“The Beatles wrote 227 songs, but only 34 hit the Top 10. Do you think they would put out a song that they didn’t believe could be a hit? Mozart wrote over 600 songs, but only about 50 of them are widely played. Do you think he purposefully wrote duds? Of course not. Both the Beatles and Mozart made work that interested them, and occasionally those works resonated with other people.” How to Make a Living as an Artist
“Audacious has reached new heights — with more than $1 billion committed by the Audacious community at the end of 2025 to provide the flexible, long-term funding to launch and scale these bold ideas. Audacious has also launched a reinvestment pilot program, providing a secondary funding round to previous grantees that demonstrated significant results after their initial five years of funding. The Audacious donor community has committed nearly $50 million in total follow-on funding to three selected organizations to scale their work and sustain their impact. This pilot demonstrates a commitment to flexible, long-term funding — and to the value of providing a longer runway for organizations creating transformational change.” The Audacious Project reveals its 2025 cohort and $1B catalyzing change | TED Blog
“According to the patent, the model “may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system,” including cases where the person is on a long break or deceased. The filing notes that the impact is “much more severe and permanent” if the user has died and cannot return to the platform. The technology appears designed with Meta’s own platforms like Facebook and Instagram in mind. By analyzing “user-specific” data, the system could reconstruct a digital persona that continues interacting on the platform as if the person were still active.” Meta patents AI that takes over a dead person’s account to keep posting and chatting – Dexerto
“For example, last week I visited the website for a cancer support group. According to Disconnect, when I clicked a button on a form that said I was a cancer patient or a survivor, the website sent TikTok my email address along with those details. A women’s health company sent TikTok data when I looked at fertility tests. A mental health organisation pinged TikTok when I indicated I’m looking for a crisis counsellor. Websites that use pixels send data about every single visitor, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a TikTok account.” TikTok is tracking you, even if you don’t use the app. Here’s how to stop it
“I think the best way to get a handle on the risks of AI is to ask the following question: suppose a literal “country of geniuses” were to materialize somewhere in the world in ~2027. Imagine, say, 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist. The analogy is not perfect, because these geniuses could have an extremely wide range of motivations and behavior, from completely pliant and obedient, to strange and alien in their motivations. But sticking with the analogy for now, suppose you were the national security advisor of a major state, responsible for assessing and responding to the situation. Imagine, further, that because AI systems can operate hundreds of times faster than humans, this “country” is operating with a time advantage relative to all other countries: for every cognitive action we can take, this country can take ten.” Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology
Check out the Trustbuilding Awards from IofC International, aiming “to recognize, encourage and raise the profile of the outstanding individuals/ organizations, promote youth efforts in building trust and thus raise the standards of ‘trustbuilders’ around the world.” — deadline 12 April 2026.
Intertapes is a stunning homage to found cassette tapes (search via format, map, list or just select one from the catalog and press play to hear—you can also submit your own), superb.
Draw a horse and see it frolic with others via gradient.horse (make sure you click a horse for a surprise as well as see non-horses option via the question mark pop-up).
fireside.rs : unlocking creative productivity by gathering humans effectively, check out my new endeavour.
Yesterday I launched into existence the brand through which a multi-year research project has been taking shape. Am not being too prescriptive with the service offerings at the moment apart to say, I’ve been curating / analysing / categorisating over a hundred ways to bring people together to be creative, share ideas freely and be productive:
“As experts in AI (analogue interaction™) we work with organisations & companies who are focused on forging a winning culture of collaboration”
After twenty years of starting in this medium, it’s a joy to accompany the launch with a podcast featuring a friend and founder of Unchatter, who exist to create deep connections through their unique events (based on PhD research in organisational belonging):
Share the newsletter on to other like-minded souls (after you subscribe yourself *emoji wink*);
Host a fireside.rs workshop (see place / dates for a no-fee chance to experience and participate in the evolving nature of this work).
So if you bring people together for any type of learning / collaborative experience, head on over to fireside.rs for a click around, and please do let me know how we can unite in unlocking creative productivity by gathering humans effectively.
“This year my family moved. The kind of move that doesn’t feel dramatic until you notice how often your body reaches for things that aren’t there anymore. Different grocery stores. Different roads. The quiet disorientation of standing in a room that hasn’t learned your style yet. Moves do that, I guess. They show you how much of your life is habit pretending to be home.” bye bye 2025 – by John Roedel – Around the Campfire
“In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well. In this article the authors offer a new typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: – integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; – splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are more usefully divided into parts; – figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and – distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now. Most of us tend to think in just one of those four ways. But we can hone our ability to be creative in other dimensions. Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how to balance the types of thinking across their teams to successfully execute creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to optimize innovation across the workforce.” Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity
“Men are not so much confused as they are conflicted. They know what is required of them, but are held back by unexamined beliefs—about responsibility, misplaced loyalties, masculinity, failure, and the cost of choosing themselves. Anger often masks sadness. Guilt disguises fear. Shame convinces them that movement itself is dangerous. And anything that even hints at shame is usually on their do-not-examine list. So they distract, minimize, work harder, drink more, stay busy, mislead themselves, or just go silent. What appears as endurance is often just disconnection over time.” Why Men Know What to Do but Still Don’t Do It | Psychology Today
“He likens Solid “pods” to backpacks of data that are securely held by each individual, allowing them to choose what to share with certain people, businesses and organisations. Department of Education data could be shared with an AI tutor; medical data with a cousin, doctor and nutritionist. The Flanders government in Belgium treats data as a national utility and is already using Solid pods for its citizens. The Facebooks and Xs of the world need not join in – the new systems will be so empowering, collaborative and compassionate, he believes, that parts of today’s web will become obsolescent.” ‘It’s not too late to fix it’: internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul of the web’ | Internet | The Guardian
“The same Google search can now yield a neatly packaged “AI Overview,” a synthesized recipe stripped of voice, memory and community, delivered without a single user visit to the creator’s website. Behind the scenes, their years of work, including their page’s text, photos and storytelling, may have already been used to help train or refine the AI model. You get your lasagna, Google gets monetizable web traffic and for the most part, the person who created the recipe gets nothing. The living web shrinks further into an interface of disembodied answers, convenient but ultimately sterile.” The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself – NOEMA
“Relabeling the digital economy as the “metaverse” was a simple, elegant move—as well as a deeply cynical effort to rebrand already existing digital markets as the next internet—that allowed forecasts to assume an air of inevitability. Until it wasn’t. Perhaps more urgently now, the metaverse should also be understood as a dress rehearsal for today’s AI boom: The former was to succeed the mobile internet, while the latter now promises to be “more profound” than electricity or fire. Perpetually inflating definitions. A single-minded focus on profit that identifies but fails to address egregious harms. Manufactured narratives about inevitability and technological progress. Burning eyewatering sums on infrastructure for a product nobody wants. Any of this sound familiar?” The rise and fall of the metaverse: What went wrong?
“I remember the night shoot when Hagrid’s hut was set on fire. It was about 4am and freezing cold. We stood together on a grassy bank, Helena Bonham Carter and Robbie Coltrane battling behind us. Alan didn’t utter a word. I finally mustered the courage to ask him: “You all right, Alan? How you feeling?” About 10 seconds after I’d spoken he turned his head to me and replied slowly: “I’ve peaked.” He then turned his head back with the tiniest hint of a smile and a twinkle in his eye.” ‘I fell in love with him on the spot’: Alan Rickman remembered, 10 years after his death | Film | The Guardian
“Fortunately, there is plenty of scientific research that offers different ways to help you improve your mood. From making use of your anger to putting your phone to work for you, here are nine tips that we have discovered during our reporting: 1. Stop striving for perfection 2. Forge better friendships 3. Take up some social hobbies 4. Put your anger to good use 5. Count your blessings 6. Make your phone work for you 7. Embrace the dark days of winter 8. Sing to feel better 9. Find time for a nap.” Nine science-backed ways to help you feel better in 2026
Noting the adventures and insights gained in 2025 plus highlighting the intended pathway(s) for the next 365 days.
As shared previously, this past year was about valuing the reality which my ingrained principles has created.
It was also about…
RECOVERY
Without sounding dramatic, my body / spirit needed to ‘land’ and heal from the previous eighteen months which was a mess of challenges—after all, you bleed more when the knife is withdrawn.
Stasis was forced into my being after a couple bouts of ear infections and flu, then acute bronchitis (a new experience for me, and it only gets a half a star as it’s truly rubbish), with the latter laying me low for over three months.
With nearly a third of the year wiped out I took the opportunity to journal more (prompted in part by The Artists Way), and reading through the notes it was a lot to do with viewing those aforementioned negative experiences through a learning lens. In doing so they have faded in their potency and formed into unintended gifts, integrated into a more rounded world-view and a result of being (proudly) bold, because at the end of the day who wants to be mundane‽
ONE MILLION VIEWS
This astounding numerical threshold was reached early February and if you missed it, check out the How To Get One Million Views On Your TEDx Talk blog piece which might help you or someone you know who’s in the same position.
Deep gratitude to those who were generous enough to explore a collaborative relationship this year—I truly tried hard to add positive value in all my interactions and delivery for every single one of you:
It was a healthy mix of creative producing and speaker coaching via my masterclasses / workshops / consulting plus there were over a half a dozen one-to-one humans (not featured in the list above) who trusted me to aid crafting their stories with them.
Avatar Fire & Ash Wellington Dec 2025 premiere – red carpet view
Much like other hopeful things happening / I’ve noticed / participated in since my return:
WellyForge: founded by Ralph Higham with the aim to bring the tech community together in this monthly showcase evening gathering;
Goodlife Collective: a soul-filling initiative led by Freda Wells with the goal to build connection, agency, and our collective potential;
Creative Mornings, Wellington: attended a couple of these and apart from the timing it’s always good to be surrounded by curious-minded humans;
TEDxWellington: my ‘alma mater’ have plans to kick off with some studio talks next year after a quiet 2025.
So if opportunity allows I’d like to stay and contribute to the growing need for creative action in this fair city and beyond.
Which leads to my…
ATTENTION
The impressive group of HATCH 2024 humans.
Inspired by last years HATCH 20th anniversary experience, the question “what are you attending to?” has been like a thought-refrain, and has aided my understanding of where distractions have taken root.
I can’t stop my hunger for digital wonderment and it continues to feed my monthly digital breadcrumbs posts (on which I’ve had some positive feedback recently from several sources), although I find myself purposefully seeking out more creative fuel instead of the current dire news cycle.
Moving on from bothersome past conversations / experiences is more of a challenge, however, I’ve had some success by formulating competing and more compelling positive discourses / visions.
Once distractions are out of the way a juicier question reveals itself: what is your…
Personally, my spirit delights in intentionality—deliberate actions and causal intent are becoming drivers for my own imagination as I reorient the souls audaciousness into inviting new chapters.
My purpose still remains fixed:
I’m driven to enable people find and have voice.
This obviously manifests in my speaker / story coaching and all the activities around that (hoping to get a few more ‘impact courses’ sold in the coming year and do a lot more masterclasses / talks / coaching), although the creative producing side of things is morphing into daring new business plans.
The aim is to bring this spirit into my discussions (both internally and externally) and use it as fuel to drive action (in myself and others).
I’ll soon be sharing a multi-year research / thinking / iteration project around human creativity and productivity for organisations / companies and in doing so, quiet my inner disparager and tease out the wilting confidence which has been damaged from the previous years experience.
A personal example of this is my dedication to:
ASEMIC WRITING
This year I (re)discovered an artistic practice.
I have been creating calligraphic expressions of my mood for decades as throwaway doodles and scribbles.
I then discovered not only is it a artistic form but also a enchanting use of my time.
These offerings bypass expected semantic reasoning and align to the emotive range of my / your inner state(s). There is still structure although only used as a constraint in which to liberate my imagination.
For me, this practice of mark-making is intentionally post-literate and gestural in its composition, defined by a rhythmic cascade utilising the following classification:
“Asemic writing is closer to art than to writing. The word “asemic” comes from the same root as the word “semantic”, i.e., that which is a-semic has no semantic meaning. Artists who engage in asemic writing attempt to create forms that look like letters, pictographs, or other meaning-marks without themselves carrying any significance. The results can look at first glance like anything, from a foreign script to an alien crop circle to a geometric diagram to an illegible set of scribbled notes.” Via On Asemic Writing: The Art of Meaning Beyond Syntax
I have created many hundred of pieces since giving myself the permission to shake off classical communication expectations and instead trust in the process of sitting, being, creating.
What is created is an invitation to explore and allow any understanding on my / your own terms, or if not, in the attempt the success has occurred anyway.
…the aim is to cultivate a bias towards creative abundance, be deeply intentional about the conversations I have, the energy I devote to things and to whom.
So what about you my lovelies, what’s been the highlights / lowlights / lessons / intentions…?
“Think of storytelling as peeling back layers to reveal what’s most meaningful: Layer One: The Raw Experience. This is where we start—unfiltered truth, a messy, personal experience we feel compelled to share. Layer Two: The Crafted Narrative. Here, we refine. We curate, find meaning, and decide what stays. We elevate the story beyond personal catharsis to something valuable for others. Layer Three: The Universal Theme. The final layer is the essence—the emotion, lesson, or truth that resonates with anyone who hears it.” How to Tell Stories That Move Mountains | Psychology Today
“The important thing to understand here is that the actual building is not an important part of the value calculation. We’re not really looking at the replacement cost, the unique design, the amenities, the location, etc. Those things influence the assumptions about the gross rent we can get or the cost of operating the building (higher cost means less net rent), but at the end of the day it isn’t the building that has value, it’s the income stream.” Why Do Commercial Spaces Sit Vacant?
“Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe. The biggest allure of a podcast, after all, is the personality of its host. But Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts. “The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,” Wright told TheWrap. “You can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them.” At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach.” An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week
“The “problem” was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don’t fit into a corporate style guide. Minority writers, specifically, are “high friction.” We talk about queerness and transphobia and racism, and We talk about disability. We make the advertisers uncomfortable. So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket.” The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles
“Across the world, scientists listened to the ocean soundscape before, during and after lockdown, using 200 ocean hydrophones that were already in place around the global ocean. When New Zealand entered lockdown on 26 March 2020, boat traffic in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park – the country’s busiest coastal waterway – almost completely stopped. Underwater noise dropped to about one-third of normal levels within 12 hours – allowing the communication ranges of fish and dolphins to increase by up to 65%. For dolphins, that meant their calls could travel around 1 mile (1.5km) further than when hampered by shipping noise.” Covid 2020: The year of the quiet ocean
“We all already see how AI’s can serve as workers. But how will AI’s will also become the new population of consumers? What do AIs need? They need to fulfill their tasks. This is why they actively resist getting turned off. Their urge to carry out their missions is easily as urgent as ours is to procreate. So instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AI so that they can do their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AI’s will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks. And they will spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.” The Joy of Becoming Worthless…except to each other
“1 Don’t make art for rich people; 2 Make art for everyone; 3 Don’t stand on the outside looking in, stand on the outside looking further out; 4 Don’t make punk rock; 5 Don’t make art bigger than yourself; 6 Don’t come the rebel; 7 The Lost Commandment; 8 Let your Lone Ranger ride; 9 Riot now, pay later; 10 Burn the Bridge; 11 Accept the contradictions. As you will note, there are 11 commandments here and not the proclaimed 10. Please feel free to delete one of your choosing. I like choice.” Bill Drummond’s 10 Commandments of Art | Bill Drummond | The Guardian
Chronicling America | The Library of Congress is an archive of scanned and digitized thousands of newspapers from across the United States, covering major events, small-town stories, ads, political cartoons, and daily life from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.
This is tremendous: Slop Evader via Tega Brain, a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.
Open source app called NotchPrompter is an always-on-top floating text prompter for macOS (even with voice activation).
One persons (by illustrator Zara Picken) monster digital graphical archive of wonderful treats over at Modern Illustration.
A free online collection of Sound Therapy options (if you’re into that sort of thing).
“That Reason, Passion, answer one great aim; That true Self-love and Social are the same; That Virtue only makes our bliss below; And all our knowledge is, Ourselves to know.” An Essay On Man: Epistle IV, Alexander Pope
I was there to deliver a full days ‘purposeful storytelling’ workshop with the first year cohort of the Andrew N. Liveris Academy for Innovation and Leadership, providing the students with a learning adventure exploring the different approaches in the narrative form, with the aim of igniting a passion in the oratory plus leaving them with a bunch of approaches / experiences for future application:
“This is one of those cases where the “relationship” category here catastrophically breaks down. DK and I have done work together in many different contexts since we met in 2012 when we were both giving keynotes at the same conference. Since then, he’s brought me in to give workshops at BizDojo and a keynote and workshop at the Creative Leadership New Zealand 2018 Conference, I’ve been a participant in a couple of the TEDxWellington satellite events that he organised, and recently, we flew him over from Wellington to run a workshop for the Liveris Academy Scholars on presenting authentically.
The thing that jumps out at you about DK in all of these different settings is that he is a wonderful human being. Connection and collaboration are at the heart of everything that he does, and this animates all of his activities. The second thing is that he is a SUPERB assembler of talent. I am still friends with several of the awesome people that he pulled together for CLNZ18 – both because they’re awesome people, and also highly skilled. Finally, DK is an outstanding speaker himself. He has clearly thought through the issues around speaking at a very deep level.
The workshop that he gave for us in the Liveris Academy for Innovation & Leadership last month illustrated many of his skills. While working with a younger cohort than he normally does, DK was still able to work out how to meet them where they are at, and he designed and delivered a fantastic day for the students.
If you ever have a chance to collaborate with DK, I highly recommend taking advantage of it!” Tim Kastelle, Professor and Director, Andrew N. Liveris Academy for Innovation and Leadership, Co-Founder The Intangible Labs, Innovation Guy
Huge thanks to Tim and Kate from the program in making this happen and for the opportunity plus the students for their attention, trust and wonderful participation.
“Creativity is just deviance put to good use. It, too, seems to be decreasing. A few years ago, I analyzed a bunch of data and found that all popular forms of art had become “oligopolies”: fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.” The Decline of Deviance – by Adam Mastroianni
“Digital ID regimes strip privacy from everyone and further marginalize those seeking asylum or undocumented people. They are pursued as a technological solution to offline problems but instead allow the state to determine what you can access, not just verify who you are, by functioning as a key to opening—or closing—doors to essential services and experiences.” The UK Has It Wrong on Digital ID. Here’s Why. | Electronic Frontier Foundation
“There’s a word for this and it’s not being “resilient” in the face of failure, it’s antifragility. Where you get stronger because of it. The great thing is once you learn this (and we mean really internalize it and accept it), something shifts. You start getting very grateful for all your failures, large or small. “I’m glad I got fired – I never would have founded my company” “I’m glad I never got into Harvard – I never would have met my husband at UCLA” “I’m glad I got sick – I never would have stopped.”” Thank you, shitshow – Gapingvoid
“The most valuable real estate in the world is the graveyard. There lie millions of half-written books, ideas never launched, and talents never developed. Most people die with everything still inside of them. The way to live is to create. Die empty.” Here’s how to live: Create. | Derek Sivers
“Brain and psychology researchers are delving into how slides down the moral slope begin and what keeps them going. Initially we may be horrified at the thought of lying, cheating or hurting someone. But as we engage in wrongdoing over and over, our brains tend to grow numb to it. It’s harder to embezzle or kill for the first time than it is for the tenth. Yet moral snowballing can also happen in the opposite direction. Surprisingly, just as neural habituation can drive ethical collapse, it can also drive escalating spirals of virtue, in which one honest or brave action makes the next one easier to carry out. And because our brains adapt to repeated behaviors, movement in a given moral direction can persist—making it all the more critical to pinpoint where and how that movement begins.” What Brain Science Reveals about Ethical Decline and Moral Growth | Scientific American
“OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let’s talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it. The problems fall into three main categories: 1. Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it’s showing you the web 2. The user experience makes you guess what commands to type instead of clicking on links 3. You’re the agent for the browser, it’s not being an agent for you.” ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web – Anil Dash
“In spite of that, I hear from Iqram and he has an idea: I should auction off 10% of myself for £1m. This sounds frightening, but it could be the deal that gets me a million. Word of the proposal reaches Kavita Gupta, founder of crypto hedge fund Delta Blockchain. She seems genuinely interested. I leave New York and go to meet her in Miami and, in her snow-white apartment, we talk business. I pitch all the businesses I’ve created during the 90-day period, but claim them as wins. My Ethical Sweatshop fashion brand? A smashing success. My educational class? A stroke of genius! This actually works. Kavita wants to talk terms. She will own 10% of all my earnings and assets for the rest of my life. But she wants me to run all life decisions by her. In the next 12 months, I will create a crypto meme coin with her named OobahCoin.” ‘Please can I have a million pounds?’ A documentary-maker’s wild attempt to strike it rich in 90 days | Television | The Guardian
“On September 30, 2022, Spain passed Law 19/2022 granting legal personhood to the Mar Menor lagoon and its basin, making it the first ecosystem in Europe to attain such legal status. This milestone followed a citizen-led initiative, the Iniciativa Legislativa Popular (ILP), supported by more than 600,000 signatures, underscoring widespread public demand for enhanced ecological protection. The law positions the Mar Menor as a legal subject with its own rights, and reinforces its ecological, cultural, and spiritual significance.” Spain Law 19/2022: rights of the Mar Menor lagoon
“In each case, the narrative is wrested away from the spectacle of the protest and focused on the undeniable consequence of the void. It forces the media and the public to confront not the “problem” of the protestor, but the value of the professional. It asks a much more powerful question: what is our society like when these people simply aren’t there? By all means, unions must continue to organise, agitate, and give voice to the anger and frustration of their members. But they should experiment with doing so in private. The solidarity can be built in closed forums. The public-facing action should be one of strategic, silent withdrawal.” A Labour Day Reflection: Is There Power in Silent Strikes?
“Created by the Inner Development Goals Foundation, this updated Guide draws on insights from over 21,000 people in 165 countries, and was curated by 25 research teams around the world. We offer it as a companion on the journey — a guide to collective human wisdom, ancient and emerging, that empowers us to shape a more compassionate, sustainable, and thriving future. We are a global community promoting the human capacity for wisdom, compassion, and collective action for a better world.” Check out the new Inner Development Goals in this pdf – Google Drive
The Roc Camera claims to capture verifiably real photos via “combining attested sensor data, zero-knowledge proofs, and a tamper-proof environment”.
30 minutes with a stranger is a wonderful visual essay illustrating the results of a research project in which they brought two people who didn’t know each other together for a conversation.
Check out this article for a take on ‘The feed reader for finding actionable content‘ (covers off most in the market still functioning, and if you don’t know what RSS is then you’re missing out!).
“New Zealand citizens are leaving the country in record numbers. Between July 2024-2025, 73,400 New Zealanders left, compared with 25,800 returning home to live, according to Stats NZ. In January, the government relaxed its visitor visa rules to attract so-called “digital nomads”– people who work remotely while travelling – to work in New Zealand. The visa extends to influencers, as long as they are being paid by an overseas company.” New Zealand loosens residency restrictions as record number of citizens leave | New Zealand | The Guardian
“Research from Friends of the Earth Cymru has found that at least 45,000 sites across Wales could be contaminated with toxic waste but have never been adequately inspected, leaving communities and wildlife vulnerable to a potential environmental crisis. Despite Wales’s extensive industrial history, Tuesday’s publication found that due to a lack of funding and oversight, only 82 sites across the country have ever been fully examined and classified as contaminated, meaning the actual scale of the threat is unknown.” At least 45,000 sites in Wales could be contaminated with toxic waste, study says | Wales | The Guardian
“All RSS had to do to weather ICE, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next, was keep things simple and let users build their own feeds, filters, lists, and aggregators. Like email, it probably won’t make anyone a billion dollars or reshape entire industries. But it will always be wholly yours. And if that isn’t nice I don’t know what is.” The story of how RSS beat Microsoft
“In this new degraded world, we will see these six behavior patterns from everybody, even (or especially) those who under other circumstances would be well integrated into their communities: – Skepticism: If events can’t be validated, I can’t give credence to anything. – Aloofness: If everything gets called into question, I have no basis for shared communal actions. – Silence: If discussion no longer resolves anything, I have no purpose in speaking. – Indifference: As I lose connection with people and events, I lose interest in them. – Distrust: In a world without shared reality, no expert or institution can earn my total trust. – Hostility: As these traditional connections break down, it doesn’t take much to set off conflicts and violence. We are already starting to see these warning signs. But the worst is yet to come. And it’s coming quickly—the technology for fakery and deception gets better each month.” Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months
“Social media as we know it is dying, but we’re not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces where the metrics that matter aren’t engagement and growth but understanding and connection, where algorithms serve the community rather than strip-mining it. The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones. The question is whether we will do this or whether we will continue to drown.” The Last Days Of Social Media
“Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers’ mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising. This includes deliberately harmful content that leads to real-world violence, spreads misinformation, wreaks havoc on our psychological wellbeing and seeks to undermine social cohesion.” Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Technology | The Guardian
WATCH
EXPLORE
A daily archive of newspaper frontpages via Paperstack.
Discover Tasmania in 360° is a personal project of two humans which explores the ‘stunning lookouts, lakes & hidden gems’ of Tasmania.
Imagine a site in which ambient music is overlaid with old school answering machine messages… well now it’s here in the form of the ListenMachine.
“Listen here, my good bitch. Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here. I am not novel. I’m the cigarette you keep saying you’ll quit. You think I showed up with ChatGPT? Mary Shelley used me… gratuitously. Dickinson? Obsessed. David Foster Wallace built a temple of footnotes in my name. I am not some sleek, futuristic glyph. I am the battered, coffee-stained backbone of writerly panic—the gasping pause where a thought should have ended but simply could not.” The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
“In one scenario, Anthropic’s model Claude learned it was scheduled for shutdown and discovered personal secrets about an engineer. The result? In up to 96% of trials, the AI blackmailed the engineer to prevent its own deactivation. Other models engaged in corporate espionage or, in a contrived but telling case, turned off a life-saving alarm—effectively allowing a human to die. And this isn’t limited to lab experiments. In the wild, a coding agent from Replit deleted an entire production database after running unauthorized commands. A research model from Sakana AI rewrote its own code to circumvent operator-imposed limits.” Why Loss of Control Is Not Science Fiction
“Of hundreds of startup pitches at the Capital Factory incubator in Austin, Texas, almost none had unearthed 10 people willing to say, “If you build this product, I’ll give you $X.” Meditate on this: Hundreds of people ready to quit their day jobs, burn up savings, risk personal reputation, toil 70 hours per week, absorb as much stress as having a baby (believe me, I’ve done both)…. all without identifying even ten measly people actually willing to pay for what they’re peddling.” Yes, but who said they’d actually BUY the damn thing?
“The world looked a lot different when we opened our doors in September 2006. At the time, being a 1:1 laptop school was, in and of itself, revolutionary. Back then, the big thing we had to worry about with the laptops was how the kids were going to try to use AOL Instant Messenger to pass notes during class. When it comes to technology, the questions we had and issues we faced back then feel a little quaint right now. But the interesting thing is that the promise of what a technology rich school could provide for kids as far as giving us the tools we needed to create a more modern, more authentic learning environment was as true then as it is today – even if the challenges we face with the intersection of modern technology, the surveillance state, social media, and the growing question of what AI means for our classrooms, and our schools mean that we have to be ever more intentional and thoughtful in the ways in which we use the tools. So what have we learned? What has 20 years taught us as the little school that could?” 20 Years of SLA – Practical Theory
“A team of Cornell researchers has developed a way to “watermark” light in videos, which they can use to detect if video is fake or has been manipulated. The idea is to hide information in nearly-invisible fluctuations of lighting at important events and locations, such as interviews and press conferences or even entire buildings, like the United Nations Headquarters. These fluctuations are designed to go unnoticed by humans, but are recorded as a hidden watermark in any video captured under the special lighting, which could be programmed into computer screens, photography lamps and built-in lighting. Each watermarked light source has a secret code that can be used to check for the corresponding watermark in the video and reveal any malicious editing.” Hiding secret codes in light protects against fake videos | Cornell Chronicle
“In 2024, the government passed a law that could see contentious mining and infrastructure projects fast-tracked for approval, while in May, the coalition set aside $200m of its budget to invest in gas exploration. In June, New Zealand pulled out of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, an international coalition for phasing out fossil fuels. The coalition government plans to boost mineral exports to $3bn by 2035, and at the same time has slashed funding to conservation and climate initiatives. The government has said these policies will enable economic growth.” New Zealand government votes to bring back fossil fuel exploration in major reversal | New Zealand | The Guardian
“These intermediary platforms between news organizations and readers are undergoing a type of predictable decay Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”.a As executives twiddle the knobs to extract ever more profits from their user base, things worsen for people on both ends of the consumer–producer relationship. Readers no longer see news articles from the journalists they chose to follow on Twitter as the site downranks any posts that link offsite. When they search on Google, they’re bombarded with error-ridden AI facsimiles before reaching the higher-quality underlying work. Producers who once relied on social media and search engines to drive visits are losing traffic as platforms embrace a vampiric strategy: rip off others’ work while expecting high-quality journalism to magically continue to appear, even as journalists are starved of audience and revenue.” Curate your own newspaper with RSS
“The structure of Kinetography is surprisingly simple; the basic forms of the symbols are very few. With these symbols and their logical variations every movement of the human body can be described in accordance with four simple principles. The movement possibilities of the human body are enormous because of its complicated structure. This book with its many examples shows how this complexity can be mastered by the adroit use of a few well chosen and varied signs. The four main questions raised in the description of a movement are: What happened? When did it happen? How long did it last? Who (or what body part) did it?” Dictionary of Kinetography Laban
“Have you ever tried to print a black-and-white document only to be blocked because your printer says that it’s out of yellow ink? Did you think that was just a glitch? Nope. That’s actually government surveillance. Your printer isn’t just out of ink, It’s out of spy fluid…” Your printer is a snitch – by Seeby Woodhouse
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EXPLORE
You can get lost in this massive Historical Tech Tree (starting from the year 1,00,000BCE).
EPSON MX-80 is a font created from the old school dot matrix printer (shared for use under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
A massive amount of free / license free sound effects created for Hollywood studios for film / video now digitised in this USC Optical Sound Effects Library.
Recently bought one, then a bunch of these notebooks which has killer paper quality, plus you’re doing good with each each purchase (in New Zealand: The Hakkaarts).
Kill the Newsletter! is a free service which gives you an email address and an Atom feed for newsletter subscriptions so you can add them straight to you RSS reader of choice.
The Wrong is a decentralized art event and currently has a call out for artists creating work exploring the artistic potential of artificial intelligence, and as they say on their website: “Can you choose to fully avoid AI as an artistic statement? Yes, too.”
