S2:E2 Rival Gangs of Moaning Whales
Me again! I have words! And links!
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I’m a huge fan of Laura Olin’s wonderful newsletter. I just looked through my Gmail (which is more than 16 years old, no biggie) and saw I’ve been getting emails from her since she was “Laura at The Awl” in, like, 2015 (RIP The Awl). The emails arrive Friday mornings* (for me) and they consistently contain delightful, fun links that come from a better corner of the internet than the one I apparently hang out in.
One of my favourite aspects of the newsletter is that each edition ends with a poem. I’ve never really engaged with poetry. I get that I should, that it is definitely something I would enjoy etc, but it just never clicked. But I realised the other day that I consistently enjoy the ones she shares, so I decided to make poetry a bigger part of my life. Starting with putting Poets.org on my Home Screen.
Presented with the choice between opening Tweetbot and growing angry at a terrible thing taking place on the other side of the world, or improving my mood by reading a poem, I have been increasingly choosing the latter. Two of my favourites so far:
Travel, and At Age 28, Chilean Astronomer Maritza Soto Has Already Discovered Three Planets. If you find any others you like, let me know!
* Ever since streaming media became dominant, newsletters and podcasts have replaced TV in the category of “media that helps me remember what day it is.” Just me?
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Author, media technologist and all-round gadabout Robin Sloan has also been futzing around with poetry lately. He’s created a thing called Amulets. To qualify, a poem’s complete Unicode text must be 64 bytes or less, and the hexadecimal SHA-256 hash of the text must include four or more 8s in a row. The more 8s, the greater the “rarity”.
Amulets can then live on the blockchain as an NFT if that’s a thing you think is a good idea (no comment).
Amulet creation/discovery is best done programmatically, but there’s a sandbox in that link above where you can just type out poems and see if they work. And along the way, maybe you’ll type out some nice poems. I have done this for, oh, an afternoon or so, and I wrote some nice poems and found one “common” amulet, which was a sentence fragment. But you can do better, yes?
PS as this went to print I saw a “beyond mythic” Amulet someone minted as an NFT:
I still think you can do better.
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It was Zelda’s birthday in February, so what better way to celebrate than this video showing people reacting to the Breath of the Wild trailer?
From ecstasy to misery: this video of a streamer struggling to complete a shrine without dying goes from “so excruciating it’s funny”, to “too excruciating to be funny” and back again several times.
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Do you like the colour of the sky?
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Jam is an open source alternative to Clubhouse. If you’d like another alternative to Clubhouse, try pretty much any social media/messaging app. Speaking of Clubhouse, an argument that it may not be as douchey as everyone says it is? It’s definitely getting weirder (ie better).
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Remember 25 years ago in January, when there was the absurd GameStop+Reddit situation? There was no shortage of takes and thought pieces about the pump and dump or whatever it was, but this one from Kyle Chaka was the best I read.
It gives a really clear-eyed summation of how it feels to be alive in a world where being an early employee of the right tech company can suddenly make you a millionaire, or someone owning a tiny slice of cryptocurrency can cash out for thousands when Elon Musk mentions it on Twitter. We live in weird times.
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Finally, I’m not going to give you any intro or description of this, just watch it and don’t do any googling or research beforehand. I saw it described as “the best 45 minutes of TV ever made” and it lived up to that hype. It’s funny.
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So, yes, it’s been more than a month since I said these newsletters would arrive monthly. I’m sorry about that! There were pandemic-related disturbances and things, but I’ll make sure to do better next time. Thank you for allowing these to arrive in your inbox!
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Today’s song (Today in Tabs does these and I like them)
Until next time 👋