The Halluci Nation: Electric Pow Wow Drum
From A Tribe Called Red (2013). There’s already so much power in traditional indigenous chanting, to add blasting electronic synths and amplification gives it just a little more oomph. Possible to tastefully connect such far away aesthetics. Super simple form, but interesting timbres from metal shakers and leather-skinned drums.
From Fountain (2020). The celestial feeling evoked without words shows what is possible with the simplest of materials: only voice, no other instruments, minimal effects (mostly reverb and echo); the layering of parts to create rich harmonies; a variety of vocal textures, syllables, sounds. There is a kind of static rhythm throughout the whole work, but contrast in the form keeps it interesting. A sublime creation.
The roads to understanding misinformation....
[If a headline provokes an emotional reaction, be on guard. They should pique your curiosity more than convince you to form an opinion. Inform over inflame.]
[Name-dropping like 'ex-Clinton staffer' might be pulling things out of context to create a first question.]
[Quoting a figure like Trump in the headline is a way to defer attention.]
[The context of a poll, how it was collected, is as important as the findings.]
[Meme images are often presented out of context. Use reverse image search to find other places where it's displayed. Some people rotate it to make tracking sources more difficult, so if you also rotate it and find results, you know it was intentional.]
[The words 'seems', 'appears', 'apparently' is an indication of opinion about intent.]
[If the outlet has something new for you to be outraged every day and cut yourself off from society, be on guard.]
I often find myself glazing over conceptual interfaces for computing because I usually just want to use the thing to see how it feels, but the nice demos on this one stopped me.
The promise of digital systems for me has always had something to do with ‘surfacing the right amount of meaningful things at the right time’. I have approximated this in my apps by requiring explicit actions to surface things because it’s beyond my capacity to imagine how to do this more automatically, and also generally distrust machines to automate this well. So how nice it is to see a vision for creating structures and associations with little friction, more or less by directing your attention. Computers should be good at this while allowing us to tweak things, to avoid relying completely on a black box:
The system can handle most of the heavy lifting by simply paying attention to how we move through our items within different contexts, but we can further manage the associations manually as we like.
Bringing things to view in the way presented here is so much more compelling than clicking around through filesystems or apps. The closest that I’ve seen and used is Quicksilver’s way of 'knowing’ by key combinations and their frequency, but this requires explicit association. Successfully capturing intent passively instead of explicitly makes it so that being a programmer is not necessary.
It’s important to have higher-level primitives baked into lower levels, rather than reconstructing them in each app–this can mean schemas, file formats, or an operating system itself. Your trail or history is valuable and shouldn’t be siloed in or built bespoke for certain apps. How can this be constructed without a universal app for all the things? (or is that just another operating system?) How can this be done in a way where the data is not siloed within this system (even though it seems to afford great flexibility across app boundaries)?
How I made $210,822 selling a pdf and a video on the internet
[Find something you know super well and give away everything you know about it for free wherever people interested in that hang around. If you manage to get attention, you will start getting questions: whatever doesn't fit into a short response can be a prompt for your info product. If you do the product, you'll have the audience at the outset because they already asked for the info from you specifically.]
[A one-hour promotion making the product available at any price over one dollar.]
Let's talk about how to pick a charity....
[Charities that hire talented people can give donors more confidence, even if the organization isn't well-known.]
I’m very attached to my kid, but I don’t expect him to be attached to me. I don’t want him to feel more tied to some people than others. I hope he ventures out into the world, makes new bonds, and feels no obligation to me. He doesn’t owe me anything. His life is his own. He didn’t ask to be born, and has no debts.
Ali Abdaal / Deep Dive | Derek Sivers
[Instead of asking if someone is free to talk, just call: the ringtone is the ask.]
God drugs those who drug themselves.
[Conversation has an arc, but also needs a spark.]
[Challenge people to contrast with what others have said. Encourage them to talk to each other.]
[Togetherness needs a plurality of relationships. Demonstrate a personal connection with you during intros. Show them they can participate in different levels.]
[Prompt in the event description to collect and come with thoughts about questions.]
[People love to be invited, and feel egotistical about barging in on a conversation (everyone seems smart, why should i talk?).]
Pay What You Want and the Four Currencies
[Optional contributions in software don't work because they're more of a pain in the ass than the free experience. If you forced a minimum price of even a cent, people would likely be more generous than the minimum because they're already in the payment process.]
[Journalism helps you learn about the world and understand what's around.]
From Caetano Veloso (1986). I’m overwhelmed by the simplicity of this little tune: just voice and simple guitar patterns can vividly paint an entire scene, with this bright, lilting mood. The singing and accompaniment are rhythmically fused in a way that makes it natural to embody. It was written for Caetano’s sister Maria Bethânia, whose hair may resemble a lion’s mane. The percussive clicking might be unique to this version of the song. See the lyrics for a translation.
Frédéric Chopin: Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 (1835)
A live performance (with hands as the focal point) of a friend and pianist from Italy playing this masterpiece, followed by an analysis explaining what makes certain parts of this piece stand out from other repertoire. I enjoy this fluidity of being able to talk about music that one performs, to help other people hear what’s going on and find their way in.
posted to Blog
Another release from Kidi Band (featured in #022). I initially didn’t make the connection that this was the same group, so they truly managed to captivate me twice—it became distracting to do anything else and I just wanted to listen. I tend to avoid ‘loud’ music, but this reminds me that it’s possible for me to enjoy it. Thoughtful, complex, and emotional. My favourite moments: How Long with busy, intricate, active drumming in the midst of graceful, expansive, widening sung phrases, plus a polyphonic polyrhythmic sundae in the middle; the rhythmic singing in Mountain, feeling like a collective rhythm machine with sudden metric changes; Fever Driver’s dense, rich texture, heavily lilting from side to side (or maybe in circles) might get you high.
My former professor started writing in public recently and managed to describe transcendence in what we, here on the Internet, refer to as a “cat picture”. I’m fond of lenses that help us see the sublime in ordinary experiences. There is so much we can learn from animals and nature, such as paying attention to our natural reactions and inhibitions. Feels also like a kind of oblique strategy.
Here is Stella, instructing us on how to look at something we’ve never seen before. As our resident cat-comedian with a gift for irony, she is wondering whether this item — a conductor’s baton — can be worked in as “A” material for her next vaudeville show. The baton is also about to become a tooth sharpener, but we’ll explore that in a moment. Here, Stella is elevating attention itself into an art form, and teaching us to do the same. If that idea doesn’t resonate with you, please find your inner still-point and a moment to drink in her lucent, emerald gaze.
Let's talk about Thanksgiving with your liberal mom....
[Frame it as a dream because in some cases people like to make dreams come true.]
Maybe waiting implies an attachment to what comes 'after' whereas being present has no distinctions.
