When I lived in Boston, I'd hear people talk about New York City all the time: they hated it, they missed it but still hated it, they were there last weekend and got messed with for wearing a Red Sox cap (or got confused with a Brooklyn Dodgers fan). There was a certain obsession with the city only 210 miles away.

That suited me, because I had grown up in upstate New York. Then I went to college with a bunch of wicked smart but wicked solipsistic New Yorkers. When I found out there was a whole city that actively hated New Yorkers, I couldn't move fast enough. That overexposure got it out of my system.

New Yorkers, in contrast, didn't notice Boston. They were hung up on themselves and had plenty of things within that. They needed cans of Pepsi that mentioned New York on them for some odd reason.

I live in Los Angeles now. People in San Francisco have a strange hatred of Angelinos. It reminds me of the Bostonian hatred of bigger NYC, except it makes less sense (except for the Giants fan that got beaten into a coma after a game at Dodgers Stadium -- that was horrible). It's like being resented by the gods: San Francisco is a beautiful city wrapped in clouds, while we have food trucks. Los Angeles is perfectly nice, so why do the better-off people feel the need to be our rivals?

Hubski is small. We're going to talk about Reddit because there is some modelling of its community. We'll also talk about it because we go there as well, then come here to get out of the loud bazaar and into the quiet tea room.

We're Hamtramck inside Detroit, Brookline surrounded by Boston, West Hollywood always a couple blocks from sketchier but more famous Hollywood. We have that removal because it keeps our brains in order, our lives in perspective.

Something that goes giant on Reddit can wind up mentioned on TV. Something that fills the eight-dot circle and gets over 20 comments in a day here could still be tiny news. That's fabulous.