Interview with senior staff researcher and lecturer in computer science at UC-Berkeley, who’s been studying cryptocurrency for years, Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire” (video of lecture below from same chap is well worth your time).
bloouikit.com is an all in one open source wireframe kit for quick design and prototyping your idea, free for commercial and personal use under CC0 License.
pixabay.com has over 2.6 million+ high quality stock images, videos and music for your creative projects (under CC licenses).
Find purposeful work & community around the Sustainable Development Goals via sdg.careers.
Three chilled audio offerings to add to the playlist when experiencing a cheeky getaway to the cosmic colonies:
Pre solarboost – 1m23s – First Audio Recording of Sounds on Mars – create22 – justadandak.comPeri solarboost & chapters of interstitial space – Sounds of Perseverance Mars Rover Driving – Sol 16 – chapters of interstitial space – create22 – justadandak.comPost solarboost & positioning to land – 2m30s – NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight – create22 – justadandak.com
Above is the latest episode of the little side creative endeavour launched a few months ago in response to the lockdown anxiety we all felt (and many are still feeling around the globe):
Revealed only in retrospect these past couple of years, is a thematic thread through my past projects / experiences of ‘giving people voice’ (which has become my spoken purpose plus evidenced in both my producing and coaching roles).
Creative Welly is a mash-up-manifestation of this and my hunger for curating good people…
After six episodes, I’m reflecting on how important intentional space is, what the mix of curious humans and intersecting disciplines ignites plus how listening is the fastest route in connecting to another person.
Am still trying to get the balance right of tangent following plus the drawing of the connections between those guests invited to participate. Sometimes it just flows, softly and eagerly, other times it requires a more focused attempt…
…then again, that’s the same with every day conversation with folks we all interact with.
Onwards!
Oh and Episode 5 was released a few weeks ago and is equally worth your time also:
All episodes are shot and edited by the wonderfully talented Jono Tucker, Empire Films. An extremely diligent and personable soul who has added a polish to the resulting video which I never could’ve achieved, thank you Jono.
Hosted at Xequals, a centrally based web development agency who provide us with a kick-ass office which totally gets kitted out for the shoot. Thank you Alex Matthews for being so gracious with your space.
There was a time when the height of technological superiority was how slow the tape deck opened. The smooth, deliberate action hinted at a deeper level of sophistication and created a moment or two of heightened expectation.
All media was slow and on its own timetable, like TV programmes, magazines and newspapers, to consume them meant waiting for their delivery. These pauses in our consumption related directly to the increased intention to savour the outcome.
As we know, the cassette went on to become one of the first portable mediums which influenced a whole set of other disruptive technologies; minituarising hardware which would enable us all to eventually take our music, then media, and now, our online and networked world, with us.
Three decades later, nearly all media is now transient. Fleeting. Immediate. Skippable. Waiting times are mere milliseconds, and even then we guffaw at any buffering icons working to serve us another video of a kid falling off a piano or a cat running into a tree.
Maybe it’s nostalgia relating to being of a generation who knew that watching movies meant putting on a coat and getting out money and the house due to a trip to the cinema or the video store. Or when recording television programmes meant running up or down the stairs and pressing the record button when they were literally ‘on’. Or from the experience of having to wait up to ten or twenty minutes for games to be loaded into my ZX Spectrum etc.
These delays were inherent. Built in. Welcomed even. There was space. Time. Time to create. Reflect. Be.
Technology has decreased patience along with the capacity to accept any empty length of time as a positive factor in the equation of the experience—waiting simply creates another opportunity to gaze into another screen and skip again. Our whole media interaction to the world has become skippable but what have we lost in those moments? What is the cost?
Social media (the industry I gave up this year after being in it for over a decade) has become diluted with “experts” throwing around words like connection, transparency, authenticity, engagement, but there’s fewer voices championing trusting the consumer with making balanced choices, framing content which situates us into the now and championing taking time offline or with others.
This isn’t a one way deluge. We produce more than ever before. We are saturating each other with our requests for attention and validation that our meal or view or opinion means something beyond our own experience of it. The cloud has given us immediacy although it only fogs our view to the importance of discernment. Of choosing better.
All brands and organisations care about is eyeballs. Attention. But it’s the lingering that matters. That’s where the impact is. The video or blog post which creates space and reflection are the ones folks remember.
It’s time to take time back again. To focus on the pauses. To stop hurrying and start living in the conscious(ly created) delays. To start appreciating the slow openers again.
50 years ago this month, Yuri Gagarin broke beyond earths gravity and floated around in space for 108 minutes. He orbited once and then returned, a hero, a legend.
Here’s how he described what he saw and felt :
“I can see clouds. I can see everything. It’s beautiful.”
“The feeling of weightlessness was somewhat unfamiliar compared with Earth conditions. Here, you feel as if you were hanging in a horizontal position in straps. You feel as if you are suspended.”
Getting the first man in space was and still is a monumental achievement in human history, although, Sergei Korolev, chief designer and scientist behind the whole Soviet space adventure, once remarked, they “should have sent a poet not a pilot”.
Reminds me of discussions with my clients around rethinking social media, especially away from just another broadcasting channel (ref : golden rule). Instead I get them to focus on exploring the opportunity to be themselves (humanisation of brands) and describe the process not product of their offerings.
The big hurdle is reversing the trend that social media sits within marketing or public relations, who, with their specific set of monologue communication skills around crafting messages for the masses or the gatekeepers of the many, fail to be conversational.
I’m not dismissing these professions just challenging the assumption to truly capture experiences you need more than simple descriptions and statements of fact but instead emotion, lyricism and sometimes (dare I say it) poetry.
