#440 - Social event software, sexy vegan propaganda, and Aussie convicts
Hola from Puerto Rico! I'm here to celebrate a friends birthday, and scope the nascent crypto scene that's exploded here in recent years.
Expect a full debrief next week when I'm back, but so far, it's fascinating to compare the neocolonial visitor dynamics here compared to those in my 2021 home of Maui.
Here's the best article covering it I've seen so far (though with heavy bias), detailing how PR lured crypto rich here with tax breaks in 2012 but haven't seen the investment they wanted as a result, rather pricier real estate to the detriment of locals.
And yet, the promise of web3 solves exactly these problems by decentralizing and disinter mediating finance. Locals I've talked to so far are of both minds.
Another PR fact is Pedro Albizu Campos, the Harvard educated leader of the independence party who lead armed revolt against local authorities and shot several Congressmen before dying from dubious jail time in the 60s.
Tech
Tuple: The best pair programming tool on macOS — tuple.app
This tool looks cool, but you know what's cooler? This landing page!
Clear, simple, personal, with a letter from the founders up top. So crisp.
Event Platforms: Pros, Cons, and My Favorites — party.pro
Newsletter friend Nick rounds up several free online event platforms to ditch FB Events for, and chose Mixily as the winner.
Partiful and Regroup are the other ones I've heard lots about.
Lifehacks
Convicts in Australia — en.wikipedia.org
My Wikipedia hole this week taught me:
20% of modern Australians are descended from convicts
most convicts where shipped for petty crimes (because capital offenses were cheaper than shipping)
and capital offense were mostly for property crimes, interestingly enough for the modern police abolition movement,
they coined a special term called 'cultural cringe' to describe the mentality that comes from such ancestry
Fun
Citi Zēni - Eat Your Salad - Latvia 🇱🇻 - National Final Performance - Eurovision 2022 — www.youtube.com
Eurovision happened this weekend, and while it had more ballads than both Twitter and I would prefer, it also had the same dose of zany wtfness that it always does.
Latvia here didn't even make it to the finale but stole our hearts with this animated vegan propaganda number with lyrics like "Instead of meat I eat veggies and pussy" "Being green is as sexy as you" "all the girls go eco / If you want your man's tongue longer than a gecko's". Norway's play off Red Riding Hood entirely in yellow morphsuits is always up there.
I don't know what kind of dynamics contribute to these being finalists on a global stage, but moar, plz moar!
Hawaii is waging war on 'aggressive' feral chickens. The chickens are winning. — www.sfgate.com
This is somewhat of an inside joke, but: Let the written record show that the locals hate the chickens just as much as the mainlanders like me did. 😅