🧠✨The Nexialist #0001
What a year | Dutch Hopefulness | Blue Skies | Sonder | Erotic Intelligence | Conscious Relationships | Braingasm | Twerking Bots | Beyond Tech Epicenters | Art Predicts | Rewriting the Past
Welcome to my first collection of serendipitous brain-sparking content 🧠✨ I tried to write Happy New Year a few times but it feels so out of place to say that in 2021, so I’ll go more specific with “wishing you a 2021 full of hope, health, lightness, and learning.”
I had prepared this before the surreal Capitol Invasion in the U.S. yesterday, but decided to follow with the original plan since you must be getting all that content in your inbox/social media right now. So, allow yourself to open this parenthesis in your day just for a few minutes. I hope you find in here something exciting that adds joy and/or knowledge to your journey.
🙌🏻What a year, huh?
VOX is one of my favorite content-makers in the past years producing great informative and engaging content. Their 2020 in 7 minutes video was one of my favorite retrospective videos: it shows the mess that this year was, no euphemisms, ending on a hopeful note. It’s a channel worth following and Explained on Netflix is worth binging (but not too much, because it’s a lot of new information).
🕺Dutch hopefulness
MEROL is one of my favorite artists from The Netherlands. Her productions are really good, but when I started looking up the lyrics I understood her sarcasm and this made me crush on her (I don’t speak Dutch, yet). Seeing her alone in the clubs in Amsterdam got me nostalgic about having a night out. She sings about what she misses from her party nights: the dilemma of choosing the outfits, waiting in line, or the stamp on your wrist that stays for days. Then in the end an invitation that actually made me emotional:
“If it's all allowed again, shall we dance until the sun comes up?”
🦋Blue skies
This is a Cyanometer, this “18th-century instrument designed to measure the blueness of the sky called.” Imagine having one of those on your window 😍 I’m missing some of the pink/orange sunset tones, but that’s ok.
found at: This is Colossal, via MessyNessyChic’s newsletter
👁A word worth learning
sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
This word really stayed with me since I learned it… Do you ever look at a stranger and this happens?
source: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
🍑Erotic Intelligence: a concept worth learning
Esther Perel saved me so many therapy sessions with her podcast Where Should We Begin. She opened my eyes to how “the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our relationships.” I chose this video because she talks about Erotic Intelligence, a concept I wasn’t aware of and that is necessary in any relationship, starting with yourself.
💗Conscious relationships:
This beautiful reminder from Eckhart Tolle, illustrated on @beamingdesign, sent to me by my good friend Gustavo Nogueira.
👂Braingasm
Yes, I am one of those (millions of) weirdos that loves a good ASMR video (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or that “tingling sensation that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine,” triggered by sounds.) This guy brings it to another level from the infamous pickle-chewing videos: the way the sounds and objects are thought with a story, the roleplay and the production overall give me life. The point here is also to show how something that was so niche developed its format in such a rich way. Now ASMR is part of the popular conversation, with campaigns from IKEA and Netflix. Give it a chance, put your headsets on and press play, no one is watching 😜
🇧🇷Press play:
This video got me obsessed: three of Brazil’s main contemporary pop-artists together. Luisa Sonza invited Anitta and Pabllo Vittar (my biggest pride atm, yes, one of our drag queen superstars) for what would be the most expensive music video in Brazilian history. The creativity with the storyline (twerking to defeat a twerking robot?! hello?), the song, the choreography and the looks are full-on pop-culture realness. Quite a smart move as well: people who consider themselves gamers in Brazil grew 7.1% during the pandemic with a female majority.
Fun fact: the fighting scenes were recorded in São Paulo’s Kinkaku-Ji Temple, a replica of the homonymous temple in Kyoto. Also, Black Mirror’s episode Striking Vipers (S05E01) was filmed there. Directed by Alaska Filmes.
⏸So you think you can dance?
Talking about dancing robots… I was already scared of seeing those robots from Boston Dynamics being attacked, but after watching this video I am not sure if I panic or find it cute. As I watch it my brain keeps thinking it’s CGI…
🦿Wait… déjà vu
I needed to include this. This music video is a short sci-fi story from 6 years ago: scientists are working on a twerking robot since people are dancing less and less. They are a couple and can only have sex again when the robot is done. Written and directed by Iranian-American filmmaker Saman Kesh.
🔮So… can art predict things?
Reinier de Graaf’s website Foresight in Hindsight is creating a database of predictions and their realizations (or not) comparing different areas: from prophets and political agents to business, science and the arts. Apparently, the arts predict technological movements better than any other analysed area. Political predictions are not so good.
(Shared by my friend Michel Zappa).
🌍Beyond Tech Epicenters
Rest of World was one the best finds of 2020— “Rest of World is an international nonprofit journalism organization that documents what happens when technology, culture and the human experience collide, in places that are typically overlooked and underestimated.” It’s so important today to understand how technology is impacting other countries, cultures and communities, outside of obvious epicenters, for the positive and the negative. Rest of World lets us take a peek at that with critical content. Check-out their 2021 technological trends 🚀
🧩Rewriting the Past
This series from the BBC is quite impressive. Archeologists are finding evidences of a much more complex and developed society in ancient Amazon. Using LiDAR technology they are able to see traces of interconnected roads, cities and villages under the canopy. Also, a 12-km wall with art from the ice age was recently found and is being analysed. Something that deeply bothers me in the episodes I watched: they keep saying that the Spanish brought disease that decimated these populations, failing to mention the slavery and genocide inflicted by those colonizers, so keep that in mind when watching.
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