply, it was overwhelming.

“I was a mental wreck at the time. I think what really hit me was not knowing what the future would hold,” Fu said.

After discontinuing his enrollment at UC Santa Cruz, Fu worked a number of jobs throughout the Bay Area and Santa Cruz. It didn’t take long for the issue of housing to come to the forefront of his concerns.

Fu does not consider himself housing insecure. He could move back in with his parents in Southern California if he had to, like millions of Americans have done due to financial impacts caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. But more than a literal roof over his head, Fu says he was desperate for a sense of community – community he says he found when he attended college in Santa Cruz.

In 2018, Fu bought a van for $22,000 then spent $6000 and 600 hours retrofitting it with help from his father who has a background in building cabinetry.

Fu has been living in his converted van full time for more than two years documenting his journey on YouTube with an account that now has tens of thousands of subscribers.

“In my current state of life, this is the best ‘housing’ situation because it gives me that flexibility. In some ways it gives me stability,” Fu said. “Because if I’m renting an apartment or house, in a sense, I’m more insecure because I’m giving up more money than living in a van. And I don’t know how much rent is going to go up five years from now or if I’m going to need to move for school or work.”

When asked if his housing solution is for everyone, Fu said “absolutely not.”

“There’s advantages to this lifestyle, but I can’t possibly see everyone [doing it]. I’m not married, I don’t have kids.”

Not everyone in the City of Santa Cruz is happy about having van dwellers parked on public streets. After receiving a number of complaints, the city is currently working on an ordinance to ban oversized, unpermitted vehicles from overnight public street parking.

“There are public safety and public health issues,” said Santa Cruz City Councilmember Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson who introduced the ordinance. “It includes having waste, having human waste into our water systems. It includes having hypodermic needles and other trash in our water systems.”

When asked about concerns surrounding criminalizing homelessness, Councilmember Kalantari-Johnson said criminalization is a last resort.

“There is a safeguard in this ordinance that says if any individual is living in their vehicle and they are interested in a safe parking space and program, but there is not one available, then they are safeguarded against being cited or any other consequences,” she said.

Facing other accusations by citizen groups the new law would directly create more unsheltered homelessness, city officials say they are working to create more ‘Safe Parking’ locations, which are sites where van dwellers can legally park and access housing services that include case management and a pathway to permanent housing. 

The ordinance is currently under state review.

“This is the first time that our city is committing to investing in these [housing] solutions. The ordinance gives us an opening and an opportunity to both address the impacts on neighborhoods, which are pretty significant, as well as get folks into a pathway to permanent housing,” said Councilmember Kalantari-Johnson.

Fu’s van may not be banned from parking on public streets overnight according to the ordinance’s language, which mostly refers to RVs. However, he understands neighbors’ concerns. 

“I’m trying to figure out what I can do for me. I want to share my life and how I did van life not to convince others to do van life but to convince others there needs to be a solution that they need to figure out in their lives and try to collectively [figure out] what is the solution that can work for all of us,” he said. 

Watch the Investigative Unit’s four-part investigative series on California’s housing crisis: Overpriced, Overwhelmed, Over it!

Making It in the Bay May 13, 2022

Overpriced, Overwhelmed, Over it! Investigating California's Housing Crisis

synced in Aug 3, 2022

Synced In Q&A: Overpriced, Overwhelmed, Over it!

Tents, umbrellas and beach chairs covered the sandy shoreline as far as the eye could see, with clusters of people out in the water, frolicking in the waves of the infamously frigid Bay.

“It’s crowded, it’s hot, it’s beautiful!” said a woman who stood atop a low concrete wall, taking pictures of the crowd. “Usually it’s cold, foggy. I’ve never seen it this crowded, and I’m from the Bay Area.”

In a city where air conditioning isn’t common, many said they’d come to the often-chilly spot just east of the Golden Gate to seek refuge from the heat — and quickly found out that everyone else seemed to have had the same idea.

“I come to this beach probably three times a week, and I’ve never seen it this packed before,” said Julia Marshall, who added she’d had a lot of trouble finding parking. “I think it’s just the holiday weekend, it’s hot as hell out here, and everyone just wants to get out and feel the sun on their skin.”

Frequented by visitors to the city, Crissy Field is known for its views of rapidly-moving fog in the summer months, rolling in over the water and wrapping its chilly fingers around the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Normally you cannot see the bridge,” said Alex Hoffman, as she cooled her face off with a small battery-powered fan. “You’re taking somebody who is not from San Francisco on a walk here, you have to convince them that there’s actually a bridge there.”

Standing with Hoffman, another woman said she’d ordered a small air conditioner for the week of hot weather ahead.

“It’s wonderful until we have to go home to sleep with no air conditioning,” she said. “So we’re gonna stay here (at the beach) as long as we can.”

The sun was shining outside, and the students in Mr. Voyer’s sixth grade classroom were getting restless.

With just days left until summer vacation, spring fever was in full effect at San Joaquin Elementary in Stockton. But in the battle to keep his students’ attention, Mr. Voyer had one more trick up his sleeve.

“Pretend like you’re balancing a plate on your hand,” he told the class.

Then he picked up a one-pound square bean bag and placed it on a student’s hand in the front row. It was the start of what promised to be an unforgettable lesson in physical education.

Part Teacher, Part Pro Athlete

Nate Voyer isn’t just a sixth grade teacher. He’s also a professional player in the American Cornhole League, currently in his rookie season. In fact, after many years as an assistant principal, Voyer says moving back into the classroom has allowed him to more easily balance his education career with his brand new sporting career. The school district has even assigned a dedicated substitute teacher to fill in whenever he has to miss class for a tournament.

Voyer’s students are some of his biggest fans. His class watched together as he made his television debut, playing doubles alongside former 49ers tight end Vernon Davis. Though the pair didn’t win the tournament, Voyer made an impressive showing, throwing the fan-favorite “airmail” shot three times in a row.

Basic Rules of Cornhole

The game of tossing bean bags at a small round hole in a slanted wooden board seems simple enough.

“I don’t care if you’re 7 or 70,” Voyer said. “If you can throw a 1-pound bag 27 feet, you can play cornhole.”

Players just call them “bags” because they don’t actually contain beans — or corn. The American Cornhole League requires the bags to be 6 inches square, and filled with plastic resin beads — almost exactly 1 pound of them. The bags are tossed 27 feet at a slanted 2-by-4 foot board with a 6-inch round hole near the top.

Players take turns throwing four bags per round. A bag in the hole is worth three points, and a bag on the board is worth one point. Cornhole uses “cancel scoring” so if Player A gets two bags in the hole, and Player B gets three, the first two shots cancel out, and Player B gets 3 points for that round. The first player to reach 21 wins.

Standing at the white board in front of his class, Voyer explained that at its highest levels, cornhole is as much a game of strategy as a game of skill. As a young and growing sport, players are innovating new kinds of shots every season. But for now, there are six basic shots to know about:

Types of Shots in Cornhole

• Slide: The most common shot in cornhole, the slide shot hits the center of the board, and then slides into the hole.
• Block: Thrown either intentionally or by accident, a block shot lands in the center of the board, but stops before dropping into the hole — creating an obstacle for your opponent.
• Airmail: Cornhole’s equivalent to a swish in basketball, an airmail goes high in the air and drops straight into the hole — flying over any blocking bags that might be in the way.
• Push: Often thrown to “clean up” at the end of a round, a push shot shoves a blocking bag — hopefully your own — into the hole.
• Cut: Sometimes thrown by accident at the novice level, experts use the cut shot to steer around obstacles — throwing bags at an angle so that they hit the board and jump diagonally toward the hole.
• Roll/Flop: Among the newest advanced shots to become trendy in professional play, a roll or flop shot hits the board in front of a blocking bag, and then catapults over it into the hole.

Harder Than It Looks

After a brief classroom explanation, Voyer’s students were ready to line up and head outside. It took them only a few throws to realize that 27 feet is an awfully long way to toss something at such a small target. Though all of them had experienced cornhole before at a backyard gathering or tailgate party, informal cornhole is often played at shorter distances, with lighter bags. Voyer explained the proper technique:

“It’s like a pendulum, like on a clock,” he said, demonstrating the underhand swinging motion with a straight arm and no bend in his elbow — and then a quick flick of the wrist as the bag left his hand. “At the very end, it’s like a frisbee movement, and you’re throwing like that … because we want a nice pancake style bag that will land on the board flat and slide into the hole.”

Throwing bags that fly high in the air and land flat on the board is a skill that relies heavily on muscle memory, Voyer said. Many professionals practice daily to maintain their accuracy.

“We have some guys that throw a thousand bags a day,” said Joseph Fields, who directs the American Cornhole League’s Western Confernce — the conference that includes California.

“Anyone Can Play, and Anyone Can Win”

Fields spoke in an interview at the ACL Open tournament in Sacramento, where Voyer and other serious players from Northern California showed up to compete. Cornhole pros from around the country travel to tournaments in a different city almost every weekend during the season, giving amateur players a chance to take them on or team up with them in the “blind draw” doubles round, where players are matched up at random.

The blind draw at ACL Open tournaments is emblematic of the league’s motto: “Anyone Can Play, and Anyone Can Win.” In the American Cornhole League, there are no age groups and no gender divisions: players are separated only by skill level, and the top 256 players can compete as professionals for serious prize money (which totaled more than half a million dollars across all the tournaments in 2021).

“We’ve got some kids as young as 12, up to age 70, early 70s,” said Jodi Lim, a professional player from San Diego who’s 52 years old. “I’m playing against some of the pros who are my daughter’s age — 20, 21, 22.”

Lim said that like many other pros his age, he found cornhole after years of playing other sports that require good hand-eye coordination. Most recently, he said, he played on the Golf Channel’s amateur tour. But unlike the other sports he’s played, Lim said there’s no single type of athlete who’s good at cornhole.

“I think (cornhole has) a pretty even playing field across the ages as well as physiques, sizes,” Lim said. “One of the things that helped me in golf, too, is I was able to stay calm under pressure, not get too frustrated if I missed a shot, and just concentrate on the next shot. And similar to golf, you’re just trying to put something in the hole.”

Rising Stars and Evolving Technology

Some of cornhole’s youngest royalty also made an appearance at the Sacramento tournament, including 19-year-old Trey Burchfield. Burchfield is the only player to have both a singles and a doubles ACL world championship under his belt. He’s nicknamed “The Robot” for his uncanny ability to remain cool, collected and consistently accurate under intense pressure.

Unlike Voyer, whose signature shot is the airmail, Burchfield plays an offense-focused game that’s centered around the slide shot — mixing in cut and roll shots to steer around his opponents’ bags.

“Pretty much just sliding it in the hole, putting every bag I can in the hole,” he said. “If they go in the hole, you can’t lose. So that’s my strategy.”

Also at the tournament was Ryan Windsor — a 25-year-old phenom who recently began selling his own signature line of cornhole bags.

“There’s just thousands and thousands of different materials,” Windsor said of the possibilities when designing high-performance bags.

Although all cornhole bags must be the same size and weight to qualify for tournament play, there are no rules restricting the materials they can be made out of. Many bags feature a fast side and a slow side: one side that slides quickly, and one side that hits the board and stops. Each season, ACL officials release a list of approved bag manufacturers and models that have passed their inspection, and every approved bag must bear the official ACL stamp to be allowed in a tournament.

The list of approved bags is long, and with good reason: The best bag for you depends on how you play.

“I’m like a really defensive player,” Windsor said, placing his style in stark contrast to Burchfield’s. “So I’ll throw sticky bags, compared to really slick bags. You know, a lot of people will just go for the hole every time, but I like to post them up in front of the hole.”

While Burchfield said he switched to an even slicker bag for the current season, Windsor has been dialing in his block shot, throwing bags sticky-side-down so that they stop right in front of the hole with startling accuracy.

All in the Timing

After school on Tuesdays, Voyer hangs up his polo shirt and dons his official ACL jersey. Tuesday night is league night for the Port City Baggers — the ACL-sanctioned local cornhole league he and his wife started about three years ago. The league now attracts from 60 to 100 people each time it meets, Voyer said, including visitors from clubs in neighboring cities.

Like Voyer, many of the Baggers discovered they had a knack for cornhole when they played it in someone’s backyard. Then, after showing up to a league night out of sheer curiosity, they were hit with the drive to compete.

“We were just hooked from then on,” said Brent Alger, who attended his first Tuesday night tournament at Voyer’s urging. “And then COVID hit, so it was one of the things we could do.”

Indeed, Voyer said it was the timing of the COVID-19 pandemic, just as cornhole was already beginning to expand its reach, that propelled the sport into the spotlight.

“During the pandemic,” he said, “boards and bags were on backorder, because people were home, but people didn’t want to just be inside.”

Because the game is inexpensive and easy to learn, Voyer said it became a popular pandemic pastime — and players with a lot of time on their hands improved quickly. And because cornhole doesn’t require close contact between players, the American Cornhole League quickly devised a set of COVID protocols that would allow it to safely hold tournaments for a television audience that was clamoring for live sports — and networks that desperately needed content.

In turn, Voyer said, the television exposure helped to grow even more interest in local leagues.

“Three years ago, when we started our league, the next league that was close to us was in West Sacramento,” he said. “Now there are leagues in Brentwood, Pleasanton, Tracy, Manteca, Elk Grove, Galt, Bay Area Baggers in South San Francisco. There’s just a lot of great, great people starting leagues because it’s thriving.”

An Olympic Future?

By the end of their P.E. class playing cornhole, Voyer’s sixth grade students were already showing improvement.

“I just airmailed one!” exclaimed one student, overjoyed at his improvement in the span of less than an hour.

“I want to be the next Mr. Voyer!” proclaimed another student with confidence, as he headed back into the classroom.

Asked if he wanted to play cornhole professionally, a third student confessed he had other ambitions: “I don’t know — I want to be an orthodontist!”

But the American Cornhole League has its own ambition, and it’s laser-focused.

“The goal for the ACL is trying to make it an Olympic sport,” Voyer said. “It’s wild, but it’s catching on!”

Voyer’s not sure if there are Olympic medals in his own future, but for now, he said he’s satisfied with a different kind of victory:

“This last week that I’ve brought boards from our league to play (at school), I actually had perfect attendance three days in this last week,” he said. “So I’m actually getting kids to come to school. I mean, I’ll take that any day.”

Lining the red brick sidewalks of Market Street, they held hand-drawn signs, Warriors jerseys and basketballs, and many wore the Dubs’ brand new 2022 NBA championship cap.

“We did it again! We did it again!” screamed a Warriors staff member as the team’s employees led off the parade, marching with giant yellow balloons as confetti rained down.

The parade’s festive ambiance was provided in part by 16 confetti cannons, loaded with a total of 1.5 tons of confetti. The gold, blue and white confetti shipment arrived just a few hours before the parade kicked off.

“It feels good to be with everybody out here — all the Warriors fans,” said a fan wearing a brand new championship cap.

“The energy’s crazy!” agreed another fan nearby.

Though reporters were initially told players wouldn’t be getting off their double-decker buses, Gary Payton II delighted fans when he ran shirtless out into the street and began high-fiving fans lined up along the crowd control barricades.

Other players soon followed suit. Steph Curry stuck to high-fives, while Jordan Poole posed for selfies and took aim at fans with a squirt gun (sticking to the Poole Party theme). Andrew Wiggins emerged from his bus carrying the Larry O’Brien NBA championship trophy, and held it high over his head, to the fans’ delight.

“I like the players, I like watching them,” one fan observed. “They just have such a warm, welcoming attitude.”

Klay Thompson brought up the rear of the parade, and as he held the championship trophy high in the air, fans flooded into the street behind his bus and began running up the parade route.

“They let us in, they let us in!” exclaimed one fan, as he jogged behind the bus.

As quickly as it had started, the parade ended, leaving fans to play (and take photos) in a street full of confetti.

Though the Warriors are celebrating their fourth championship win in recent years (and their seventh in franchise history) it’s the first time a victory parade has taken place in San Francisco. Faithful fans from Oakland, who came over on trains, buses and ferries, said they didn’t mind the trip.

“We would go anywhere for the Warriors,” one longtime fan told us. “We would go anywhere.”

That’s when the dance team and T-shirt cannons emerged onto the empty basketball court, to the sounds of the Black Eyed Peas singing, “I got a feeling that tonight’s gonna be a good night.”

Thousands of miles away in Boston, Steph Curry was already getting overwhelmed with emotions, as he collapsed in tears onto the red oak floorboards of the Celtics’ TD Garden, with the game clock still ticking.

The basketball game wasn’t in San Francisco, but for the crowd that packed the Chase Center to watch the Warriors fight their way to the final win on the giant screen of the NBA’s biggest center-hung scoreboard, the taste and smell of victory was every bit as real.

“Champions!!!” screamed countless fans as the clock ran down to zero, leaving the Warriors with a decisive 103-90 victory, winning the NBA Finals in Game 6, and earning them the 2022 NBA championship.

“Four rings! Four!” several other fans repeated, marking the fourth championship for the Warriors in just eight seasons.

Still more fans attending the Chase Center celebration simply screamed, their hands and heads to the sky, as confetti and streamers rained down from the ceiling.

As the television broadcast went to commercial, Queen’s immortal “We Are the Champions” began playing over the loudspeakers, and the crowd stopped cheering to sing along. And as trophies were handed out, fans chanted “MVP!” for Stephen Curry, who was named most valuable player in these NBA Finals.

“We had setbacks — we kept going,” said a fan named Oliver from Palo Alto, as others danced and screamed around him. “A lot of different guys chipped in. If one guy was off, another guy chipped in — and it was just a complete team effort.”

Looking up at the scoreboard that now read, simply, “Champions,” Oliver added: “I just love this team, man.”

The Warriors will celebrate their victory with a parade down Market Street in San Francisco, starting at 11:20 a.m. on Monday.

For many, the highlight of the game was a third-quarter buzzer beater by Jordan Poole that put the Warriors in the lead, and prompted one fan (who’s also named Jordan) to declare Poole “the future of the Warriors.”

“This is history, ’cause we’re gonna win!” Jordan (the fan, not the player) added joyfully.

Game 5 saw fans from faraway places converge on the Chase Center with flags and hand-painted posters. One group of fans flew 8,000 miles from the Philippines “to see Chef Curry cook!” according to their sign. Others who made the journey included a family from Alaska, a man from Mexico City and a barber from Costa Rica who shaved Klay Thompson’s likeness into the back of his head.

“That’s my favorite player,” explained the barber, who goes by Fillostyle.

Even relative newcomers to the team have their devoted followers.

“Wiggins is the most consistent and best player on the team right now,” declared a man who spent most of the first half on the edge of his seat, cheering for Andrew Wiggins by name.

As the clock ticked down at the end of the game, fans poured out the front doors into Thrive City chanting “Dubs in six!”

One especially exuberant fan (who didn’t pause long enough to give his name) said he hopes the Warriors win in Boston, rather than risk a win-or-go-home Game 7 in San Francisco. He only wishes he could be there to see it.

“I wish I was, I wish I was!” he said, jumping up and down. “But I’ll be there in heart, and in spirit! We’re gonna win Game 6! Yes!”

After keeping the Celtics at bay for most of three quarters, the Dubs blew a double-digit lead in the final minutes of the game, to lose to Boston 120-108 — a turnaround so swift it left fans of both teams in disbelief.

But something else happened at the Chase Center on Thursday night: according to die hard fans who’ve been season ticket holders for decades, the roar of Oracle is back. It’s a sound so deafening that the Warriors’ old venue across the Bay in Oakland was known throughout the basketball world as “Roaracle.”

“It’s just as loud as Oracle right now,” said a fan named Patrick from Pleasanton in the moments before tip-off. “It’s beautiful!”

“It’s so loud that I’m already losing my voice,” said Sandy Uejo, a Warriors fan for decades, just before halftime.

The Warriors’ first trip to the Finals since their move to San Francisco was also marked with excitement for the return of Klay Thompson, who was sidelined by injuries for two full seasons.

“In 2019, we were there the day Klay got hurt,” said a man in a Steph Curry jersey who arrived early to grab food and drinks. “That and everything leading up to today makes it so much more exciting.”

With him, a woman wearing Golden Gate Bridge earrings and a hat from the Warriors’ last championship confessed that the team’s return to the brink of NBA glory is an emotional roller coaster.

“Exciting to be back, but yes, very nervous,” she said. “Literally having our full team on day one of the finals — who could ask for better than that?”

The Warriors and Celtics will face each other again at the Chase Center on Sunday, June 5, before the series heads to Boston for Games 3 and 4.

“I’m really good at completing people’s ‘honey do’ lists — that aren’t getting done by their honeys,” Webber said.

On her business card, Webber identifies herself as a “handywoman.” But she acknowledges that the word doesn’t exactly roll naturally off the tongue.

“Handywoman does sound kind of weird, and handyperson sounds weird too,” she said. “I fill a role that has been primarily filled by men for a very long time.”

But that’s nothing new for Webber, who’s been playing with tools and building things since she was a kid. As a high school graduation present, her family bought her a set of tools all her own, she said — and with good reason.

“My dad would continually find his tools in my bedroom and be all upset about it,” she confessed.

After a few years working on staff at Habitat for Humanity, Webber decided she wanted to join the Navy — and break some barriers along the way.

“I walked into a recruiter’s office and I said: ‘I want to join the Navy, and I want a job in construction,'” she recalled. “And they said: ‘Ugh, females can’t be Seabees.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s not true — I’ve done my research. This is the job I want, and I’m not leaving until I get this job.'”

The Seabees, a word that comes from the acronym “C.B.,” are the Construction Battalions — a division of the Navy that only began allowing women to serve equally among the men in its ranks in 1994. Webber’s persistence paid off, and after several trips to her local recruitment office, she was accepted into the Navy in 2000, trained as a Seabees Engineering Aide, and traveled the world to build facilities on U.S. Naval bases from England to Japan.

“Out in the field, kind of doing the math behind the building,” she said. “And learning a lot about teamwork and leadership and solving the problem without saying, ‘Ugh, I can’t do it.'”

The Seabees’ motto is “Can Do!” — and Webber said she summoned that problem solving spirit again, years later, when a divorce left her raising two growing boys on a single income.

“Divorce just kind of splits your life in half,” she said. “I had this life that I was building, and then it just stopped.”

Webber moved back home to Pleasanton with her kids, and took a job designing exhibits for the East Bay Regional Parks District — a rare opportunity to use both her visual design skills and her construction experience, she said.

But even with a full-time job, Webber said she found herself living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with her two pre-teen sons and some unruly neighbors. For a moment, she said, she thought about leaving Pleasanton. But only for a moment.

“My boys still have several years of school left,” she said. “And the schools here are just unmatched.”

So instead of packing up to move somewhere more affordable, she talked to a friend who’s a general contractor and asked to be set up with a few odd jobs. She had no idea that the request she’d made was about to change her life.

Contractor Daniel Curtis said the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t really slow down demand for construction services — so he had plenty of odd jobs to go around.

“I want Jenn to come in and do the work that I don’t have time for, or that I know that she’s great at,” Curtis said.

Among the handful of initial customers he referred to Webber, a few posted their rave reviews on social media. Despite not having her own social media presence at all, Webber became an online sensation in her East Bay community, practically overnight.

“It’s so hard to find people you trust,” said Livermore homeowner Becca Mock. “She’s just genuine. She knows what she’s doing.”

And Mock was quick to add that it’s refreshing to have a woman wielding the power tools.

“My husband doesn’t like to read directions,” Mock lamented.

Webber doesn’t merely glance at the directions, she said. She starts on page one, every single time — even if it’s a piece of hardware she’s installed ten times before.

“The very first page of all sets of directions are: ‘This is what’s in the box,'” she said. “This morning, I was installing a dog door and immediately realized there were parts missing, that weren’t in the box.”

Reading the directions, she said, saved her from having to stop in middle of the project, leaving the door with a gaping hole in it. It’s lessons like that, learned through years of experience, that Webber says separate the professionals from the amateurs.

And as for the old adage that a carpenter should measure twice and cut once? Webber has a correction to make:

“You measure like five times and cut once,” she said.

Webber’s job with the parks district gives her every other Friday off, she said. Those days, plus a few evenings and weekends, have given her time to work a steady flow of small home improvement jobs.

The income’s been enough to improve her own home too: she’s been able to rent a four-bedroom house in Pleasanton, where her boys can each have their own rooms, and her mother can come stay with them.

“I feel very proud to have my family in a nice home, in a nice neighborhood, and my kids are in the schools they want to be in,” she said. “And we got to keep the great community of friends and family that we’ve made here in Pleasanton.”

Within that community, Webber still makes time for something else: she volunteers for a nonprofit called Sleep in Heavenly Peace that builds twin-sized beds for children of families in need. Daniel Curtis runs the local chapter, and Webber helps supervise an army of volunteers.

“When Jenn comes out, I don’t have to worry about some novice person drilling a drill bit through their finger,” Curtis said.

Together, in a small way, they say they’re helping to bring kids the same sort of comfort that Webber herself no longer takes for granted: the comfort of having a place that feels like home.

“If a child has a bed, it really helps a child feel like they have a space,” Curtis said.

“We think it’s ‘just’ a bed,” Webber added. “But it’s really so much more — because it’s security.”

As for her own kids, Webber is hoping to send them out into the world with a few extra skills that might help them along their journey. Her eldest, 14, has already started accompanying her on a few weekend jobs, learning all the intricate details of how to drill through different surfaces, cut wood cleanly and safely, find the right wrench for the job, and apply sticky adhesive without making a mess.

Whatever the future holds for them, she said, knowing how to build and fix things will give them an edge.

“Tech jobs are going to continually change,” she said. “But everybody’s going to need carpenters and plumbers and electricians, (and) handypeople. The trades are never going to go away.”

She’s also hoping to give them a little of the “Can-Do” spirit she learned in the Navy years ago.

“I tend to work as if it’s my house,” she said. “There’s people that just: ‘Ahh, it’s good enough.’ And I like undoing the good enough. I like making it the best.”

George advised presidents from Nixon to Bush, and served as President Reagan’s Secretary of State. Charlotte served 10 San Francisco mayors and three California governors as Chief of Protocol, welcoming foreign dignitaries and heads of state, and throwing black tie celebrations, victory parades and charitable balls dating back to Dianne Feinstein’s days as mayor.

In fact, it was Feinstein who introduced the couple, both widowed, in the late 1990s. They were married at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral in 1997, in what the New York Times called the social event of the season.

“The groomsmen were fighting over who would get to walk Nancy Reagan down the aisle,” said Victoria Richardson, head of Bonhams San Francisco auction house.

Beyond their passion for public service, George and Charlotte shared a love for fine jewelry — especially American-made pieces, and those in patriotic colors. Together, they amassed hundreds of items, from everyday silver to diamond necklaces with six-figure price tags — much of it from Tiffany & Co.

“George Shultz was a true patriot,” Richardson said. “They could’ve chosen to collect something like a Cartier or a French brand, but they chose an all-American classic.”

That jewelry is now up for auction, after George Shultz died last year at the age of 101, and Charlotte died just 10 months later at the age of 88. Their family hopes to find the right buyers for some of the rare Tiffany pieces, and historically-significant items like George’s official State Department cuff links.

“We’re always hopeful that institutions such as the Smithsonian and other museums might like to buy these and put them on exhibit,” Richardson said.

Bonhams is touring the collection around the world, including stops in London and Hong Kong, before selling the more than 200 individual pieces of jewelry at a May 23 auction in New York City.

For many attending, this year’s small but enthusiastic GDC crowd was a long-overdue chance to test games they’ve been working on in near-isolation for the past two years — and get feedback from players who speak the language of game development.

“It feels really important if game designers like the game,” said Blake Andrews, who’s a game designer and programmer himself.

“They give really good feedback,” agreed game artist Tomás Jech. “They’re very vocal about their reactions.”

Jech and his wife Clarissa Bernardo were exhibiting their spooky action game “Begone Beast” in a corner of the Moscone Center’s north hall. The two co-designed the game, with Bernardo writing the code and Jech drawing the characters — and say they’ve spent nearly 100% of their time together since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Probably one of the hardest things we’ve ever done — but also the most fulfilling,” Jech said.

“It only brought us closer,” added Bernardo.

As groups of three and four players lined up for a turn at the cooperative, top-down thriller inspired by Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights, Jech and Bernardo explain how the game works, then stand back and watch — making note of where players get stuck, confused, excited and frustrated — while also recording video of their path through the game.

“It’s amazing being able to see what’s not working, what’s working with the game, live, right in front of them,” Jech said.

Bernardo would often hover over players’ shoulders as they dodged scary pink monsters, offering hints and hoping to elicit spontaneous feedback.

“Whatever we go through, they’ve probably been through it themselves,” she said of the fellow game designers who stopped by the booth. “And so what they say just means so much.”

A few aisles away, Yuan Chiang was conducting a similar test of his retro 2D run-and-gun game “Planet Cube: Edge.” GDC, he said, provides a rare mix of potential players to test works in progress.

“You have game developers, you have journalists, you have publishers, and they all give you different input,” He said. “To have all of that in one single venue is almost impossible.”

In-person playtesting is especially important for makers of “alt-control” games — that is, arcade games that eschew the traditional buttons and joysticks in favor of custom, alternative controllers. Some of those games saw public testing for the first time at GDC 2022.

“This is Alghrab, the world’s only animatronic, fortune-telling crow,” said Michael Perce, a game developer from San Antonio, Texas.

The haunting robotic bird, originally a Halloween decoration, sits atop a wooden table where players engage it in a card game using a deck of special microchipped cards. With its ominous voice, the crow speaks in riddles and rhymes as players turn over cards to find out if the bird is bluffing.

“This was developed over the course of the pandemic,” Perce said. “So the vast majority of the playtesting was me, in my room, and maybe my parents.”

The smaller scale of GDC 2022 made room for several alt-control games built by students — including “Plinko Burger,” whose creators wore aprons and paper chef’s hats to look the part.

“We were super excited for even the opportunity to submit to GDC, let alone actually be here,” said the game’s co-creator Zayna Sheikh.

Plinko Burger is one of several projects that experiments with using voice control in addition to handheld controllers. Players shout the names of ingredients into a drive-thru headset while controlling an on-screen paddle by squeezing ketchup and mustard bottles with wires coming out of them.

The sounds of “Bun! Burger Patty! Order up!” echo through the halls of the Moscone Center, along with shouts of “Buy! Sell!” from a booth nearby — where another group of developers is testing a game that’s literally called “Buy! Sell!”

“We like to say that it’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ meets ‘Sesame Street,'” said co-creator Matt Bethancourt. “So, stock trading as imagined by a child.”

Bethancourt said he came upon a veritable truckload of old office phones on eBay and was inspired to turn them into game controllers. Players dial the numbers of stocks and commodities and shout the words “buy” and “sell” into the phones, creating a sort of chaos and cacophony that might resemble the New York Stock Exchange at 3:59 p.m.

Playtesting at GDC can often come only after years of hard work. Such is the case with Scrapeboard, an arcade game that resembles Dance Dance Revolution in which players slide a skateboard onto different colored squares.

“Five years ago, I would’ve had to be fixing it every five minutes, 10 minutes,” Blake Andrews said.

Now, he and fellow developer Frank DeMarco say they can usually get the board and its giant playing surface to last most of the way through a convention like this one — requiring only infrequent tweaks with a hammer and screwdriver.

Because of its sheer size, it’s hard to find places to test Scrapeboard. But after a successful run at GDC, Andrews and DeMarco think they’re finally ready for the next step.

“It’s taken years to get to this point,” Andrews said. “Now, we want to try to find a permanent place — an arcade that can be a home for Scrapeboard, where if people want to play Scrapeboard, they know where to go and play it.”

Yet, when it comes to the conference where they meet every year, game developers say virtual events just haven’t been cutting it.

“Lines are long, everyone’s happy to be here to get that great experience again,” said Eric Chou, founder of startup Honor Games.

The longest lines on the eve of the five-day conference were for the COVID testing and vaccination checkpoints at the entrance to the Moscone Center. Attendees are required to wear masks indoors and show proof of vaccination plus a booster shot, or vaccination plus a negative test. Developers who traveled across oceans to be in San Francisco didn’t mind the extra delay.

“I think what this represents, especially after three years of being away, is human beings need to connect,” said Charles Sekwalor, who traveled to the conference from London.

Though GDC’s attendance has reached nearly 30,000 in recent years, some estimates have put the 2022 crowd at half that number. Still, organizers have put on a full program of sessions and exhibits throughout the week. Exhibitors and indie game developers will get to show off their wares Wednesday through Friday on the expo floor, spanning the north, south and central halls of the Moscone Center.

But developers arriving at the registration desk on Monday said the true value of the conference for them will come in between the exhibits and sessions.

“Everybody’s been sitting in their living rooms thinking about ideas, and communicating over Zoom, but there’s no coffee chat — where wonderful things come out of,” said Marcus Jones. “Talking about interesting ideas, and having some person from over there overhear it — which can’t happen online — and be like, ‘Wow, I’m really interested in that, let’s hear more about it!'”

Networking among strangers has been a tough nut for virtual events to crack. Some game developers suggest it’s their own industry that should be coming up with solutions for that, on the path toward an ever-more-immersive metaverse. But at this point, they say, nothing is quite like meeting in person — especially when those meetings are long overdue.

“I’m looking forward to getting to meet the people I’ve been working with on my game,” said Chris Weisiger, who’s building a game called Waves of Steel. “It is pretty weird, I gotta say — we’ve worked together now for over a year, but we’ve never met in person before.”

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Demi Skipper is the San Francisco woman who went viral on TikTok during the pandemic. She started the “Trade Me Project” with a bobby pin and her goal was to make trades, all the way up to a home. And, she did it.

RECAP OF HER STORY

• She started this project at the beginning of the pandemic May 2020, while being stuck in quarantine. And like the whole world, she downloaded TikTok and decided to document her journey there.
• Skipper says she was inspired by a Canadian blogger who did the same thing back in 2006 but with a red paper clip instead of a bobby pin. “I was like, I have to be the second person. How is that possible that no one else has done it?” says Skipper.
• It took her 18 months and 28 trades to get that house in Clarksville, Tennessee.
• Some of her most notable trades include: a Chipotle celebrity card, 4 different vehicles, and a cabin on wheels.

In December 2021 she announced the final trade. And while millions of her followers thought the journey ended there, Skipper has other plans.

“I’m fully renovating the house, and then I’m trading the house for a bobby pin. Meaning that somebody is going to get a brand new fully-renovated house completely for free, no mortgage, no rent,” says Skipper.

Skipper thinks the project was less about the house and more about “is it possible” to accomplish the trade. People reached out to her for advice on how to do what she did. She started helping them. That’s when she says she realized she had to give up the house.

“As I started walking people through, I realized this house does not belong to me. Like my journey was about proving it was possible to get there,” says Skipper.

Ok, so how can you win this house? The San Francisco native says she wants people to send her their stories on TikTok and Instagram explaining why they deserve to win it. From those entries, she says she’ll pick out who gets the house. If you happen to score the free property, don’t forget the bobby pin, because it’s still a trade.

Once Skipper donates the house, she says she’s doing it all over again.

“I feel so sure I can be the person to do it twice. There’s nobody that’s crazy enough to do this thing twice. So I want to give it away, I want somebody to have it for the prize of the bobby pin. And then I’ll do it a second time.”

Mario Patiño took a liking to the 49ers the first time he watched them play on TV when he was 12 years old.

“The colors, the gold in the helmet, everything,” he recalled. “I loved the team.”

He wasn’t alone: Growing up in Mexico in the 1980s and early 1990s, he was surrounded by fans of the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys, two teams that dominated the NFL during those decades.

“I never missed a game,” he said. “Every game, I used to wear the same jeans, the same T-shirt, my gold satin Starter jacket. And it was like my lucky charm.”

In the 90s, he became a fan of quarterback Steve Young, who led the Niners to their fifth Super Bowl win. But it wasn’t until 2005 that Mario got to see the 49ers play in person. That was when they played in the NFL’s first regular season game held outside the United States, at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City.

“Those singular games can create fans for life,” said 49ers chief marketing officer Alex Chang. “It’s not just one game, it’s really all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the game.”

Chang noted that much like the Super Bowl here in the U.S., the NFL’s visits to other countries can include a full week of fan experiences leading up to the game. He said the 49ers are making plans to return to Mexico for another game during the 2022 or 2023 season — part of a broader effort to engage fans in both Mexico and the U.K., now that the team has officially been granted marketing rights in both countries. We recently met a seriously die-hard 49er fan who lives in England.

But for Mario, the transition from fan to superfan happened in 2012, when he visited San Francisco and caught Colin Kaepernick’s first game as starting quarterback — then traveled to Atlanta to watch the Niners beat the Falcons in the NFC championship. That was the year he decided to start social media accounts about the 49ers, to post news and game updates on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Certainly, the team already had its own social media. But Mario’s accounts were different: they were all in Spanish.

When he joined Twitter earlier that year, Mario had noticed that 49ers content in Spanish was lacking. So he went straight to the top and sent a direct message to the team’s CEO, Jed York.

“I DM’d Jed York and he answered me,” Mario said. “I asked him for more content in Spanish.”

York promptly replied, “We will get on that. Thx for your support.”

Over the years, the team has kept its word about that, and now broadcasts every game in Spanish. Telemundo 48 sports anchor Carlos Yustis serves as analyst for those game broadcasts. Like Mario, Yustis also grew up in Mexico watching NFL football on TV during the 1980s and 1990s.

“The very first memories I have of football are with the Niners and the Dallas Cowboys,” Yustis said. “Being a part of the team that was part of my childhood — for me, it’s a dream come true.”

Yustis, who recently became a father, pointed out that many fans his age who still live in Mexico are now having kids of their own, and those kids are growing up as 49er fans — so the Niners’ fanbase is growing rapidly in Mexico. It may explain why Mario’s social media accounts have become popular enough to gain notice by the team. But Chang suspects it’s also the quality of the material he posts.

“The frequency that he was posting was incredible,” Chang said. “He was keeping up with folks on my team who do that as a full-time job.”

But Mario already has a full-time job: he’s a doctor at Mexico’s National Cancer Instutute. And in early 2021, his life as a fan and as a doctor suddenly collided when the 49ers’ official Twitter account followed him.

“They asked me to translate some tweets about vaccination at Levi’s, and I helped them,” he said.

The home of the 49ers had become a mass vaccination site for Santa Clara County, and Mario said he was honored to be able to help spread the word to the Spanish-speaking audience in the Bay Area. But he also had a favor to ask:

“I asked for their help to verify the account as the official Spanish account for the 49ers,” he said.

The team agreed — and also offered to co-manage the account with him, giving him more time to work on his new 49ers podcast, also in Spanish. Ten years after he began live-tweeting every game and translating every piece of breaking news about the team, Mario got his wish: an official presence for the 49ers on social media in Spanish.

But the story doesn’t end there. In 2012, Mario went to a second football game during his visit to the Bay Area.

“My wife is a Raider fan,” he confessed. “My brother is a Raider fan.”

Outvoted two to one, Mario put on a plain black jacket and headed to the Oakland Coliseum, not daring to be seen in his 49ers jersey. And that day, his brother Jesús felt the same enthusiasm that Mario felt when he decided to begin tweeting for the 49ers. He started a Twitter account for the Raiders in Spanish — and still runs it to this day. Sharing the love of football with Spanish-speaking fans has become sort of a family business.

“It’s my ‘jobby,'” Mario said. “My hobby, and my job on game day.”

Miguel Moises always knew he wanted to start a business.

But when he began looking for locations and applying for permits, he had something entirely different in mind. The year was 2020, and Miguel had his heart set on opening a bar: the kind of business where glassware is generally only broken by accident.

“The permits were not going through because of COVID,” he said. “I was on vacation in Miami, and I was stressed out.”

Miguel said he’d heard about rage rooms — a Japanese phenomenon that had slowly begun making its way to America. With a quick Google search, he found one in Miami.

“I went to a rage room in Miami, tried it, loved it, came back home, I was still stressed out,” he said. “I said the Bay Area needs something like this — and the Bay Area Smash Room was born.”

Miguel now operates two smash rooms: one in Fairfield and one in San Francisco. Other nearby rage rooms include Break Stuff in San Jose and Smash Sacramento.

At Bay Area Smash Room, prices start at $65 for a quick 20-minute smash, and range all the way up to $360 for a full hour of smashing with up to 10 people in a room well-stocked with plates and electronics. And if an hour of smashing stuff with an army of friends sounds a little exhausting, Miguel says you’re not wrong.

“Every time, they leave smiles and tired,” he said. “Sweating, because it’s a workout in there!”

Every smashing session starts with a safety briefing.

“Please do not hit the walls, the door, or each other with the weapons today,” Miguel says, grinning ear to ear, as he hands out hard hats, safety glasses and gloves.

By “weapons,” he’s referring to the implements of demolition: baseball bats, crowbars and sledgehammers, just to name a few. They hang on a wall outside the establishment’s three smash rooms for easy access on the way in.

Neatly stacked off to the side, Miguel pointed out the “breakables” — most of them donated by local businesses.

“We have some smart boards, some printers, some furniture,” he said. “They’re breakables, meant to be broken, they will be broken by the end of the day.”

The rooms themselves are made to take a beating, with easily-replaced boards covering the walls and chicken wire protecting the light fixtures.

“We do have a window right here,” Miguel said, pointing out the spot where guests in the lobby can peek in at the smashing. “It is normally open, but someone just broke it yesterday, so we had to cover it up.”

Colorful scribbling covers the walls of the lobby. Miguel encourages customers to sign the walls when they’re done smashing, and the results are equal parts profound and profane.

“A lot of people say they hate their exes,” Miguel said, pointing out some choice words on the wall nearest the front desk.

Through all the scribbling, and all his conversations with customers, Miguel said he learned something about the business he’s in.

“Honestly, that it’s not all about fun, you know, some people do need this,” he said. “We support some people that have just gone through death, and they need a healthy outlet.”

Indeed, among the customers who came in a steady stream one afternoon, many said there’s something decidedly therapeutic about smashing big objects with a 40-pound sledgehammer and swinging at flying plates with a baseball bat.

“Just the therapy of being able to smash stuff, break it, and not have to clean up the mess,” said one woman who brought her whole family to smash things. To Miguel, she added: “It’s a huge mess in there — sorry!”

To be clear, those who actually practice psychotherapy don’t recommend smashing things as a way to treat stress. But they’ve certainly given a lot of thought to why it feels good.

“People don’t like feeling vulnerable; stress makes us feel vulnerable,” said David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford. “And I think what happens when people want to break things is they want to be the breaker, not the broken.”

Spiegel runs Stanford’s Center on Stress and Health, where he studies the use of hypnosis to help patients reduce stress and get better sleep. He even has an app, Reveri, to help you hypnotize yourself in the comfort of your own home. It’s the very antithesis of smashing things when you’re stressed — an urge he says is likely rooted deep in our genetic code.

“As a species, we evolved to deal with physical stressors: can I get away from that saber-toothed tiger or that neighboring tribe that doesn’t like me,” he said. “Most of the stressors that we feel (nowadays) are psychological stressors: things I have to do, things I need to worry about. … So you’re ready to fight or flee when, in fact, that’s not what you need to do.”

But faced with the psychological stressors of modern life, the ongoing pandemic, and the holidays on top of it all, the market for smashing things only seems to be growing — even though there’s no medical evidence it actually reduces stress. And just like the bar he’d originally planned to open, Miguel’s smash rooms now have a growing group of regulars.

“I have a group of grandmas, they come once a month, they smash all glass,” Miguel said. “They bring their own glass too, and have the time of their lives.”

His film credits include movies with the likes of Clark Gable and John Wayne, but when Mason Dinehart introduces himself these days, he rarely leads with his acting career.

“I’m a collector of Olympic pins, first and foremost,” he said when we sat down. “It’s the only hobby I’ve ever had.”

Indeed, the walls of his cozy home office in San Ramon aren’t lined with autographed movie posters. Instead, his desk is covered in gleaming, colorful pins from countries around the world, many of them dating back to 1936, the year he was born.

The son of two actors, Dinehart came into the world at the dawn of the modern film era, when sound and color were both relatively new. He started acting at a young age, in Roy Rogers’ “Eyes of Texas” — a 1948 movie that was filmed in Technicolor, but only survives today in black and white.

That same year, Dinehart earned a prestigious distinction:

“I was the first actor ever to play Superman on film,” he said. “I played Clark Kent as a boy.”

It was Columbia Pictures’ Superman serial, the first live-action portrayal of the Man of Steel on the big screen. It was a low-budget affair with hand-drawn animations for special effects, and Dinehart appeared in the first of its fifteen chapters.

“My job, with my X-ray vision, was to dive into a haystack and pull out my mother’s ring,” Dinehart recalled.

Though it was an uncredited, non-speaking role, it gave Dinehart a taste for Hollywood — and perhaps a taste of the joy he’d find later in life, searching in a proverbial haystack for small, shining gems of Olympic history.

As he got older, Dinehart found steady work appearing in Westerns and other adventure movies.

“It was just luxurious, as a young man growing up,” he said. “I got to meet all the wonderful, wonderful actors — the Charles Coburns, the Edward Arnolds, the Clark Gables, the John Waynes.”

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He hit his stride at just 19 years old when he landed a recurring role as Bat Masterson in “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.” It was TV’s first Western series aimed at adults, and is still syndicated today by Proven Entertainment, which provided us clips for use in this story.

Dinehart’s character was a gunslinging, gambling sidekick to U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp, flirting with well-dressed women and frequenting saloons, even though in real life, he was still too young to legally order a drink in California. In Dinehart’s first big episode, Earp (played by Hugh O’Brien) even makes a joke about his unsuccessful attempt to grow a mustache.

Dinehart appeared on the show during five of its six seasons, but once it concluded, he said he’d begun to realize he had a passion outside the world of show business. He’d taken a job as a bank teller while he was still acting, and had started to climb up the corporate ladder at Bank of America.

“It came to a point where I said I need to go into the career that I really want — and that would be in the brokerage industry,” he said.

He learned everything he could about real estate transactions, trading stocks and trading bonds, but there was one kind of trading he hadn’t discovered yet. When the Olympics came to Los Angeles in 1984, Dinehart found himself immersed in a brand new world: Olympic pin trading.

“It was an auction to get tickets, and I got the track and field, so I went to the Coliseum,” he recalled. “There may have been 35 to 40,000 people in the stands; there were 25 to 30,000 people outside on the lawns around the Coliseum, trading Olympic pins. And I said, ‘What in the world is this?'”

Dinehart had stumbled upon what’s known to frequent Olympic spectators as the “unofficial Olympic sport.” Olympic pins have existed since the very first summer games in Athens in 1896, and by some accounts, the practice of trading them became common among athletes during the 1924 Olympics as a show of friendship between competitors from different countries.

Today, it’s common to find athletes, officials, volunteers and journalists wearing lanyards lined with shiny pins, and stopping to make trades in common areas around the Olympic venues.

“When you conclude a trade with someone, you shake hands: you’ve made a friend,” said Sid Marantz, vice president of Olympin, the world’s largest Olympic pin trading club.

Marantz said he and his wife first took up the hobby when they attended the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Though it had long been common among those competing or working at the games, he said that was the year pin trading really caught on among spectators.

“I enjoy the trading just as much as I do the having,” he said. “Because you trade memories, you collect memories. I’ve traded pins with Prince Albert of Monaco, with Mary Lou Retton, with gold medalists, with heads of state, and just with normal little kids. It’s a hobby without class distinction.”

To Dinehart, it represents the Olympic spirit in its purest form. And for the first time since his earliest days in the movies, he found himself starstruck.

“The athletes would actually come out in their uniforms, and they had their NOC or (National) Olympic Committee pins, and they would want to trade with you,” Dinehart said. “So you got to know the athletes from these countries.”

1984 was a banner year for pin trading at the Olympics, and the LA summer games that year remain the reason why much of the American pin trading community is centered in Southern California to this day. Though there are pins from sponsors, from TV networks, and even from the Olympic mascot (Sam the Eagle that year), Dinehart found himself immediately drawn to “country pins” — the official pins of each National Olympic Committee that spectators often get by trading directly with the athletes.

“They’re more colorful,” he said. “They’re much more striking.”

And by a coincidence of history, the most colorful and striking assortment of NOC pins ever produced came from the 1936 Olympics: the year Dinehart was born.

“They’re much larger than the normal Olympic pins that you see, and they were just really crafted exquisitely,” he said.

Berlin hosted the Olympics in 1936. It was Germany’s chance to be on the world’s stage again after its defeat in World War I. The beginnings of the Second World War were already brewing, with the Nazi party in power and Adolf Hitler at its helm.

After the German government ordered the exclusion of Jewish athletes from Germany’s national Olympic team, other countries considered boycotting the games. But ultimately, they elected to show their own national pride in the face of Hitler’s propaganda machine, with the biggest and most ornate Olympic pins ever made. Some of those pins are now worth thousands of dollars apiece — and Dinehart has two display cases full of them.

1936 was also the year of the very first Olympic torch relay, with runners carrying the Olympic flame from Athens all the way to Berlin, where a single athlete lit the cauldron during the opening ceremony. Dinehart has a torch from that relay — a gleaming, silver object the size of a lamp, covered in fine engraving.

“The torch for 1936,” he proclaimed as he presented it. “Made by Krupp Steel.”

Krupp Steel later went on to manufacture tanks and guns for Germany’s military during World War II — a stark contrast to the peace and unity symbolized by the shining steel torches that were made from the same metal.

The 1936 Olympics brought one more piece of noteworthy memorabilia: the largest Olympic medals ever made. They actually come from that year’s winter games, which were held in the German ski resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Dinehart has a bronze medal that was awarded in pairs figure skating that year, and it’s nearly the size of a tea saucer.

“The winners’ medals are the prize collection,” Dinehart explained. “Especially those that are awarded to an athlete, where you have the diploma to prove that it was actually awarded in a key sport in the Olympics. Rowing wouldn’t be as attractive or valuable as, say, a track medal or a gymnastics medal.”

Much like a fine Swiss watch comes with papers to prove its authenticity, an Olympic medal comes with a diploma — a large certificate that can be several feet long when unrolled. Dinehart has one framed in his office. And at one point, he had amassed a collection that included a gold medal from every summer Olympic games.

“When I turned 80 years old, we were going to move to San Ramon, California, from Los Angeles and buy a big house with a pool,” he said. “So, I put them all up for auction, and except for a very few, which I still retain, I sold my medal collection.”

According to sports memorabilia specialist Heritage Auctions, an Olympic gold medal can sell for $20,000 to $50,000. With more than two dozen of them in the collection he sold, it’s no wonder Dinehart’s new house is spacious, well-appointed, and filled with sunlight.

These days, Dinehart works as an expert witness in securities fraud cases, testifying on behalf of investors swindled by crooked brokers. His victories include three cases representing victims of Bernie Madoff, the disgraced mastermind of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. The work draws on his decades of experience in finance, but also on his years as an actor.

“When you walk into a courtroom, in front of a jury,” he said with a smile, “You’re on stage every minute!”

Fortunately, he said, the sort of trickery he battles in his professional life doesn’t exist in the world of Olympic pin trading.

“People are totally honest,” he said. “They don’t come up with fakes. They tell you what something is worth.”

Dinehart said he continues to trade pins at conventions all over the country, where he sees old friends and makes new ones. It’s a lot different from the days of his Hollywood youth, he said, when friendships began and ended quickly, and often lasted only until the end of a production.

“People that come to those conventions are down home, real people,” he said. “I didn’t find that kind of person in show business.”

Of course, in the hierarchy of important events for the hobby, the Olympics of pin trading are, quite literally, the Olympics. Dinehart and Marantz had both been hoping to attend the games in Tokyo. When it was announced that the Olympics would be held without spectators due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it put a damper on the games — and on pin trading there.

“Most of the trading took place only among the athletes, in the athletes’ village,” Marantz said.

Now, for the second time, American fans won’t be traveling to see the games in person. The organizers of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing announced in September that no spectators from outside mainland China would be allowed at the games.

Still, if Tokyo is any indication, pins traded among athletes and those working at the games will make their way across the Pacific to American collectors in the weeks and months following the Olympics. To get some of his own, Dinehart only needs to muster the patience and tenacity to do what he did at 11 years old — and go find them in a haystack.

It all started because of an early 1990s fashion trend: Starter jackets.

Brendan Clark recalls they were huge in New Zealand, where he and his brother grew up.

“My brother got a Cowboys one, so I found out who the Cowboys’ rival was at the time, and the 49ers and Cowboys had quite a big rivalry,” he recalled. “That’s how I became a 49ers fan. To basically go up against my brother.”

At the time, it was rare to find NFL football on TV in New Zealand. But once he moved to England in 2010, Clark remembered his interest in the 49ers. While flying through San Francisco with his family, he stopped to catch a game at Candlestick Park — just minutes from the airport. The Faithful tailgating crowd welcomed him with open arms.

“We were just treated so brilliantly, and it really cemented my love for the 49ers, and I’d say that’s when I truly became faithful, is probably 2011,” he said.

Clark’s enthusiasm for the team has only grown. His home office is now lined with signed, limited-edition sports cards and other autographed memorabilia: game-used gloves and cleats, a helmet signed by Brandon Ayuk, and a custom-built display case to show it all off.

“For the last several years, I’ve not missed a game,” he boasted.

Watching the Niners each week takes dedication, Clark pointed out. Though daytime games aren’t much of a problem, Sunday night games that kick off at 5:20 p.m. Pacific Time begin after 1 a.m. in England. Still, the NFL is enjoying a steady rise in popularity across the Atlantic, with at least two games played in London each year.

“I just had the opportunity to be in London, and it was incredible to see so many people in 49ers gear,” said 49ers VP Jenni Luke, who’s in charge of community impact for the team. “They’re very proudly wearing their jerseys — you saw some Jimmy Garoppolos, but you also saw (former 49ers greats) Ronnie Lott, Joe Montana, Steve Young, Jerry Rice. People know the Niners and have been fans for a very long time.”

Luke and Clark both said they credit the rise in international interest to the way American football easily lends itself to television broadcasts. Though fans of soccer and rugby can find the stop-start nature of NFL football jarring at first, it allows more time for replays and analysis during the game than other sports.

“I actually quite like it, because it gives me a chance to understand what’s just happened and why it happened the way it did,” Clark said. “And it’s quite good as well because you can go out and get a cup of tea and not miss anything.”

The English have their tea and the Americans have their tailgate parties.

“One of the things that is not a tradition in English sports is tailgating,” Luke said. “English fans, I think, are very curious about that kind of pregame ritual for American fans.”

When NFL teams visit London to play games at Wembley Stadium, Luke said they close off streets around the venue to allow a tailgate-like atmosphere before the game starts.

But in 2020, even American fans weren’t tailgating, as teams played games in quiet, empty stadiums with desolate parking lots. Luke said the 49ers launched a program called the “Tail-Crate,” sending 49ers-themed tailgating supplies to fans for each game. In this case, it was English sports teams teaching the Americans how to connect with fans at a distance.

“Leeds United, one of our Premier League soccer team friends … the majority of their fans across the globe, they will never ever come to a game at the stadium,” Luke said.

With the COVID-19 pandemic throwing a wet blanket over the 2020 NFL season, the 49ers rethought their fan engagement strategy, and began to focus on what they could make digital: first, a virtual tour of the 49ers Museum, and now an official Supporters’ Club, which gives devoted fans access to a library of exclusive online content.

“We’ve had over a thousand people sign up to date, and about 15 percent of those are international fans from all over the world,” Luke said.

That includes Brendan Clark, who’s now made 49ers fans out of his two oldest children. One, who just turned 10, is about to join an American football team in the town of Reading, England, where the family resides.

Clark said his kids can’t wait until they’re old enough to stay up late and watch the 49ers’ nighttime games with him. Until then, he said he tries to keep the noise level down.

“I can’t quite jump up and down and curse when things don’t go right, because I don’t want to wake my children up,” he said. “I don’t want to be dealing with that in the middle of the night — I’ve got football to watch!”

With the score tied 1-1 in the 7th inning, Giants fans sang along loudly to the classic tune that includes the lyrics, “If they don’t win, it’s a shame.”

And in the fifth game of the National League Division Series, that line was undoubtedly the biggest understatement of the team’s entire season.

“I’m heartbroken,” said one fan. “But I’m still proud of my Giants, man, I still love the Giants. We’ll be here next year.”

The stunning moment of disappointment that ended the Giants’ bid for another World Series may forever be remembered as a questionable call by the first base umpire. But for fans who were there that night, an overwhelming air of gratitude quickly replaced the frustration.

“That’s why it’s sad, man, they had a great season,” one fan opined.

“What a great season,” said another, and repeated himself for good measure.

Earlier in the evening, fans were already waxing poetic about what it was like to be back at the ballpark with a winning team, after the shortened 2020 season was played in front of empty stands.

“Just nice to make friends out of strangers, and high-five, sing dumb songs,” said longtime Giants fan Jack McKenzie. “I totally took it for granted.”

“Baseball is about rooting with 40,000 of your friends, it doesn’t matter whether you know them or not,” said Yvonne Morones, who’s been a Giants fan since the 1960s.

“People you don’t know, but you all have one thing in common,” echoed Mindy Charlup, who’s also a longtime Giants fan. “You forget everything else going on in the world, in the country. You’re all together as one, and it’s phenomenal.”

Morones attended the Giants’ penultimate postseason game with her childhood friend Loretta Bracco. The two met when Morones’ father was working on the construction of Candlestick Park, the Giants’ former home. Bracco was playing with her friends at the construction site.

“I kind of miss the old ‘Stick, but you know what? This is a crown jewel,” Morones said. “Best park in baseball.”

The two say they’ll be back next season, with a new appreciation for what it means to watch baseball together with friends — including the thousands of friends they haven’t met yet.

Staring into the sea of waving orange towels at Oracle Park on Friday and Saturday nights, it would be easy to think only Giants fans attended the first two games of the National League Division Series.

But look closely, and you’ll begin to make out specks of the unmistakable color known as Dodger blue. You’ll find it on hats and jerseys worn by Angelenos who made the 5-hour drive to San Francisco on just a few days’ notice — but you might also find it on your friends, co-workers and loved ones: Dodgers fans who’ve somehow managed to carve out a peaceful existence for themselves right here in Giants territory.

By now, they’ve learned to handle the rivalry with their loved ones during the regular season. But many told us (with apologies for the cliché) the postseason is a whole different ballgame.

“I think we don’t really know the intensity of the trash talk because we haven’t experienced the postseason trash talk,” said Giants fan Derek of his romance with Dodgers fan Kimberly, speaking just ahead of Friday night’s Game 1.

But for some couples, the tension’s been brewing for weeks.

“A lot of mocking,” confessed Dodgers fan Alexis Salinas of her relationship with Giants fan Carlos Mosqueda. “The game ends and we’ll just turn opposite ways.”

But the two agree on one thing: Their rivalry has never threatened their romance.

“It makes it a little bit stronger,” Mosqueda said.

Sometimes, pride can be costly, as it was for Dodgers fan Matthew Bragg.

“We bet on the NL West, and the bet was an authentic jersey,” he said.

“Obviously, I won,” interjected Bragg’s co-worker, Chase Martinez, sporting his brand new authentic Giants jersey.

“It was $440,” Bragg lamented. “Felt terrible.”

But lost bets and trash talk notwithstanding, friendships and family bonds have endured.

“I’ve been a Dodger fan all my life,” said Connie Mares.

And in her family, she’s the only one. She sat in her full Dodgers uniform next to her granddaughter, Nina Muñoz, decked out in Giants gear.

“Grandpa, Dad and Uncle are Giants fans,” Muñoz said. “So I was never allowed to be a Dodger fan.”

A steady stream of text messages between them had been heating up throughout the regular season, Muñoz said, and reached a fever pitch by the start of the Division Series. But it’s all in good fun.

“I love her,” Muñoz said. “The only Dodger fan I’ll ever love.”

The Golden Gate Bridge was shrouded in chilly fog on the afternoon of September 11, 2021 as San Francisco’s fireboat, the St. Francis, sat waiting at the mouth of the Bay for the dark object on the horizon to approach.

The firefighters aboard the St. Francis had come to welcome a special visitor: The Navy’s newest amphibious assault carrier, the USS Tripoli, with more than a thousand sailors in their white uniforms standing around the edges of the ship’s enormous deck.

“We call it manning the rails,” explained Chief Petty Officer Jerome Dunkley, who’s in charge of flight deck operations. “It was 9/11, so we were giving honors to the fallen, and also for the city.”

Though it came several weeks early, the Tripoli’s maiden port visit to San Francisco added an exclamation point to the announcement that S.F. Fleet Week would proceed as scheduled the first week in October — the only Fleet Week in the country to happen in 2021. The ship’s crew also took part in disaster preparedness training with Bay Area first responders.

“What makes our ship so unique is we can do assaults if we need to, but we can also do humanitarian assistance and disaster response,” said Navy Lt. Sam Lieber. “We have a unique ability to create a lot of water — potable water for drinking. We also have a very robust medical capability on board.”

The Tripoli’s on-board hospital is second in size only to the Navy’s dedicated hospital ships. And the ship as a whole is one of the Navy’s largest, second only to supercarriers like the USS Nimitz.

Despite its imposing size, the Tripoli has no catapults for launching jets. Its 844-foot, heat-resistant flight deck is purpose-built to accommodate a new generation of Marine Corps aircraft that are capable of short or vertical takeoff and landing. Currently, it operates as a platform for MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and F-35B Lightning II fighter jets — and has sleeping and dining accommodations for the hundreds of Marines who come with them.

“I’m a high-energy guy,” Dunkley said as he stood on the flight deck. “I can’t stay still, so I like being up here because it constantly keeps you on your feet, constantly keeps you busy.”

Dunkley showed us the red and white “foul line” behind which air operations personnel must stand for their own safety when jets and helicopters are taking off.

“You do not want to be standing here when that aircraft is taking off,” he said. “It’s gonna blow you back.”

Directly below the flight deck, the Tripoli’s massive hangar bay is where aviation mechanics are typically shuffling aircraft around, performing light maintenance on the ones toward the front of the ship, and more complicated repairs on the ones toward the rear. But when the ship is in port, it carries just a solitary, battered airplane covered in duct tape.

“This guy’s just for training purposes — there’s no engine in it, it’s just here so we can use it to practice,” Dunkley explained. “We have to constantly train, train, train, that’s the only way we get better. … The guys have to be proficient moving them around the hangar bay because it’s a tight space.”

The ship is filled with tight spaces, including narrow hallways punctuated by tightly-sealed doors that not only can stop fire and flooding, but also help control the flow of air conditioning. Savvy sailors can tell where they are on the ship by decoding the cryptic clusters of letters and numbers printed on many of the ship’s beige interior walls.

“We call that the bullseye,” Lieber said. “Those are all over the place. Every space will have one.”

Another common sight aboard the ship: fire hoses.

“That is because at sea, we are our own fire department,” Lieber said. “We can’t call anyone for help, so all sailors are trained in some basic level of damage control, whether it be fire, flooding or even toxic gas. But we do also have our own little fire department on board.”

Back up on the flight deck, Dunkley showed us the ship’s fire truck — a compact and boxy white vehicle with red stripes that carries an ample supply of both water and firefighting foam.

“It’s as powerful as you’ll ever get,” Dunkley said. “It’s fast!”

But aside from water and foam to fight fires, and fuel to power the aircraft, there’s another important liquid aboard the Tripoli: coffee. For officers like Lt. Lieber, coffee is found in the ship’s wardroom — a combined dining room and meeting space that’s right next to the officers’ on-board barbershop. Lieber says drinking the ship’s coffee is a rite of passage for visitors aboard the Tripoli, and a veritable necessity for the sailors stationed on board.

“These guys work really hard to make sure the coffee’s always hot so people can keep working around the clock,” Lieber said of the ship’s large culinary staff. “Because somebody’s always working on a ship. A ship is never asleep.”

Though the sailors couldn’t disclose where they’ll head next, it’s likely to be the ship’s first time there. That’s the fun of being on a brand new ship, Lieber said.

“It’s something we’ll be able to tell our kids and grandkids and family and friends years from now, ‘Hey, the first time that ship went there, I was there,'” he said. “I’m looking forward to all the exciting places she’ll go, and I can’t wait to be a part of that.”

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The practice of redlining has played a crucial role in systemic housing discrimination across the country – impacting how people live, work and grow wealth. Redlining began in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression, when the Federal government began a program designed to increase homeownership in cities that had suffered from waves of foreclosures. Neighborhoods were ranked from ‘least risky’ to ‘most risky’ – ‘green’ was considered the best or most desirable area for housing, while a ‘red’ ranking was deemed detrimental or hazardous. This color-coded system explicitly segregated and discriminated against neighborhoods with Black residents and people of color. It systemically denied these communities access to homeownership and lending programs, preventing them from investing in a home and building generational wealth. Even though redlining was officially banned through the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the long-lasting impacts of housing discrimination persist in cities across the United States.

Residents in neighborhoods historically plagued by redlining, like those in West and East Oakland, are more than twice as likely to go to the emergency room for asthma. They’re also more likely to experience higher rates of poverty, crime and infant mortality. The impacts of redlining can be felt in almost every aspect of life: from access to high quality education, to job opportunities and even healthy food options. Watch the explainer video above for a deep-dive into the legacy of redlining, both in the Bay Area and across the country. 

For a more in-depth look at housing discrimination in the Bay Area watch our four-part documentary series ‘The Mom’s of Magnolia Street’.

It’s an odd time to hold an election — and the election itself is anything but ordinary.

So if you forgot to open your mail-in ballot in the recall election being held September 14 across California — or if the ballot itself is proving to be a real head-scratcher — here’s how you can still make your voice heard, in 10 easy steps:

1. Find your ballot

Your vote-by-mail ballot will be in an official-looking envelope marked “Election Mail.”

2. Open it!

Carefully tear open the envelope and remove the long, thick, folded ballot. Your ballot is double-sided, and contains one question on each side.

3. Decide if you want Gov. Newsom to be recalled

On the front of the ballot, answer “Yes” if you think Gov. Newsom should be removed from office, and “No” if you want to keep him in office. In short:

• YES is a vote to Remove the governor
• NO is a vote to Keep the governor

4. Mark your answer in blue or black ink

Most mail-in ballots ask you to mark them in blue or black ink. Some counties say a No. 2 pencil is also acceptable.

5. Decide who should replace Gov. Newsom if he’s removed

On the back of the ballot is a long list of candidates vying to replace Gov. Newsom if he’s removed. The candidate with the most votes wins — no majority necessary — and you can vote for one even if you also voted “no” on removing the governor.

6. Place your ballot in the return envelope

This should be a postage-paid envelope that came with your ballot. If your ballot has a perforated stub on one end, you should tear that off and keep it, so you can check online later to see if your vote has been counted.

7. Sign the envelope

Mail-in ballots aren’t valid without a signature, so be sure to sign the outside of the envelope! You may also be asked to include your name, address, email and phone number, so that election officials can contact you if there’s a problem with your ballot.

8. Wait… You’re not done yet!

In the final hours of the election, it’s important to ensure your ballot will arrive in time to be counted. While any ballot postmarked by September 14 will ultimately count in the election, your ballot may reach election officials more quickly if you take it directly to an official drop-off location.

9. Go to a polling place or official drop-off site

On Election Day, you can drop off mail-in ballots at your polling place, at county election offices, or at designated drop-off locations like San Francisco City Hall.

10. Put your ballot directly into the ballot box

Make sure your ballot goes directly into an official ballot box. Election workers will show you where the box is, and you can drop the ballot into it yourself!

NBC Bay Area will have coverage of the recall election on Election Night as results begin to come in, so check back with us for updates!

Nearly three thousand people lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

But the death toll could have been much greater, if not for the actions of 40 people aboard United Flight 93, which left Newark, NJ that Tuesday morning on its way to San Francisco.

“There were some heroes on that plane,” Sridhar Sarnobat said as he visited the memorial to take photos at dusk.

“The world is a safer place because of them,” agreed his friend Deepti Reddy. “We need more people like them.”

The story of Flight 93 is inscribed on towering stone tablets at the Union City memorial, detailing the moment-by-moment terror that unfolded in the skies. Upon learning that other planes had already been flown into the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, passengers and crew made a collective decision to storm the cockpit and take on the four hijackers, who appeared to be piloting the plane toward Washington, D.C. After a prolonged struggle, the jet ultimately crashed into the ground at a reclaimed strip mine near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at over 500 miles per hour.

“It touches my heart that they were that brave,” said Jeanette Green, who visited the memorial for the first time on September 9, 2021.

“Either way, they were probably going to die, but they chose to save other people,” said Christopher Epperson, who visited the memorial with Green. “I don’t know that most people could do that rationally. And in a group of people who don’t know each other, that’s pretty amazing.”

Remembrance ceremonies are held at the Flight 93 memorial in Union City every five years, including this year, which marks 20 years since the terror attacks.

“Wow, it’s been 20 years,” Reddy said. “And it still feels like it just happened. In a way, it’s a part of everybody’s life, the fabric of our lives if you think about it.”

She added, “We’ve done a lot of good in the past 20 years, and we can do even more.”

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, flurries of excitement echoed from an ordinary-looking Victorian house on a quiet street in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Inside what was once the garage, a brightly-lit art gallery bustled with teens, adults and a few dogs, with the hum of conversation occasionally punctuated by squeals of joy followed by long, warm hugs.

“It’s like a mini reunion,” Erik Auerbach said in the midst of the hubbub. “I’m seeing people here that I haven’t seen in person in over 16 months.”

Auerbach is the director of First Exposures, the San Francisco-based nonprofit whose exhibition, “From the Inside Out,” was opening that day in the clean and cozy an.ä.log gallery. It was the organization’s first in-person event since the coronavirus pandemic forced San Francisco schools and businesses to close their doors in March, 2020.

“We asked them, ‘What is it like to feel stuck inside? What is it like not to see your friends?'” Auerbach explained. The art exhibition, he said, was “really just a chance to express what the pandemic’s felt like for them, through their eyes.”

Photos displayed on the gallery’s walls ranged from abstract to very concrete and familiar, and many carried a sense of confinement and loneliness, said the gallery’s curator, Don Ross.

“Solitude,” Ross summed it up. “And kind of looking inward.”

18-year-old Delilah Ponton exhibited a large black-and-white photograph of an overturned trash can in a yard full of overgrown grass. She said she enjoyed hearing from numerous gallery visitors who felt the image perfectly symbolized the frazzled chaos of the past year. It also represented an artistic victory for her: overcoming a lack of inspiration.

“I can’t go hang out with my friends and take pictures of them, so I had to take pictures of my surroundings, which I’d already seen before, and felt like I couldn’t get anything out of it,” she said.

Sometimes, the push to be creative comes entirely from within, but in this case, Delilah had some help from her First Exposures mentor, Alex Fulks.

“The photography is what starts the mentor relationship — it gives us common ground and something to build on, and then it just grows from there,” Fulks said. “Before the pandemic, we would do a lot of photo walks, so we would be able to sort of spot and create images together. … Sometimes it looks like that, and sometimes it looks like texting each other memes.”

Standing outside the gallery that day, Fulks was giving Delilah advice on how to prepare for her California driver’s license test.

“There’s a lot of other youth photography programs around the country, around the world, but to our knowledge, we are actually the only one that does one-to-one mentoring like we do,” Auerbach said.

Students and mentors meet in groups at first, he explained, and the program uses a gradual and organic process to match up students with the mentors they really click with. In the case of 18-year-old Ty’ler Banks and her mentor Jose Portillo, that pairing has stayed strong for five years, right up through Ty’ler’s high school graduation.

“I just love the person I’m becoming, and that I’ll continue to grow to be, and I think Jose has really encouraged that,” she said. “I never had that type of adult in my life.”

Ty’ler is heading off to college at The New School in New York City, where she plans to study photography and explore her interest in photographing fashion professionally. Her mom had a feeling early on that photography was something special for her.

“Her mom was like, ‘You know, this is the longest she’s ever done a hobby,'” Portillo recalled. “She goes, ‘I think this one’s really sticking!'”

Like many First Exposures mentors, Portillo and Fulks aren’t currently professional photographers. Both have worked in the worlds of art and design, and have a lifelong passion for photography that they enjoy sharing. Auerbach said First Exposures estimates that mentors each devote about 120 hours per year to working with their mentees, and both Fulks and Portillo said it’s been a rewarding experience that’s helped them stay in touch with their own love of making images.

“When I met Ty’ler, that’s when I got a nice camera,” Portillo said. “Because I was starting to do more photography, and I really learned as she was learning as well.”

Ty’ler was quick to point out that Portillo was definitely the expert when it came to shooting film and printing in the darkroom. First Exposures continues to offer film and darkroom photography classes alongside the digital ones, and Auerbach said interest in those classes has steadily increased over the years.

“There’s something really magical that happens in here,” Auerbach said of the serendipitous interactions and learning that take place over the steel sinks of the spacious black and white darkroom. “Forcing people to slow down is a good thing. And to give a young person that opportunity to slow down is not something that typically happens.”

Standing in front of a row of photo enlargers in the cavernous brick building that was once the RayKo Photo Center, Auerbach explained that the kids and teens who are the focus of First Exposures’ mission can sometimes have even less of an opportunity to slow down than their peers.

“There’s never good words to refer to this,” he said. “The terms that we can kind of live with are words like under-resourced, or underserved youth. Young people who have that passion and that ambition, and don’t have those opportunities.”

Auerbach said with changes in Bay Area public school curriculums over time that have left fewer and fewer opportunities for kids and teens to explore the arts, First Exposures is most interested in providing those opportunities to young people who can’t get them elsewhere. Now, the program will continue to do that from a brand new home in San Francisco’s Mission District.

“For the very first time ever, we have a space that is just ours,” Auerbach said, standing in the middle of the unfinished building that will soon house a brand new darkroom and classroom space.

First Exposures will actually share some of its space with another nonprofit, Youth Speaks, that engages young people in writing, speaking and poetry slams. Auerbach expects the organizations to become fast friends.

“We’re kind of thinking about it as a hub for youth storytelling, whether it’s the spoken word or image making,” he said.

Ty’ler isn’t the only graduating mentee who wants to keep photography in her life.

“First Exposures is amazing,” Delilah said. “It definitely changed my life for the better. I feel like they’ve made me think about having a career in photography, instead of just, ‘Oh, what am I gonna do with my life.'”

Delilah’s two older brothers have always been artistic, but her mom said it wasn’t until Delilah found photography that she began to see herself as an artist too.

“You have to find your niche, and it’s sometimes hard to do that — and sometimes it just finds you,” Kelly Robinson said. “And I think that’s what happened with First Exposures. It just found Delilah.”

First Exposures is currently accepting applications for new mentors, and new mentees ages 11-18, on its website.

Skateboarding has its own culture and its own language, and this summer, Olympic viewers all over the world will learn about ollies and nollies, Smith grinds and backside airs.

But of all the words in the skater lexicon, it takes only one to describe 15-year-old Minna Stess: “steezy.”

“It’s like making something look good without even trying,” she explained of the word that’s a mixture of “style” and “ease.”

Minna gave us a crash course in skater lingo as we stood in the middle of the glistening white concrete skate park that’s taken over her family’s entire backyard. A basketball hoop and a single rose bush are among the few other things left.

“My kids love to skateboard — can you tell?!” quipped Moniz Franco, Minna’s mom.

Minna says it’s her older brother who first turned her on to skateboarding — before she was even old enough to walk.

“I was, like, crawling on a board,” she chuckled.

Minna Stess gave us a tour of the skate park that takes up her family’s entire backyard. She and her brother helped design the park when they were in elementary school — long before Minna’s Olympic dreams began to take shape.

It was never intended to be a competitive endeavor, she insists. It was purely a form of entertainment — until it became obvious that she was a lot better than everyone else.

“When I was younger, I just thought it was really fun,” she said. “I started doing some competitions, I started winning some stuff, and I thought, ‘Well, yeah, man, maybe I’m pretty good.'”

As a young kid, Minna was already attracting attention from sponsors: first, local skate shops, then equipment brands. But the Olympics weren’t something a young skateboarder could aspire to — until now.

“Definitely the 2024 Olympics,” she said when we asked her next big goal. “It’s so far away, but so close at the same time.”

Skateboarding is making its Olympic debut in Tokyo, and is already approved for inclusion in the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Men and women compete separately in two events: park and street. Minna competes exclusively in park.

“Street’s going down things, like down stairs — and I don’t like going down stairs,” she explained. “I just like flying high and going fast, and that’s what park is, basically.”

Park events are held in a giant concrete bowl filled with obstacles, and skaters are expected to do tricks on as many of them as possible, within a limited time, without falling. Points are awarded for such things as difficulty of tricks, flow of the routine, style and originality.

“Learning tricks that people aren’t doing is the big thing,” Minna said.

Minna grabbed attention by doing exactly that during the 2021 national women’s park final: she performed a kickflip on a nearly-vertical wall, in a move so gravity-defying she might as well have been skating on flat ground.

“That was a full-blown street kickflip!” exclaimed one of the announcers on the USA Skateboarding webcast when Minna landed the trick on her second run.

Reflecting on it a few weeks later, Minna was patently nonchalant about the whole affair.

“That was kind of, I guess, like a ‘statement’ trick,” she said. “People thought I was making it my signature trick now. … It was just a kickflip, I wasn’t trying to make it my signature trick, but now it is.”

As Minna demonstrated that signature trick over and over again in her backyard, it became clear she’s starting to outgrow the concrete ramps and obstacles she and her brother helped design when they were in elementary school. Indeed, to train for Paris and beyond, Minna has been spending more and more time traveling to the elite skate parks of Southern California.

“A 500-mile commute to San Diego County,” Minna’s mom reflected. “I think there’s a lot of things that I consider normal as the parent of a skater that other parents would say, ‘That’s not normal.'”

Minna said she wants to make a life out of skateboarding, and hopes to add pro skate brands to her growing list of sponsors. She already proudly rocks her Santa Cruz Skateboards gear at every competition and interview. And she knows what would look really great on top of those stylish clothes: an Olympic medal.

“I remember watching the Olympics and being like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, I probably will never be in the Olympics, because I’m not doing an Olympic sport,'” Minna said. “But now, it is an olympic sport, so it’s really weird.”

Because Olympic qualifying is based on a full year’s worth of competitions, Minna is an alternate for Team USA in Toyko — but she’s already begun making her mark on American sports history. As the youngest person to win a USA Skateboarding national championship, she was asked to submit the helmet she wore during the competition to the sports collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She did — and the manufacturer was more than happy to send her a shiny new replacement.

Though she’s been called a prodigy and a rising star, Minna reminded us she’s still human, and gets pre-competition jitters just like anyone else.

“I still do get nerves — like, every single time,” she said. “I just try to tell myself it’s not that big of a deal. I mean, it is that big of a deal, but I try to calm myself down by saying that.”

As for the Olympics, Minna tries not to think too hard about the sheer magnitude of the biggest sporting event on the planet.

“There’s always competitions,” she said. “It’s kind of just a bigger competition now.”

As the first notes of the national anthem rang out from Oracle Park one evening in May, a lone seagull glided past the waving “Giants” flag on the ballpark’s northernmost turret, announcing its presence with a jarring squawk.

The birds are well known to Giants fans — especially those who sit in the left field bleachers, just steps from the ballpark’s famed food court, with a clear view of the sky. The gulls begin assembling toward the end of every game, eagerly waiting to chow down on hot dogs, garlic fries and nachos.

“They’re vultures,” remarked one fan, clearly not concerned that gulls and vultures are hardly related.

“They’re just rats with wings,” said another, who could’ve just as easily been talking about pigeons.

Here Since the Beginning

Whatever you call them, the birds showed up on the very first day the Giants played at the waterfront venue that opened as Pac Bell Park in 2000, and they’ve been coming to games ever since.

“They’re not here when we don’t play,” said Giants Chief Venue Officer Jorge Costa. “It’s like they know the damn schedule!”

Costa, who’s worked for the Giants since 1989, found himself in a game of cat-and-mouse with the gulls almost as soon as the ballpark opened. That game has gone on for more than two decades, with no end in sight.

“I found chicken bones on the field, and I’m thinking: How are these chicken bones getting on the field? Are people throwing them?” Costa recalled.

He got his answer during a 2015 game between the Giants and the Arizona Diamondbacks that had gone deep into extra innings. Television audiences watched the slow-motion replay over and over, as a half-eaten chicken tender fell from the sky and landed squarely on the pitcher’s mound.

“They were dropping them. They’d eat them or fight over them, and then they’d drop them. So that solved that mystery,” Costa said.

Over the years, he added, he’s come across plenty of other food items left in strange places throughout the ballpark, and each caper has ultimately wound up with the birds as the culprits.

Blame It On Nature

It turns out science has a good explanation for this: through a quirk of nature’s calendar, the start of baseball season happens to coincide almost exactly with the start of breeding season for several types of gulls that nest in the Bay Area.

“Some studies have actually shown that gulls will increase the time they spend feeding on human food … during their breeding season,” said Max Tarjan, science director for the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory.

That includes the large, pink-legged western gull, which nests on Alcatraz and the Farallon Islands, and the smaller, yellow-legged California gull, which nests farther inland, in and around the Bay.

“Back in 1980, there were no (nesting California) gulls,” in San Francisco Bay, said Gabbie Burns, lead biologist for the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory. “It has exploded to a recent peak of around 55,000 breeding birds.”

The explosive growth in the population, Burns said, is almost entirely attributable to humans and their leftover food. The observatory keeps tabs on the population by counting the birds and their eggs every spring, often kayaking out to small islands in ponds and waterways.

“Their populations are just doing incredibly well,” said Josh Scullen, a senior biologist with the observatory, as he counted birds in the Bay’s largest nesting colony. “The gulls have just really adapted well to living in an urban environment.”

Walking up and down the the long, flat island in a Palo Alto creek where more than 10,000 birds come to nest every spring, Burns came across a shining example.

“One of the nests we saw had some recently hatched chicks in it, and also a little pile of French fries that their parents had left for them,” she said, and showed a picture as proof.

Creatures of Habit

For Giants fans, though, the mystery has remained: How do the birds know where the fries are, and when to find them?

“I would just love to do an experiment where we tracked a couple of birds,” Costa said.

As it turns out, that experiment is already underway. Scott Shaffer, a marine ecologist who’s a professor at San Jose State University, travels out to the Farallon Islands every spring to put tiny GPS tracking tags on a handful of western gulls. The birds, which can recognize human faces, wear the tags for up to two weeks before Shaffer sneaks up on them in disguise to carefully remove the trackers and download the data.

“Part of my research is to understand where they go,” when they leave their nests in search of food, Shaffer said.

In past years, Shaffer has learned that many gulls have a daily dining routine of sorts: individual birds will find a good food source, learn the best times to visit it, and return over and over again. That includes a bird that would repeatedly commute from its island digs into one of San Francisco’s densest neighborhoods.

“This particular bird … flew from Alcatraz into what we think is a dumpster behind a delicatessen in the Tenderloin,” he said. “And it did that I think five different times.”

Another bird made headlines in local newspapers for its elaborate dinner ritual: it jumped aboard a garbage truck and hitchhiked from San Francisco to a compost facility in the East Bay.

“That bird actually did it twice — down the freeway, crossed over the Bay Bridge, stayed overnight, and then it flew all the way back to its nest (on the Farallon Islands) the next day,” Shaffer said.

Shaffer said he’s trying hard to catch a bird in the act of visiting the ballpark — even coordinating his tracking efforts with the Giants’ schedule. Based on his research up to this point, he suspects it’s the same birds over and over again. He added it’s also likely that the birds frequenting the ballpark this season are the same ones that used to visit it before their year-long absence during the coronavirus pandemic, when the Giants played in front of empty stands.

Long Live the Birds

Though a GPS-tracked bird has yet to visit the ballpark, Giants fans have indeed spotted birds wearing identification bands around their tiny legs. Those bands give researchers valuable information about how long the birds live, and how their nesting patterns shift over time. They’ve learned gulls can live 20 years or more, and usually return to the same nesting spot with the same partner year after year.

“Some of the birds that we’ve re-sighted in past years have been almost 40 years old,” Scullen said.

That means it’s almost certain that there are birds alive today that saw the Giants play at Candlestick Park (which was right next to a Recology compost facility they might have also enjoyed). It’s even possible some were alive when Willie Mays was inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Because they live so long, and continue breeding for most of their lives, Tarjan said it’s not surprising that their population increased exponentially until 2013 — and she said it’s noteworthy that the year their numbers began leveling off was the same year both the Giants and Recology began taking measures to manage their behavior.

Everybody Clap Your Hands

Costa said it feels like the Giants have tried everything to prevent a repeat of the now-infamous chicken tender incident — and to spare fans in the bleachers from getting gooey “presents” dropped on them by agitated birds. (Tarjan says they do it on purpose, by the way — it’s a defensive weapon against predators.)

The problems seem to occur mostly during extra innings, especially at night games. Costa’s working theory is that the birds have an internal clock of sorts, and know about what time a game is “supposed” to end. Shaffer’s research supports that theory. Tarjan adds that gulls are daytime feeders, and may be anxious to get back to their nests soon after dark. Either way, it means the Giants sometimes have to take measures to encourage the birds to wait their turn.

Some of the team’s efforts haven’t gone so well — like the season they began playing a realistic recording of a gull in distress over the ballpark loudspeakers.

“That scared the birds,” he said. “And children. And adults.”

Then there was the season they brought in a young red-tailed hawk named Bruce Lee.

“He scared the birds — the crows and the pigeons,” Costa said. “The gulls, not so much.”

But though the gulls do love the ballpark’s notorious nachos and fan favorite Cha-Cha Bowls, the Giants have discovered the birds utterly hate the song known as the “Cha-Cha Slide.”

“It goes literally like, ‘Everybody clap your hands,'” Costa said, and demonstrated by clapping his hands eleven times in rhythm.

Getting fans to clap along with the song is a great way to get the gulls to slide right out of the ballpark — at least for a little while, he said.

Generations of Memories

Costa says his most important job at Oracle Park is ensuring that families who come to a Giants game get to experience the kind of timeless memories that make baseball special from one generation to the next. He was probably talking about human families — but then again, he didn’t specify.

Shaffer points out that sometime in September or October — when the Giants might be laser-focused on the race for the National League pennant — another kind of family might be showing up at Oracle Park.

“When the chicks are big enough to fly,” Shaffer said, “A family of gulls might actually head to the ballpark and feast on what’s there with their young fledgling chick.”

Do the young birds then develop a taste for garlic fries that stays with them for life? Shaffer and Tarjan said they hope that one day soon, they’ll have the answer.

On a windy January afternoon, a line of people snaked its way around the corner of 24th and Mission in San Francisco, meandering around street vendors and shop entrances in the heart of a bustling neighborhood.

Wearing masks and occasionally face shields, the people in line dutifully stood on chalked lines six feet apart, each waiting their turn to have their nostrils probed by a stranger holding an extra-long cotton swab.

“For the first few days, we had over 700 people (per day) come test,” said Susana Rojas, executive director of Calle 24, San Francisco’s Latino Cultural District.

First opened in April 2020 for a select group of residents, the free coronavirus testing site at the corner of 24th and Mission had been open to all members of the public since November, and after a holiday surge in COVID-19 cases, it saw no shortage of takers.

“It was huge,” Rojas said of the surge when we spoke in January. “And we’re hoping that with all the work we’re doing to help people isolate, we’re going to be able to bring it down.”

Helping infected people stay isolated, explained UCSF physician Carina Marquez, is key to stopping the spread — and in this predominantly Latino neighborhood, that comes with unique challenges. The first challenge, she said, is simply catching the infection before it spreads to an entire family.

“Transmission within households is really high, and certainly higher when you’re exposed to more people,” she said. “Especially in really dense households, where you’re living with your grandma and your aunts and uncles and there’s lots of kids.”

A New Approach From an Old Playbook

Marquez and her collaborator Diane Havlir at UCSF saw striking similarities between this pandemic and the one that raged out of control in the Bay Area a generation ago: the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Though the two viruses are very different in how they work and spread, they believed an effective response to the coronavirus could take a page straight out of Havlir’s HIV playbook from the 1980s.

“We developed an approach we call ‘low barrier,'” Havlir said. “A person can walk up on that same very day, they can get the result as soon as possible, and they can have someone help navigate what they should do with that result.”

Those principles formed the basis of the Mission District community testing site when it first opened to a select group of study participants in April, 2020. Testing was free, with no need to show an ID or insurance card, and no appointment necessary. Those eligible were encouraged to test often — at the first sign of symptoms, or with no symptoms at all. Results were delivered the same day by a disclosure team that could immediately offer counseling and services to patients who tested positive.

It was a highly unusual approach in the early days of the pandemic, recalled UCSF biophysics professor Joe DeRisi.

“A year ago, to qualify to get a test you had to be symptomatic,” DeRisi said. “That was a major, major mistake.”

DeRisi set up one of California’s first large-scale coronavirus testing labs in San Francisco, funded by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg and housed at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, where DeRisi serves as co-president.

“We just didn’t fully appreciate that around 50 percent of people who get COVID never have a symptom,” he said. “And that one fact is probably the largest driver of this pandemic, bar none.”

Processing test samples from around the state — and from the Mission District study — he began analyzing tiny mutations in the virus to build a “family tree” of sorts, and learn about how it spreads. The analysis showed that essential workers are some of the most likely people to contract the virus, and densely-packed living situations are the places where it spreads the fastest. As Havlir’s study gathered more information about the demographics of those who tested positive, a troubling pattern began to emerge.

A Community Hit Hard

According to the Latino Task Force, which partnered with UCSF on the study, about 40 percent of the people tested in the study identified themselves as Latino (Latinos make up 58 percent of the neighborhood overall). But among people who tested positive for COVID-19, Latinos account for a staggering 95.5 percent.

“I wasn’t surprised — but I was devastated,” Priscilla Chan said of her first look at those numbers. “The number of people who identified as Caucasian with coronavirus, I think, was literally zero. Zero. In the same neighborhood, in the same buildings.”

Chan oversees the day-to-day operations of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropy she runs with her husband, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The organization’s stated goal is to cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the century. Chan has strong feelings about inclusivity when it comes to health care: in public health, she says, the “public” must include everybody.

“The Latinx population that traditionally has lower access to healthcare and testing needs a different solution,” she said. “To keep everyone safe, we actually have to keep everyone safe.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative initially pledged $13.6 million to study the spread of COVID-19 in the Bay Area, and as of April 2021, had spent a total of $108.8 million on coronavirus response efforts worldwide. $4.7 million of that went to set up and run the testing lab overseen by DeRisi, which provided free PCR testing to counties across California.

But for the Latino community in San Francisco’s Mission District, traditional approaches to PCR testing often weren’t fast enough.

“Waiting two days, three days, sometimes five days to get your result,” Marquez said, “by the time we get to the home, everybody’s been infected.”

So in the fall of 2020, the UCSF team began trying out a new kind of test at the Mission community site: Abbott‘s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test, which comes on a paper card and requires no machine or special processing. The test gives a result within 15 minutes, meaning volunteers can notify patients within 1-2 hours. By January, the site had switched to the new test entirely, with thousands of data points confirming that it was nearly as accurate as PCR at identifying the patients with the highest viral loads — those most likely to be infectious.

“Identifying people earlier on in their infection may mean that you can get to their contacts a lot earlier,” Marquez said.

She explained that COVID-19 is typically contagious for ten days from the onset of symptoms. Patients who drop by for testing at the first sign of a fever could be notified of their need to isolate on the first day — meaning they can avoid spreading the virus for the remaining nine days. That stands in stark contrast to PCR testing by appointment, in which a patient could unknowingly spread the virus for several days — while waiting for a test, and then waiting for a result.

A Problem of Economics

The importance of a rapid test-and-respond model is only amplified by the economic realities facing the Latino community in San Francisco’s Mission District, said Jon Jacobo of the Latino Task Force.

“It’s highlighting these inequities within our country,” said Jacobo, who chairs the task force’s health committee.

Compounding the problem of crowded apartments, Jacobo said, is the list of jobs most commonly held by Latinos in San Francisco: jobs that are high-risk for coming in contact with people carrying the coronavirus.

“Ask yourself: who’s picking the food in the fields?” he said. “Who’s driving the trucks to the produce market? Bringing it to the grocery stores? Taking it to the restaurants? … It’s the Latino community.”

Of the people who tested positive during the initial study, he said, “We found that 90 percent of them were essential workers — meaning they couldn’t stay home, they had to go out and work. And 88 percent of them made under $50,000 a year — in a neighborhood where a two-bedroom goes for $4,500 a month. That leads to people having to live multiple individuals in a unit.”

In San Francisco, it’s common for landlords to ask that prospective tenants prove they’re spending no more than a third of their income on rent — meaning that it would take three incomes at those wages to qualify for a lease on a two-bedroom apartment.

Because people working in those types of jobs may have multiple employers and irregular hours, the ability to get tested in their own neighborhood without a prior appointment was a major step toward making testing more accessible, Havlir said. Marquez added that self-isolation in a large household is often a tricky matter. Breaking down that barrier came with help from San Francisco’s public health department.

“The Department of Public Health offers a free hotel, and so we immediately — same day you get diagnosed — we can refer you to … stay in a free hotel during your isolation period, with the hope that you’re going to decrease the likelihood that you spread the infection to your roommates,” Marquez said. “And then, of course, we want the roommates to come here and test.”

For households of more than four people, the disclosure team will offer to make a house call: they’ll come to the patient’s home, test everyone who lives there, and immediately offer services that could include food assistance if the need to isolate will result in lost wages.

“It’s not enough to test,” Marquez emphasized. “You have to respond.”

A Summer of Uncertainty

Even with all adults now eligible for vaccines across much of the Bay Area, DeRisi says testing will remain important.

“There’s still a sizable percentage of the population that isn’t vaccinated yet,” he said. “We need to know who has the virus, and we need to isolate them quickly — especially with the emergence of new variants.”

DeRisi’s genetic testing lab continues to analyze samples from around the state — looking for which variants are entering the Bay Area, which are becoming dominant, and which could spell trouble.

“We want to know if there are particular variants that not only spread aggressively, but might have the ability to escape the vaccine,” he said.

UCSF and the Latino Task Force are continuing to offer community testing, and Jacobo said the 24th and Mission site has been responsible for about six percent of the samples sent in for genetic sequencing.

The site has also begun offering vaccinations, inviting those who get tested to book a vaccine appointment before leaving — and sending out invitations by text message to those who’ve been tested there in the past. Havlir points out that some of the obstacles that exist at large city-run testing sites can also exist at mass vaccination sites.

“There’s people that there are just trust barriers, cultural barriers, to go to large sites like that, and those are the people we need to offer vaccination opportunities to,” Havlir said.

A Group That’s Still Waiting

But as more people get vaccines, there’s one group that’s remained almost completely unvaccinated: children. DeRisi and Chan point out that testing is likely to play a critical role in safely reopening schools.

As the mother of two school-age daughters, Chan said she knows this year has been tough on kids.

“One thing that is critical is making sure that our kids are getting back to their ‘normal,’ whatever the new normal is,” she said. “They need to be with other kids, they need to be learning.”

And though the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s long term focus on supporting breakthroughs in basic science remains the same, Chan said she’s taking a hard look at how the organization can continue some of the work it’s begun during this unexpected detour.

Above all, Chan said, she hopes the pandemic has highlighted that the public health of a community is only as strong as its most vulnerable population.

“To actually address the pandemic, we have to act as a collective body, and that doesn’t work if we’re systematically leaving populations behind,” she said. “We get sick together; we get well together.”

That’s the commonality Stevenson said he finds among the fiercely loyal customers he’s dubbed the “Gourmonade Fam.” Whether they first found him on Instagram, at his retail shop, or through the viral video of his racist run-in with police, they’ve all stuck around because they love Stevenson’s new take on lemonade — and the dozens of flavors he’s created.

“We had 42 recipes before we opened up this store here, and we have more now,” Stevenson said. “I get inspired by regular — even like taco Tuesday, we have a taco lemonade.”

The flavors change with the seasons, since they’re all made with fresh fruit, but Stevenson offers some year-round. Those “staple” flavors are the ones he’ll focus on as he prepares Gourmonade for its next big challenge: cold-pressing bulk orders of bottled lemonade, giving them the extended shelf life needed for high-end supermarket chains like Whole Foods.

“We want to do it right when we go into Whole Foods, because that’s big boy pants level,” he said. “That’s where everybody wants to be.”

Stevenson said he plans to sell Gourmonade directly to customers this summer at local farmer’s markets, including the one at Jack London Square in Oakland.

He said he’s waiting for the right moment to reopen his San Francisco store on Valencia Street. Neighbors say they’ll be lining up when he does.

The Backstory

We first met Vicktor Stevenson wearing a bow tie and a big smile as he stood in front of his tiny store in San Francisco’s Mission District.

He was the city’s newest viral sensation — a young entrepreneur with the audacity to charge a whopping eight dollars for a bottle of fresh-squeezed lemonade — and it seemed the whole neighborhood had shown up to see what the fuss was about.

“It has a sharp, sour flavor that I really like,” one customer commented.

“Well, you know, it’s cheaper than real estate,” another quipped.

For two years, the business grew, and by early 2020, Stevenson had three other people working for him, squeezing lemons in the kitchen and selling more than half a dozen flavors of Gourmonade to thirsty customers.

And then, the world shut down.

“In the beginning, it was scary,” Stevenson said. “We closed down for a good three months. I came to terms with possibly closing down the business completely. … My main goal was just to keep my family safe. And so, if the business had to go, it had to go.”

But as summer began, Stevenson came across a company that would help Gourmonade deliver its products directly to customers. He felt it would allow the business to open up again in a safe way — eliminating the risk of standing out on the sidewalk and interacting with customers all afternoon, in the tiny outdoor storefront without room for plexiglass or social distancing.

Over the months that followed, Stevenson built up a base of loyal subscribers who order his fresh-squeezed lemonade by the gallon or by the bottle every 1-2 weeks. Some were already loyal customers, but others found Gourmonade for the first time on social media.

“About 96 percent of our sales come from social media, from Instagram,” Stevenson said. “We call them ‘Gourmonade fam,’ because it’s literally a family base we have, not really a fan base.”

And with the summer’s social justice movement shining a spotlight on Black-owned businesses, Stevenson said that family has continued to grow.

“I’m thankful for them, because they came for the story, or they came for whatever reason, but they stayed for the product,” he said. “And that’s what we’re here to sell, is great lemonade.”

Stevenson was always an early riser, but now he’s starting his days earlier than ever — doing his kitchen work as early as 4:30 a.m. on some days. He shares the kitchen with another business, and working at odd hours allows him to avoid direct contact with other workers, he said, lowering his risk of contracting COVID-19.

The day starts with squeezing lemons, and then preparing other ingredients — slicing fruit and brewing tea or coffee for Gourmonade’s six year-round flavors (including caffeinated and sugar-free varieties) or the numerous seasonal flavors on offer.

But as the tea steeps and the lemon juice flows in the kitchen, there’s a problem brewing back in the storage area.

“Right here, this used to be bottles — from the top to the bottom,” Stevenson explained. “We have about four packages left. That’s it.”

When Gourmonade launched, Stevenson said, he could buy glass bottles on an as-needed basis, stocking up on as many as he thought he could sell during the course of a sunny weekend. With the price of those bottles going up, and a move to subscription-based delivery, Gourmonade has moved to plastic bottles.

“Going plastic is going to help us grow and scale — it’s a lighter packaging and everything like that,” Stevenson said. “But the minimum orders are pretty ridiculous. We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to fund the re-up for the bottles so that we can continue to operate.”

Stevenson said he has a couple of loans out, and is applying for another one — adding he’d be open to taking on investors if the right ones come along.

In the mean time, he said, “My wife keeps me positive, and seeing my kid’s smile keeps me positive.”

Stevenson’s son Legacy, who’s now three years old, has almost mastered pronouncing the name of the family business.

“The fact that now he’s saying ‘Gourmonade’ keeps me even more positive — so I want to keep it around for him, so when he’s older, Gourmonade still exists,” Stevenson said. “So losing is not an option.”

ABOUT REBOUND: From dealing with restrictions brought forth by COVID-19 to wrangling with issues of equality and representation, Black-owned businesses are doing everything they can to rise up and be heard. 

REBOUND tells the stories of three Black-owned businesses and how they are persevering through difficult times, as well as how they’re using creativity and innovation to make their mark on a changing society. 

We supplied each business with a camera so they could take us behind the scenes themselves. REBOUND shows us their stories.

Stevenson said he was later told a neighbor had called the police, suspecting he was a burglar. Ironically, he had been on the phone with his security company, ensuring the alarm system was working, when officers arrived.

“When I started my business, I never took into account my race,” Stevenson said. “I never took into account being Black or not being Black — but that’s something that I just think plays a part.”

Stevenson’s story garnered attention a full two years before the Black Lives Matter movement shined a national spotlight on the challenges faced by Black business owners. It earned him a loyal following from neighbors who said they want to see more entrepreneurs of color and small family-owned businesses in San Francisco’s Mission district.

But faced with an ongoing pandemic that’s left the neighborhood’s usually bustling sidewalks unusually quiet, Stevenson continues to look for new opportunities at grocery stores and farmer’s markets, hoping to find a steady flow of thirsty customers in time for summer.

The Backstory

We first met Vicktor Stevenson wearing a bow tie and a big smile as he stood in front of his tiny store in San Francisco’s Mission District.

He was the city’s newest viral sensation — a young entrepreneur with the audacity to charge a whopping eight dollars for a bottle of fresh-squeezed lemonade — and it seemed the whole neighborhood had shown up to see what the fuss was about.

“It has a sharp, sour flavor that I really like,” one customer commented.

“Well, you know, it’s cheaper than real estate,” another quipped.

For two years, the business grew, and by early 2020, Stevenson had three other people working for him, squeezing lemons in the kitchen and selling more than half a dozen flavors of Gourmonade to thirsty customers.

And then, the world shut down.

“In the beginning, it was scary,” Stevenson said. “We closed down for a good three months. I came to terms with possibly closing down the business completely. … My main goal was just to keep my family safe. And so, if the business had to go, it had to go.”

But as summer began, Stevenson came across a company that would help Gourmonade deliver its products directly to customers. He felt it would allow the business to open up again in a safe way — eliminating the risk of standing out on the sidewalk and interacting with customers all afternoon, in the tiny outdoor storefront without room for plexiglass or social distancing.

Over the months that followed, Stevenson built up a base of loyal subscribers who order his fresh-squeezed lemonade by the gallon or by the bottle every 1-2 weeks. Some were already loyal customers, but others found Gourmonade for the first time on social media.

“About 96 percent of our sales come from social media, from Instagram,” Stevenson said. “We call them ‘Gourmonade fam,’ because it’s literally a family base we have, not really a fan base.”

And with the summer’s social justice movement shining a spotlight on Black-owned businesses, Stevenson said that family has continued to grow.

“I’m thankful for them, because they came for the story, or they came for whatever reason, but they stayed for the product,” he said. “And that’s what we’re here to sell, is great lemonade.”

Stevenson was always an early riser, but now he’s starting his days earlier than ever — doing his kitchen work as early as 4:30 a.m. on some days. He shares the kitchen with another business, and working at odd hours allows him to avoid direct contact with other workers, he said, lowering his risk of contracting COVID-19.

The day starts with squeezing lemons, and then preparing other ingredients — slicing fruit and brewing tea or coffee for Gourmonade’s six year-round flavors (including caffeinated and sugar-free varieties) or the numerous seasonal flavors on offer.

But as the tea steeps and the lemon juice flows in the kitchen, there’s a problem brewing back in the storage area.

“Right here, this used to be bottles — from the top to the bottom,” Stevenson explained. “We have about four packages left. That’s it.”

When Gourmonade launched, Stevenson said, he could buy glass bottles on an as-needed basis, stocking up on as many as he thought he could sell during the course of a sunny weekend. With the price of those bottles going up, and a move to subscription-based delivery, Gourmonade has moved to plastic bottles.

“Going plastic is going to help us grow and scale — it’s a lighter packaging and everything like that,” Stevenson said. “But the minimum orders are pretty ridiculous. We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to fund the re-up for the bottles so that we can continue to operate.”

Stevenson said he has a couple of loans out, and is applying for another one — adding he’d be open to taking on investors if the right ones come along.

In the mean time, he said, “My wife keeps me positive, and seeing my kid’s smile keeps me positive.”

Stevenson’s son Legacy, who’s now three years old, has almost mastered pronouncing the name of the family business.

“The fact that now he’s saying ‘Gourmonade’ keeps me even more positive — so I want to keep it around for him, so when he’s older, Gourmonade still exists,” Stevenson said. “So losing is not an option.”

ABOUT REBOUND: From dealing with restrictions brought forth by COVID-19 to wrangling with issues of equality and representation, Black-owned businesses are doing everything they can to rise up and be heard. 

REBOUND tells the stories of three Black-owned businesses and how they are persevering through difficult times, as well as how they’re using creativity and innovation to make their mark on a changing society. 

We supplied each business with a camera so they could take us behind the scenes themselves. REBOUND shows us their stories.

This is life in the COVID-19 era for the owner and operator of gourmet lemonade business Gourmonade: getting tested regularly, working alone in the kitchen late at night, and re-imagining his company from the ground up.

The pandemic has changed everything about how Stevenson makes and sells lemonade, and is now forcing him to explore avenues he never thought he would: hand-delivering six packs, shipping frozen gallons of lemonade to Alaska, and working to get his most popular flavors into grocery stores.

All the while, he keeps a smile on his face, and ends every customer interaction with his signature catchphrase: “Shazaam!!”

The Backstory

We first met Vicktor Stevenson wearing a bow tie and a big smile as he stood in front of his tiny store in San Francisco’s Mission District.

He was the city’s newest viral sensation — a young entrepreneur with the audacity to charge a whopping eight dollars for a bottle of fresh-squeezed lemonade — and it seemed the whole neighborhood had shown up to see what the fuss was about.

“It has a sharp, sour flavor that I really like,” one customer commented.

“Well, you know, it’s cheaper than real estate,” another quipped.

For two years, the business grew, and by early 2020, Stevenson had three other people working for him, squeezing lemons in the kitchen and selling more than half a dozen flavors of Gourmonade to thirsty customers.

And then, the world shut down.

“In the beginning, it was scary,” Stevenson said. “We closed down for a good three months. I came to terms with possibly closing down the business completely. … My main goal was just to keep my family safe. And so, if the business had to go, it had to go.”

But as summer began, Stevenson came across a company that would help Gourmonade deliver its products directly to customers. He felt it would allow the business to open up again in a safe way — eliminating the risk of standing out on the sidewalk and interacting with customers all afternoon, in the tiny outdoor storefront without room for plexiglass or social distancing.

Over the months that followed, Stevenson built up a base of loyal subscribers who order his fresh-squeezed lemonade by the gallon or by the bottle every 1-2 weeks. Some were already loyal customers, but others found Gourmonade for the first time on social media.

“About 96 percent of our sales come from social media, from Instagram,” Stevenson said. “We call them ‘Gourmonade fam,’ because it’s literally a family base we have, not really a fan base.”

And with the summer’s social justice movement shining a spotlight on Black-owned businesses, Stevenson said that family has continued to grow.

“I’m thankful for them, because they came for the story, or they came for whatever reason, but they stayed for the product,” he said. “And that’s what we’re here to sell, is great lemonade.”

Stevenson was always an early riser, but now he’s starting his days earlier than ever — doing his kitchen work as early as 4:30 a.m. on some days. He shares the kitchen with another business, and working at odd hours allows him to avoid direct contact with other workers, he said, lowering his risk of contracting COVID-19.

The day starts with squeezing lemons, and then preparing other ingredients — slicing fruit and brewing tea or coffee for Gourmonade’s six year-round flavors (including caffeinated and sugar-free varieties) or the numerous seasonal flavors on offer.

But as the tea steeps and the lemon juice flows in the kitchen, there’s a problem brewing back in the storage area.

“Right here, this used to be bottles — from the top to the bottom,” Stevenson explained. “We have about four packages left. That’s it.”

When Gourmonade launched, Stevenson said, he could buy glass bottles on an as-needed basis, stocking up on as many as he thought he could sell during the course of a sunny weekend. With the price of those bottles going up, and a move to subscription-based delivery, Gourmonade has moved to plastic bottles.

“Going plastic is going to help us grow and scale — it’s a lighter packaging and everything like that,” Stevenson said. “But the minimum orders are pretty ridiculous. We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to fund the re-up for the bottles so that we can continue to operate.”

Stevenson said he has a couple of loans out, and is applying for another one — adding he’d be open to taking on investors if the right ones come along.

In the mean time, he said, “My wife keeps me positive, and seeing my kid’s smile keeps me positive.”

Stevenson’s son Legacy, who’s now three years old, has almost mastered pronouncing the name of the family business.

“The fact that now he’s saying ‘Gourmonade’ keeps me even more positive — so I want to keep it around for him, so when he’s older, Gourmonade still exists,” Stevenson said. “So losing is not an option.”

ABOUT REBOUND: From dealing with restrictions brought forth by COVID-19 to wrangling with issues of equality and representation, Black-owned businesses are doing everything they can to rise up and be heard. 

REBOUND tells the stories of three Black-owned businesses and how they are persevering through difficult times, as well as how they’re using creativity and innovation to make their mark on a changing society. 

We supplied each business with a camera so they could take us behind the scenes themselves. REBOUND shows us their stories.