General Seminar

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5 minutes

I’m going to be a special guest at Near Future Lab’s General Seminar No9 on Synthetic Media/Synthetic Brands along with Katie Dreke on Wednesday (29th).

What? Why? Well — because I want to know what the heck is up with this show Alter Ego that is plastered all over the metro buses here in Los Angeles. (That, but so many more questions..but that’s a start!)

Join me, Julian Bleecker and strategy & innovation consultant Katie Dreke — along with our special guest participant, strategist & writer Jay Springett (a/k/a @thejaymo) who also is the feller behind the most fantastically concise podcast, 301 Permanently Moved.

Sign up quick! There are only 16 seats! $20/seat!

Like — what the heck? The log line is “A singing competition where contestants reinvent themselves and perform like never before — as their dream avatar.”

I’m looking forward to talking about purpose built ABBA stadiums, vinfulencers, the coming explosion in realtime indie movies, and more. If you want to attend seats are 20 bucks and limited: link here.


It was great to get back in the practice room with the lads during the week.

My ‘works with computers’ fingers are still in shock after playing bass for 3 hours.

As expecting seeing as we hadn’t played together for 18months, things sounded pretty ropey during the first hour. But after three hours we got 2 songs somewhere back in the ‘barely acceptable’ range.

A lot of work ahead if we are going to record this side of xmas. :s

I think lap steel players are super lucky that they get to sit down the whole time. It’s funny, I’ve known Matt for 18 years and this is the first time we’ve been in a band together.


Jay Owens announced her book: Dust: A History and a Future of Environmental Disaster this week. I’m really happy for her. Can’t wait to read it. Here’s the detail

Dust  is developed from the email newsletter “Disturbances”, which Owens created to “explore dust as a method for seeing the world anew – from space dust to sandstorms, the domestic to the digital”. Owens’ study developed into a story about the deep entanglements of people, capitalism, and the natural environment, from the earliest industrial history into the future speculative technologies for geoengineering a cooler planet, Hodder said. The book will reveal that all human history is recorded in the dust we create and how the substance, in its many and varied forms, plays a vital role in Earth’s metabolism. 

Owens is a writer and researcher based in London. She started to think about dust in 2008, after casting around for a topic for her master’s thesis in geography and architectural theory at UCL. Her writing has been published in the Guardian, Roads and Kingdoms and Apollo magazine.


Permanently Moved

New Glasses

I have two new pairs of glasses. For the first time in a long time I’ve been feeling self conscious. But this is my face now, I’ll get used to it

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

  • Endless Essay noodling.
  • Starting writing up a personal project I’ve been working on.
  • More unreal tutorials.
  • A conversation with Simon from Untitled Frontier the CC licensed interactive/blockchain story studio.
  • Organisation of my life ready for the back end of the year.

Dipping the Stacks

Help! I Couldn’t Stop Writing Fake Dear Prudence Letters That Got Published

It was a fulfilling creative outlet, until one got featured on Tucker Carlson.

Beijing’s breakup of Alipay was inevitable – Rest of World

In just 17 years, Alipay went from zero to $17 trillion in transaction volume, amassing over 700 million users. Visa processes only about three-quarters of that in total payment volume and is more than 60 years old.

Why People Are Scared of Marie Kondo (Kondopilled, part 1)

KonMari is fundamentally about killing your own falsity, about holding a funeral for all the remnants of old, illusory perceptions of yourself that you’ve been too afraid to give up.

How trust undermines science – Works in Progress

“According to science” is a cursed phrase. It signals a high probability that the content you’re about to consume is based on small, sketchy studies that probably don’t replicate. But it wasn’t always so. People used to trust science, myself included. Then the replication crisis happened.

Cozy Management Games Remind Us How to Care | WIRED

Sometimes a gentle nudge is all we need to start looking after ourselves, and others.

Reading

I’m still reading James/Meta-Nomad’s essay collection ‘Exiting Modernity’.
It’s so good. I ended up reading this essay on ‘Bugmen’ out loud in its entirety to Eve one evening. LOL

Still also reading FALC. Also still reading Building Imaginary Worlds.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Kaloli by Nihiloxica

My friend top sent me a link to this bandcamp album with no explanation and i’m really glad he did.

Here’s the description from the artists website:

Kaloli is the debut full-length LP from Kampala’s darkest electro-percussion group Nihiloxica on cult Belgian label Crammed Discs. The album marries the propulsive Ugandan percussion of the Nilotika Cultural Ensemble with technoid analog synth lines and hybrid kit playing from the UK’s pq and Spooky-J. The result is something otherworldly. Kaloli journeys through the uncharted space between two cultures of dance music, where the expression of traditional elements mutates into something more sinister and nihilistic.

And here’s some live footage from CTM 2018. Can’t wait to catch them live one day.

Remember Kids:


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