Hey everyone!
Last week was a smoggy week in NYC, with smoke from Canadian wildfires covering the city from Tuesday up until about now. A health advisory was issued by NY state.
It felt very apocalyptic to move through the city this week. Here’s a photo I took of the city in smog.
Kind of eerie. It felt like this event is a line that has been crossed, like we’re going to get more and more of this kind of smog and smoke in the future.
The Toxicity, of our City, if you will.
I was surprised that I didn’t see a lot of New Yorkers wearing masks in public. I attribute that to the “tough New Yorker” myth. Maybe there is a bit of mask fatigue from Covid.
A while back I read this blog post that the air quality in NYC subways is way worse than initially thought. Since then, I’ve started to keep that thang on me(my mask) for anytime I have to hop on the train.
And now, smoke from forest fires!
I’m planning on getting out of the city for good in a year, and I am really looking forward to that. The shortlist of places we’re thinking of moving are: Kingston, NY; Philly; Holyoke, MA; Austin; and possibly somewhere in Maine?
If you have any tips, drop them in the comments.
5 Cool Things from This Week
The 5 Cool Things:
NYU’s ITP Camp
Bluesky
Zoe Lund (RIP)
This piece in Dazed about “the new psychedelic age of AI”
D’Angelo at Redbull Music Academy
ITP Camp
I’m at ITP Camp again!
What is ITP Camp?!
ITP is basically a one-month long hacker/maker camp that NYU hosts every June. Here’s a link for more info.
It’s a lot of fun. The ITP floor has 3D printers, laser cutters, a woodshop, an equipment room to check out all kinds of cameras and gear and stuff like that.
The people are the best part, though. 100-200 kind, creative nerds, all building stuff, and helping each other build stuff.
Here’s a quick vid I took from the camp orientation earlier this week.
And here are some links to some things I’ve made while at the camp in 2015 and 2017.
Bluesky
Bluesky is a social network that was funded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter.
As Twitter has turned into a garbage fire since being purchased by Elon Musk, many are leaving “the bird site” for Bluesky.
Bluesky is a lot more light-hearted than Twitter. Right now, there are around 100k users signed up.
The app is still relatively new, but the small team running it are placing an emphasis on safety and moderation, which is necessary in today’s social media landscape.
Eventually, Bluesky will be “federated” which means that there will be multiple Bluesky networks that are managed and moderated according to the wants and needs of the users.
Also, posting on Bluesky is called “skeeting”, which is ok I guess.
If you’re curious about the emerging shitposting culture on Bluesky, I recommend Faine Greenwood’s post about “sexy Alf”.
I have a Bluesky invite. Give me a good or funny reason to give it to you and I will send it over.
Zoe Lünd
I just watched a really wacked Abel Ferrara movie with Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, and Asia Argento.
The movie wasn’t good but it was a weird cyberpunk, dystopic kind-of-thing, which I’m a sucker for.
I’m always curious about who writes these kinds of things and it turns out it was a writer-actress-artist-political activist named Zoe Tamerlis Lünd.
Upon reading about her, Lünd seems to be the penultimate unsung 90’s icon:
Unapologetically addicted to and in love with heroin
Friends with cultural luminaries like Richard Hell, Abel Ferrara, Eric Bogosian
Co-wrote The Bad Lieutenant, one of the strangest and most visceral “cop movies” ever made
There’s a mystique about her that I find is so quintessentially 90’s. Feels like just a matter of time before Gen-Z discovers and lionizes her, like they’ve done with Kurt Cobain, Tupac, and others.
Lünd passed away in April 1999, effectively dying with the 90’s.
She was 37.
The New Psychedelic Age of AI
This piece in Dazed claims that we are entering “a new psychedelic age”, as AI chatbots will create new realities that we will be forced to reckon with.
Equating living in an AI-dominated world to the experience of a psychedelic drug is a bit of a stretch I think. However, AI’s potential to shape our world, create new narratives, and flood media channels with mass-produced, computer-generated media is something worth thinking about.
It’s an interesting piece. A lot of writing about AI is hype and nonsense, this piece at least offers a metaphor for how AI may change our world in the near future.
D’Angelo at Redbull Music Academy
I’ve been making music again.
Not by myself. I can only seem to get into it when I’m making music with others.
One of my friends that I make music with recommended this video of D’Angelo speaking at the Redbull Music Academy.
If you’re not familiar with D’Angelo:
You should be.
He doesn’t give a lot of interviews and rarely speaks in public.
If you’re a fan, this informal discussion before an audience is an absolute treat. Highly recommended.
Some other things that you may not know about D’Angelo:
He started his music career as an MC.
He’s been playing piano since he was three.
He has that superpower-musician-thing of growing up in the church (Aretha, Marvin, many others, also Kings of Leon)
Listen to the whole thing here:
Tweets From this Week That I Liked
This tweet by @AnneSelke.
This tweet on retiring the “attention economy” as a phrase.
This tweet thread comparing Silicon Valley to the Soviet Union.
This tweet about “failed experiments” and how your writing might “map to a great idea” but still needs work to convey it effectively through writing.
This tweet musing about a widespread shift back to communal living.
I’ve been writing about this topic for a while:
- "Go Find the Others"
- Living in Community = Doing the Shadow Work 👤
- Prepping Won't Solve Your Problems
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