Hi Crowd!
One thing I neglected to mention in my previous note was that upon returning to Vancouver I was visually assaulted by bubblegum pink trashcans littering the streets. All the streets. Previously we had black for trash, green for food, and two blues – one for paper and the other for containers. Now we also have pink for “flexible plastic.” Regardless of your feelings about recycling, how to separate trash or who should be doing it, this color is atrocious. You look down any street and that’s all you see now. It’s a complete eyesore, and I don’t know how anyone thought this was a good idea – especially in Vancouver where at one time the color of glass used on buildings was mandated to keep everything matchy matchy across the city.
Speaking of matchy matchy, or meshy meshy, I’ve been diving in to mesh networks and it’s been really fun. With governments getting touchy feely with internet connectivity and free speech the value prop of off grid and independent comms is increasing by the day so figured it was word playing with. Meshtastic is an communications protocol that allows group and encrypted 1:1 chats over decentralized mesh nodes (using LoRa bandwidth). These radios are super low power so they can be truly off grid with a small solar charger on a repeater. In theory this is ideal for disaster response when phone and internet go down, in practice is a ton of people sending out “ping” and “test” and “are you getting this?” messages all day long. The younger, hipper version is Meshcore which uses the same hardware but runs different yet easily flashable firmware. There are fewer people using it which makes it a little more interesting and almost early #irc like, if #irc was regionally bound. This is mesh, so it’s not about connecting A to B, rather is about connecting A to D and hoping B and C are somewhere in the middle to pass the message along. Because of the limitations of repeater power and line of sight how far you can send a message varies, but using a cheap little Seeed radio I’ve been able to talk with people in Seattle pretty regularly. Without internet, so that’s fun.
Also fun are these two CryptoPunk stories videos I had very small hand in helping with:
My friend Greg has been exploring doing longform narrative projects with AI, and he wrote, directed and produced those with some assistance from Reid, who also just posted this podcast he did with Matt & John last month.
Speaking of fun videos, when it comes to news I’ve Had It is pretty much my favorite thing to watch these days followed closely by Amanda’s Mild Takes. And speaking of news get ready to watch a whole chunk of the population get angrier about the Superbowl Halftime show than they are about ICE shooting people in the street or about all the people showing up in the Epstein files. Speaking of someone just made JMAIL which is essentially what it looks like if you were logged into Epstein’s gmail account. It’s fully searchable and I guess as new documents are released they are getting added. This is making it really easy for people to find things since the actual Justice Department files are not so easily searched, almost intentionally so. While there’s a lot of horrible shit in there and a lot of people covering the horrible shit in there, the coffee reddit meltdown over a V60 recipe was not something I anticipated. Something I did anticipate and delighted to not be disappointed, is Shepard making some fantastic art about ICE shooting people in the street, and making the PDFs free to download for all your protesting needs.
Speaking of ICE and videos, over the last month or two a lot of people have been sharing around videos of the Black Panthers in Philadelphia standing up to cops and speaking out about ICE. There’s also been a lot of push back from people saying they weren’t the real Black Panthers or that they weren’t allowed to use the name. Officially the Black Panther Party for Self Defense ended in 1982. I’m just an observer in all of this, but what it seems is that some og Black Panthers had told them they could use the name, and some other og Black Panthers objected to that. There were a lot of Black Panthers back then and there’s been a bunch of spin off copycats that have taken positions that were counter to what the original Black Panthers stood for so this is a touchy subject. A sticking point here seems to be that these new guys were speaking out about all oppressed people, hence the criticisms of ICE, and pointed to how that position was perfectly in line with the original Black Panther literature and stances, but some other people felt that Black Panthers should only be concerned with the Black community. Or something like that, anyway there was some drama and back and forth and the new guys recently released a statement that rather than bicker about it they just changed their name to the Black Lions, and are continuing to do their work in defense of all oppressed people. I’m posting this mostly because lots of people keep sending me these videos and I just want to note that I’ve seen them and am sort of loosely following the situation out of curiosity.
Totally unrelated, apparently rocking yourself to sleep is really good for you. Also, there may be more (or less) people on the planet than we thought. Finally, some people asked if I’d rushed out to see Melania yet, but I already saw Zone of Interest so not sure I need to right now.
Calling it a night from here, hope you are well!
-s