#430 - Web3's Centralized Aspects, Sidestepping Privilege, and RnB Baby Shark
I finished China Mieville's The Scar, the sequel to Perdido Street Station, my latest obsession of New Weird genre defying fiction. It wasn't as good as the first, but still spins an impressive tale about a floating fantasy pirate city and its anarchist politics.
I also watched Looop Lapeta, an Indian movie on Netflix that is a remake of Run Lola Run, which remains one of the most fun explorations of time loops and branching narratives I've ever seen in fiction.
This take gives the story a 2021 boost with graphics, colors, and some of the craziest needless camera cuts I've ever seen. Entertaining!
Tech
I attended Facebook whistleblower France Haugen's talk at Stanford and tweeted some of her insightful shares.
Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3
The Signal Messenger founder isn't impressed with web3, as he finds in order to use it one must still deal with several centralized services like OpenSea.
And has insightful takes on how end users don't want to manage their online infrastructure, that's not the goal - even technical startups use AWS.
Lolita Taub on Twitter: "👋🏽 Hi! I'm the child of Mexican immigrants & grew up in the hood. here's how I can help" — twitter.com
Super impressed with Lolita's pinned tweet here showing all the ways she can specifically help people in her audience and how to engage her on each. I'm totally stealing her 'Corey As A Service' moniker down the line.
Lifehacks
The Banquet of Whiteness — charleseisenstein.org
I'm falling deeper down the Eisenstein rabbit hole of smart woke technologist musings, and this one rightly asks us to reframe the privilege argument from 'lifting the downtrodden to privileged' to 'rethinking the costs of privilege and finding better ways to accomplish the same'.
In other words, (as seems to be a pattern in his writing), don't reorder the hierarchies of scarcity, zoom out so they're irrelevant and we all have what we need.
The trick is exactly how thats done, of course.
Voices of the Past — www.youtube.com
Youtube channel that reads primary historical sources alongside contemporary images of the events they relate. Great niche!
Fun
Baby Shark (R&B Remix) — www.youtube.com
This song is catchy no matter the remix, but I daresay this one is exceptional fire. This channel has an entire playlist of RnB remixes to childrens songs.
FireDrums 2012 Recap on Vimeo — vimeo.com
This flow arts/circus festival makes up games for folks to play that test their circus skills, and I'm obsessed with whatever is happening at 1:00 here with them poi spinning dixie cups on strings filled with water. Gotta be skilled though!