🐦‍🔥✨The Nexialist #0188

duelo | imaginal disk | bread | galina | phrogging | lucifers | amsterdam archive | interrobang

Aug 29, 2024

welcome to your weekly floppy disk with surprise files, the nexialist

hey you, i hope this message finds you very much ~~out of~~ in touch with reality. this week, i write to you from sunny but cold buenos aires. osvaldo, the father of my partner juan, passed away unexpectedly, and we flew to argentina for his funeral and to spend time with the family (8 of the 9 siblings were able to join, so you can imagine the celebration). osvaldo was a very tall man of few words, with a respectable moustache, very kind, chill and respectable. i’m glad i got to spend time with him and see his legacy in the way the siblings care for each other. i’m also happy to be part of the family, thank you for being so welcoming. rest in power, osvaldo!

i did have some content lined up, from new music and videos, to words and places, so i took some time to organize this week’s nexialist. no long reads, just some brainsparking content. i hope you enjoy it! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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⚔️duelo

in spanish, duelo is one of the ways to say grief or mourning. duelo is also a duel. so when i heard it the first time, i thought of this poetic image of two people fencing, as if mourning is a sort of battle. we know about the stages of grief, so of course i thought it was the same etimology. it turns out they’re homonyms but do not share the same root: one comes from bellum/duellum (war, war between two), the other from dolus (pain). i’ll not go into the explaination, but you can read it here, in spanish. anyway, i’ll keep this image in my head.

brainsparks: resilience in cx (tn#15), sloshing time (tn#151)

💿imaginal disk

i’ve been in love with magdalena bay for a while, but this new album, imaginal disk, is just such a cozy, surreal, psychodelic work. i can’t explain it, but it feels like it’s from the same universe as hbo’s fantasmas series (tn#185) i shared a few weeks ago. they both coat big questions of adulthood and humanity in nostalgia and kids’ show vibes, it’s an unexpected perfect mix. it’s also impressive how they’ve managed to create a whole sonic and aesthetic universe:

In the album’s narrative, aliens implanted an “Imaginal Disk” with consciousness into the foreheads of apes, leading to the creation of humans. The protagonist True’s body rejects this disk upgrade, prompting her to embark on a quest to understand the essence of humanity. Across 15 tracks, Tenenbaum and Lewin explore themes of identity, technology and the essence of humanity. These philosophical earworms are purely catchy at first glance, but gain additional resonance once one pays attention to the themes their lyrics are weaving. (the rice thresher)

switched on pop interviewed them, so i was happy to learn they also invoked some abba in the production, and they are both from argentine descent: mica was born in argentina and matt has argentine parents. so very timely that i’m writing this from buenos aires.

brainsparks: fantasmas (tn#185), most creative time ever (tn#183), imaginal disc vs imagination (tn#19), mercurial world (tn#64), how sci-fi has changed (tn#186)

🥖bread

sofi tukker also released a new album, bread, and it’s so much fun. my friend put it very well: going to their concerts, you don’t need to know the songs, they make fun danceable music, so it’s always a good time. they’ve always been so good with the brazilian samples, rhythms and words in their music, and this time is no different. i mean, they have a song called cafuné, one of my favorite brazilian words.

brainsparks: cafuné (tn#3), hey homie (tn#183)

👁️galina

i just love when artists that i love get together to do something. allie x’s original version of galina was already one of my favorites from the album, now with empress of, it just feels so much better.

brainsparks: mistress violet (tn#31), black eye (tn#144), umwelt (tn#86), weird world (tn#161)

🐸phrogging

this word appeared on my feed with another horror story that seems be more common than we think. sounds like a nightmare to me, but loving the fact there is a word for it.

Phrogging is the act of secretly living in another person’s home without their knowledge or permission.
A person who engages in phrogging is sometimes called a phrog or, less commonly, a phrogger. The verb form phrog is sometimes used.
Phrogging is similar to squatting except that phrogging involves living in an occupied property.

brainsparks: frodrick (tn#111)

🐦‍🔥lucifers

Lucifermeisje (Matchstick girl) by Floris Arntzenius (1864-1925)

while watching mothers’ instict in the airplane to argentina, the only option of subtitles was dutch, so i went with it. i’m glad i did because i learned matchsticks in dutch are called lucifers, and i think it’s the coolest thing i learned this week.

In 1829, Scots inventor Sir Isaac Holden invented an improved version of Walker's match and demonstrated it to his class at Castle Academy in Reading, Berkshire. Holden did not patent his invention and claimed that one of his pupils wrote to his father Samuel Jones, a chemist in London who commercialised his process. A version of Holden's match was patented by Samuel Jones, and these were sold as lucifer matches. These early matches had a number of problems – an initial violent reaction, an unsteady flame, and unpleasant odor and fumes. Lucifers could ignite explosively, sometimes throwing sparks a considerable distance. Lucifers were manufactured in the United States by Ezekial Byam.
The term "lucifer" persisted as slang for a match into the 20th century. For example, the song Pack Up Your Troubles includes the line “while you’ve a lucifer to light your fag”. Matches are still called “lucifers” in Dutch.

(also, since when there is a phoenix emoji? 🐦‍🔥

brainsparks: priDEMONth (tn#123), time of monsters (tn#181), the devil of your story (tn#181)

🏛️amsterdam archive

recently i had to opportunity to visit the city’s archive (which btw is free to visit). i first went there for an ancestral ai zine-making workshop with gustavo (temporality lab), internetteapot and aixdesign.co. then i had to go back to enjoy the beautiful historical building i always biked past, but never made the time to visit, de bazel. it served for many years as different banks, but today the safes are open to the public with exhibitions and the city’s archive used. there are old photos of the city, animations showing how the city was built overtime. it’s incredible to see how much/little the city has changed. i included it in my notion page of tips in amsterdam.

brainsparks: amsterdam in the summer (tn#185), that amsterdam photo (tn#122)

⁉️interrobang

from messy nessy chic’s newsletter, a list of words in english was not familiar with, with the exception of petrichor. globella, columella, interrobang, dysania, tittle and crapulence are my favorite.

brainsparks: callipygian (tn#139), anasyrma (tn#79), new words for new worlds (tn#111)

see you next week, lucifers 🪽✨

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