I grew up on PC's but had not heard of Neko until somewhat recently. Back in the 1980s, Naoshi Watanabe created an MS-DOS graphical cat named Neko. I'm not clear on what it did back in the DOS days but it was quickly ported to the Macintosh in 1989 and would chase your mouse around the screen. That's it. It's just adorable and fun.

The full history is worth a read. It was eventually ported to Windows, officially licensed by IBM for OS/2 and the author even eventually declared the images as part of the public domain. Because of that, there's a million variants and offshoots of the program. The adorable lives on.

Maybe I should install WebNeko around here....

Occasionally old mixes pop into my brain. The other day I was thinking about Summer Long, Some Aren't - a mix from McBurney that introduced me to Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra. I went to recreate the mix on Spotify and could not find anything about Track 5 - "High Life Time" by Good Friend Charles.

No streaming music service had any artist with that name. Google returned no valid results. I inquired with Mac what the story was and he said he named it that based on a best guess; as he'd heard the song from Pates Tapes, with no obvious credit.

This all sounds like a great candidate for a Lostwave deep dive but then it hit me.. this mix came out in 2012, before the ubiquity of song identifying services like Shazam or SoundHound. I played the track and got the hit for George Darko, "Highlife Time." A song from a 1983 album originally entitled Hi-Life Time.

Mystery solved but, more importantly, a nice little gateway to great record and a wonderful sampler about Oval Records. Triple win in my eyes.

I posted about the "Sound Files of Summer" episode of Never Post back at the end of June. If you have not listened to that episode yet, please do so now. The show recently did a Mailbag follow-up where listeners chime in about how streaming music vs curating a library of files has impacted them. This is some nerdy subject matter I can greatly appreciate. They tackle the music library topic at the top of the show but hop to 7:45 to get directly into the discussion about "the materiality of sound files." Specifically, how listening to sound files differs from streaming, particularly in regards to encoded errors that create. The second response gets even further into this idea and I'm transcribing the quote exactly here so there's a means of preserving it:

"I accept that my copy of Akira is a little folded up in the corner after I sat on it without looking. Or that my vinyl copy of that one Sufjan Stevens record has a locked groove that I need to get up and lift the tone arm over whenever I get to that part. We expect our physical media objects to have quirks of ownership. There was a very short amount of time where our digital media had these same quirks.

Maybe that copy of Indiana Jones that's sitting on your computer just has the Hindi subtitles burned into it and you learned to live with it. Kind of grow to love it. It's yours (although depending on how you got it, it could also be someone else's). It's just not everyone else's. Digital files are funny like that.

The age of streaming has somewhat singularized the files of digital media and I find that to be a little sad."

I love that quote. It is, admittedly, a little bit of nostalgia for a nerdier time but it's also a nice sentiment that building a "Music Library" is a physical activity. Granted, the physicality of it is bits being written on a drive but there's still something there; errors and all.

Bloomberg ran a piece profiling the Worldcoin Orb Factory - a biometric iris scanner that swaps your retina data for cryptocurrency. The company behind it is called Tools for Humanity and it's backed by Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO (at the time of writing) and many other big VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz (whom I can no longer mention without citing their moral bankruptcy).

The pitch is that as technology advances, we will need a way to verify human beings vs AI. So, they set forth to scan every iris on Earth and store the information in the blockchain, which means you get a little dab of cryptocurrency in exchange called Worldcoin, which you can access with your newly registered World ID. It's like a fusion of Universal Basic Income, cryptocurrency and Persona, all verified by your eyeball. The people behind it know how dystopian it sounds but promise it's all quite altruistic.

My knee jerk for projects like this is that they are naive at best and exploitative at worst. Quotes from the Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania like this one do not waive my fears:

“That’s actually the cool thing about Silicon Valley,” Blania told the students. “You’re able to raise a quarter of a billion dollars with a crazy idea that, if it works, will change everything, and, if it doesn’t work, at least it was worth a try.”

It actually turns my stomach to think about how much VC money is spent on ideas like this instead of real world problems. The amount of ego involved is astounding to say the least.

Trying my best to put on an optimistic viewpoint, I can't disagree that a Universal Basic Income is a good idea. I can't disagree that technology is going to accelerate extremely fast, possibly in such a way that humans are hard to detect (tho mostly online). I can't even disagree that The Orb looks cool. It's also built on open source software and available for anyone to see how it works. But at the end of the day, it's a for profit company, with hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capitalist funding that eventually expects a return. They may be betting on that return to be fueled by the Worldcoin crypto value increasing but it's entirely possible that's not going to be the case. Even if it is, it's likely that the investors will be first in line to profit over the millions of people scanning their eyeballs.

As I get older, I'm trying to keep an open mind about technology and efforts of this nature. It's too easy to be cranky and pessimistic about everything. However, that forced optimism can be its own trap; skepticism can be healthy. Overall, I'm not keen on Worldcoin or The Orb for myself. Maybe one day I'll feel otherwise but I'm not convinced the privacy downside is worth the crypto gamble.

I've been keeping an eye on the Creative Works conference since way back in 2014. I even had the pleasure of attending in 2015. I still think about the presentations from Mikey Burton, Ghostly Ferns and Dan Christofferson to name but a few.

The conference has grown over the years and is now holding events on the west and east coasts. In fact, they recently announced their Creative Works EAST lineup and workshops. Lauren Hom! Meg Lewis! Jessica Hische! Lots of names I Don't Yet Know But Really Want To!

Creative Works founder Josh Horton has always had a knack for creating a compelling lineup of speakers, legitimately educational workshops and an environment that is friendly even if you (like me) do not really know anyone at all. Do recommend!

Somehow I ended up subscribed to Every - an AI / tech / thinkpiece newsletter that goes out every day. Sometimes the results are immersive and interesting, sometimes I delete them before I make it past the first paragraph. So it goes.

This piece on The Addiction Economy is much moreso the former. It's a lengthy read that takes its time to cover many of the obvious examples of how we're all becoming increasingly more addicted through technology and how that's not really all that surprising; it's a long trend!

Aside from being packed with informative nuggets about the world taking shape around us, it also ends on multiple optimistic notes. I find optimism to be a rare commodity these days, so I greatly appreciate a long - possibly dreadful - read that takes the effort to leave you with some positive feels.

The 2024 Defy Film Festival starts this weekend - Friday, August 16 Saturday, August 17th. It's been around since 2016 but I only managed to start attending in the last few years. I feel foolish for not having attending earlier. If you are in the Nashville area, make the effort. If you are not in the Nashville area, go follow them and come out next year! The folks over at City Cast Nashville have a great interview with one of the festival founders, Dycee Wildman. She does a great job explaining how the festival comes together and what kind of programming they are on the lookout for.

If you have a filmmaker in your life, please clue them in to Defy. They are doing a great thing and I'm especially in awe of their ability to keep it welcoming, weird and small. A perfect combo.

Miles recently invited me to Record Club - a new(ish) site for cataloging music. Simply put, it's "Letterboxd for music." I'm just getting started but if you end up on there, give me a follow!

My initial impression is that the aesthetic of the site is very nice, the onboarding was insightful and easy but the kind of music I listen to simply may not be in their database! Much like how Letterboxd uses TMBD as their backend, Record Club uses MusicBrainz for theirs. No repository of open source information is going to be complete (especially with music) but I've found that a great deal of what I'm listening to lately is simply not on there. I think my niche local listening may just be too specific.

That said, I've literally been signed up for less than an hour so any critique I have is way too early to be truly insightful. I'm happy it exists and am looking forward to getting it into my daily rotation.

TimWalzFixedYourBicycle.com is just the right dose of silly Internet. Refreshing to just have a little fun because a political candidate seems to be a pleasant person. Imagine it!

A few weeks ago, I got up at the crack of dawn and joined up with Tower Defense to film a video for their forthcoming song "Repeat." I am happy to report that song and video is no longer forthcoming! Drummer Jereme Frey did an astounding job doing all the things to make this gem come together. I won't lie - I enjoy that I get to make a cameo in the final product. The single is available on Bandcamp along with a b-side cover of Devo's "Girl U Want," which is also quite good.

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A few years ago, I had a casual meeting with the band and they told me they wanted to start a new cycle of home recording, DIY videos and releasing music more often. "Repeat" is the fourth single and video (along with an EP) that they've released in the last few years and it's really great to see that they set a goal, achieved it and did it with an ever increasing bar of quality. Ya love to see it.

Right at the tail end of July, The Robe released two brand new tracks - "Lights" with "River in the Ocean." This continues the ongoing series of singles that have been releasing monthly (you can hear them all here or here) and I gotta say, it's among my favorites yet. And that's saying a lot. Obviously I have bias with any release coming out on yk but I am really stunned by the evolution of these songs. "Evolution" being a questionable word choice as the songs are changing but they were always good from the very start.

I'm intrigued by the concept of Quantum computing but, like a lot of big physics ideas, I find it hard to understand on a practical level. There's a lot of language to comprehend (qubits, superpositions, probabilistic output, et al) and it's very easy to get lost in the sauce.

So, when YouTube served me up this Ted Talk from Hartmut Neven called Quantum Computers Aren’t What You Think — They’re Cooler, I assumed I was in for a real treat! Neven is the founder and lead at Google's Quantum AI division so he most certainly knows what he is talking about. For roughly half of the talk, I was following along just fine. Once it hits the real meat and potatoes of the talk, I must admit that I still have no idea how any of this works on a practical level.

Regardless, worth watching and learning about. Seems like it could be a real game changer in the speed of computing or maybe the key to unlocking some disastrous multi-verse disaster. Maybe both! Still, worth a watch.

Awhile back I stumbled on the video for "Her" by Caroline Cronin. It's a delightfully oddball offering that I can't say enough things about. Later, I stumbled on Cronin again with this "Softening" single - which isn't nearly as oddball and it is equally mesmerizing. Can't put my finger on why but there's something about it that keeps it on regular rotation.

Through the magic of haphazard searching, I came about this 2020 essay Consider the Arcologies. I was not familiar with the word but an "arcology" is a real architectural term for a structure that is densely populated, has low ecological impact and may even be self-sustaining (think: power, climate control, food production, et al in one building). To be clear, none exist, it's just an idea.

Unless you played SimCity 2000, the urban planning game from Maxis. Arcologies do exist in that environment. However, again, I was entirely unfamiliar (my house was a SimAnt household). Author AV Marracini makes this wonderful observation regarding the game and arcologies:

By the way, at the end of the game you choose to launch the arcologies into space. You abandon the metropolis that you have spent hundreds of hours balancing and maintaining. In SimCity 2000, the apex of the metropolis is its death. Cue the accelerationists. Cue Tacitus by way of Gibbon. We are all, in the end, some simulacrum of the bad emperors.

That's a lot to digest but it could not be more pertinent here in 2024 as we see the rise of Effective accelerationism, aka e/acc, the movement that aspires to propel technology at all costs, guard rails be damned.

The essay is a great read that proposes what life within each of those arcologies may be like. However, even more interesting, is to let yourself continue down the rabbit hole of how SimCity 2000 can be a reflection of our current times. This John Leavitt article, "Sim City 2k, Post-Capitalism, and ‘The Four Futures’" takes a similar tact breaking down each arcology tower and how they could represent our possible future.

All this may lead you Kevin T. Baker's piece "Model Metropolis," which tells the rich origin and history behind SimCity, going as far back as early computing influencers and urban planners. It also touches on the less-than-ideal underpinnings of the assumptions being made in the gameplay. Spoiler alert: a lot of historical urban planning was problematic, misguided and downright racist. SimCity isn't modeled after that but it is modeled upon the historical choices that came before it, which often were. (This can be extrapolated even further once you see the influence the game has on its players, convincing them that low taxes are the only way to go and destroying neighborhoods has no social impact (it's just a game, after all))

Or maybe you'll just end up watching the obnoxiously hypnotic depature of 330 arcologies from a SimCity map; the finale of the game and a sad conclusion to a lot of work.

The popular destinations of the web are closed systems but it's nice to remember there are still loads of websites out there linking to one another and guiding you through a deep dive of thoughtful entertainment.

A friend of mine saw Faye Webster in concert recently and remarked that 5-6 people had fainted during the performance. With a little research, they found that this has become more common post-COVID.

His findings are confirmed by this excellent essay Falling from May of 2023; in which author Max Levin recounts numerous fainting experiences at concerts and the phenomena that may cause it. One such name for this happening is "Stendhal syndrome" - defined in Wikipedia as:

...a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion, and even hallucinations, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty.

The name goes all the way back to 1817 when French writer Stendhal was overcome by seeing works of "painted frescoes and the tombs of Machiavelli, Galileo, and Michelagelo." Similarly, Lisztomania is the name for the intense crowd reactions at Franz Liszt concerts in the 1840s in which the audience would become overwhelmed with hysteria (and a helluva Phoenix song).

The essay goes on to speak on the shared experience of concerts and art viewing; how that can impact us both mentally and physically. I've not witnessed any bouts of fainting at concerts recently but I certainly can attest to the intense tuned in experience that comes from a particularly good show.

TLDR: good read. Thanks Steve!

Yesterday I posted about the Friend reveal, a new AI necklace that listens to your surroundings, lets you speak to it and responds with texts. The trailer felt dystopian but I tried to remind myself that the older I get there may be new things that take some adjustment. While I personally do love the Friend, I can see that it's a direction we're headed.

What I really want to make note of is that all of these AI powered pieces of hardware have all had some drama attached to them and it's a really satisfying Internet dish. Friend is no different.

With the Rabbit R1 (which I felt intrigued by), folks quickly figured out that it was just a device running Android and the "Large Action Model (LAM)" was not quite as fancy as the founders would lead you to believe. The Humane AI Pin (which I felt intrigued by) got some terrible reviews and the parent company is exploring a sale.

With Friend, founder Avi Schiffmann raised $2.5 million in a fundraising rounder - a rather small bit of seed investment relatively speaking. Apparently, they spent $1.8million on the domain. Many are clarifying that it's on a payment plan so they didn't just squander 75% of their available funds but still. It's a helluva lot of money for a device that costs $100 and, frankly, isn't stirring much genuine interest. It feels like vaporware and I'll be shocked if it's around in a year. Bonus: this Wired interview is quite cringe-y - the bravado of a 20-year old trying to sell some futuristic tech rarely goes down well.

We finally did it! We have blurred the line so heavily between "actual technology advertisement" and "satirical commentary on a dystopian future" that it's impossible to tell the difference! Watch this product reveal commercial for the new Friend device and tell me you are positive it's a real thing. The device itself is always-on, listening for your surroundings and allows you to speak directly to it. The responses will be texted to you from your virtual friend.

The video was created by Sandwich, so it's incredibly well made and quite believable. I've pored over the website and the sparse socials and I'm still not convinced it's not a teaser for a new season of Black Mirror.

Assuming this isn't revealed to be a promo campaign, it does seem like an inevitable future. The Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin covered the exact same ground. Personally, I don't think we're ready for specific hardware that does this and provides any sort of actual value. Yet. Could I see a version of this in ten years that works like a Babel Fish? Yea, I totally can. I also can't completely hate on the idea of having a digital friend or personal assistant or whatever you choose to call it. Here in 2024 it feels out of place to have such a close digital companion but I can't imagine that will be true forever.

I regularly remind myself that the future is slippery. Technology changes both extremely quickly and very slowly. Social norms can shift in the blink of an eye (remember when wearing Bluetooth headphones in public was mocked and now it's not even something you notice?). I don't love this particular product for myself but I am fascinated by the development of these kinds of products. Looking forward to seeing how they continue to market this (and won't be too surprised when I find out Charlie Brooker is involved).

"Lostwave" is a term that applies to both a type of music and a community of people. If you've ever heard of "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet" you may already be familiar with the concept. Basically, it's music of any genre, typically found online, that has no connecting information pertaining to its origin. In other words, uncredited music. Maybe it's an unlabeled mp3, or a youtube video with no information or an archive.org zip file devoid of metadata. The Lostwave community will take it upon themselves to try and figure out who created a specific song that catches their collective ear.

One such Lostwave song that made the rounds was called "Downfall" or, more specifically, "Downfall of a Well Known Actress." It turns out that's an unreleased song from the late 90s Nashville band Fair Verona. This is of particular interest to myself because one of the songwriters of Fair Verona is Beth Cameron, who later went on to form forget cassettes and Black Bra - two bands that I have worked directly with and feel very proud to support.

Very long story short - the "Downfall" song was found by a Lostwave community, researched heavily and discovered to be Fair Verona! Shawna Potter, another primary member of the band, has a rather compelling podcast called But Her Lyrics... and managed to bring everyone together to discuss the song, the band and the discovery process. I'm biased but it's definitely worth a watch.