- Coriky – Ian Mackaye and Joe Lally from Fugazi and Ian’s wife Marina on drums. Catchy and mellow, much like the Evens and (go figure) Fugazi’s mellow tracks.
- Sunshine – It’s almost spring, or sort of almost spring. Here on the sunny side of the Alps, we’re hovering on numbers going up again, but we’ll see. Despite all the bullshit in our lives, we can still look up and see this big warm thing that gives our lives and our planet warmth.
- Alternate Proof of Consensus mechanisms – Proof of Work, the utterly shortsighted and ecocidal mechanism that powers blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is just about a complete disaster. There are alternates though and hopefully things like Proof of Stake will take off before this whole thing implodes and takes us all with it.
- IPFS – I still think this thing is bad ass. Full disclosure, I worked on some of this last year and still feel good about it, which is trying to make the Internet NOT just a couple of Silicon Valley companies trying to own more and more parts of you.
- People’s slow and sad realisations that NFT’s exist to benefit people primarily as an investment vehicle and not as anything that remotely helps artists in general
- Reimagining the Research Lab – Chatter and threads being bandied about the internets by the likes of Tom Critchlow and Matt Webb about rethinking what research labs, what they’re for and how they run
- Deviant Art – Sure, it’s a great one stop shop for illustrations of elves and dragons. This should be enough for most of us. But it goes beyond that in eschewing any sort of commercialisation and is generally a safe space for people’s actual comments on the illustrations of elves and dragons.
- Ghost – Really interesting developments with this blogging platform in creating a whole environment for writers and bloggers, in that you can have not only the newsletter included but also a way to charge people money. Imagine that, someone actually thinking beyond advertising as a way to have people create stuff online.
- Old people getting vaccinated first – That the capitalist world has somehow, despite our cruelest and most selfish tendencies actually decided to make saving lives a matter of priority over money makes me think we as a species still have a chance for a second
- Kerning Cultures – Extremely well researched and written podcast about life, culture and attitudes in and around the Middle East and primarily about Arab cultures, where you can hear all the things you never would on the newscast showing angry young men in the streets.
