Hi Crowd!
I’m just back home in Canada after a short visit to occupied territory south of the border. Reader, it was weird. There was this nervous undercurrent to everything. I spoke with a whole gang of friends and travelers who were both local and visiting from elsewhere in the world as well, and almost everyone noted they were now taking care to keep their passports on their person at all times, just in case. I was having coffee with a friend from Paris when the Pretti news started rolling in and shift in tone of conversations at nearby tables was distinct. Conversely, the people I encountered who were sticking to the “I’m just ignoring the news because I don’t know who to trust, and focusing on my own work” line seemed increasingly rare. It’s a weird feeling being “from there” but at the same time feeling so distanced, and still connected. And as obvious as all that was to me, as a chronic people watcher, it was also disheartening to see all of this being spoken in hushed tones and off to the side. People are still afraid to “be political” or something, as if people being shot and killed in the streets by masked, untrained, unaccountable cowards is complicated issue you can argue both sides on. I’m glad to see friends like Reid Hoffman speaking out, and encouraging others to as well.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend Bassel recently, and a conversation we had one night in Singapore, sometime in mid 2011. It had been no small task to get him out of Syria and he was finally safe and free, but he couldn’t fully enjoy it thinking about the friends he’d left behind and wondering if there was more he could/should be doing to help them. He eventually went back, and sadly I never saw him again. For years I wondered about what motivated that move, from safety to anything but, and now think I kind of understand. A little bit anyway. That’s a different story for another time.
The story for this time, is mostly about Node.
I’ve written a lot about CryptoPunks over the years and in mid 2024 I argued that the IP for the collection should be entrusted to a non-profit foundation charged with protecting it, to remove any risks (or perceptions of risks) involved with it being held by a for profit company with investors. The NODE foundation was announced in early 2025 to do just that, and after a year of planning and build out their public facing gallery space in Palo Alto opened to the public this past weekend. There was multi-day programing with talks and side events, with basically everyone pretty happy about how it all came together and what was being presented. There was also a wonderful representation of attendees from all over the world who flew in to mark the moment, recognize what led to it, and imagine the future. I was happy to be able to add a little bit to that with the Trivia session I hosted in the final slot of the artist talks programming on Saturday, and I think everyone had fun with it.
The NODE space is beautiful and well thought out. A number of people asked me for my impression of it all and as I told them there’s two distinct things to consider. The now, and the next. This event was wonderful, both in presentation and participation and attendance. I think that’s the overwhelming position. But that’s also a single event, and in the big picture what NODE does next is more important. How they continue to position themselves, what they present and how they present it will be important to watch. Good intentions only go so far, though I’m cautiously optimistic. They have some runway to tweek and fine tune, so we’ll see where it goes from here. If you want a more in depth look at the opening and the idea, Ameesia did that over on Right Click Save.
As I alluded to earlier I mostly stopped using X on January first. 2006 to 2026 is a solid 20 year run and the site in it’s current form isn’t anything I need to spend attention on. I deleted all the apps and just have one browser where I’m logged in to handle the occasional retweet, though I don’t know how useful that even is at this point. On BlueSky Anil has an interesting thread for anyone required to use X for their job, basically encouraging people to get in writing that they are aware of the CSAM material being created and boosted by Elon. Getting managers to sign off on this using their names on a papertrail has some interesting effects. One thing I’ve been surprised to see, having basically never been logged out in the last 20 years, is how unusable X has become if you aren’t logged in. You can’t see profiles, threads, articles, replies, etc… So that’s also something people should realize, if that’s the only place you are posting something, the audience is more limited than you might realize.
Speaking of stupid things, apparently some tech bros are trying to co-opt “grindcore” to mean working long hours and “grinding” on a project. I would just like to say, absofuckinglutely not. No. Grindcore is already a thing, and it’s glorious, and tech bros who would not last 5 seconds in the pit do not get to fuck with it. However I do think if tech bros started listening to Naplam Death and Brutal Truth and Capitalist Casualties and Carcass and everything else they’d potentially be more interesting.
While I’m complaining about shit, can we all agree that this thing with bands announcing a new album and giving you one streaming song months before release is annoying as fuck. Just give me the album when it’s done, don’t do this trickle out bullshit.
I needed a new baseball hat the other day and went shopping for one, only to sadly find that companies are totally douching out by putting ropes and fancy buckles on everything. A baseball hat does not need a leather strap with a hand cast brass buckle on it. Stop it.
Instagram has also really stepped up the annoying ads for some reason. Every day now I’m getting “today is the last day of the sale!!!” ads for things that have been warning that “today is the last day of the sale!!!” for months. I accidentally clicked on of them trying to block the account, only to be taken to a web store where the item in the ad was sold out. How is this a good idea for anyone?
That reminds me of a story from back when I worked at Playboy Dot Com in the late 90’s. Among other things, one of my jobs was making banner ads for the side and each week we’d have a meeting to look at metrics and see what performed well and what to tweak for the following week. One week we had an ad which was performing at something like 4000% better than everything else on the site, and we all got called in to figure out what happened here and why this was one ad was doing so much better than everything else. Turns out it was an animated gif which had been improperly exported as a jpg, so only one frame of the animation showed. So while all the other ads on the site had images and bait and sales pitches to try and lure people in, this one was solid black with nothing else on it except plain white text that read “CLICK HERE.” No explainer why or pitch, just that text. Apparently it was taken as a direction, and people followed it without question.
Anyway, hope you are all well.
-s