🌉✨The Nexialist #0223

terms of centaur service | craft is rebellion | how people use genai ‘25 | wine animals | thick imagination | fascinus | stateside | umbrella

May 01, 2025

welcome to your weekly cyber-fertilizer, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well! amsterdam has been divine with sun, all of the wisteria floribundas (tn#171), and my parents are in town. i found some time while they were napping to fix their jet lag to send you this week’s nexialist, so i hope you enjoy it! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🎠terms of centaur service

loved this text by

Venkatesh Rao

taking us over his experience about reading and writing together with ai. i’ve brought the centaur mindset (tn#106) before or ethan mollick’s 15 times to use ai, 5 not to (tn#206), and this is an expansion on that. personally, i sometimes feel guilty for using ai, either for its environmental impact or for feeling it’s doing the work for me, but reading this helped validate what i’ve been doing: iterating, collaging, expanding and collaborating. and this process actually improves not only my learning process, but the quality of my delivery. the text felt like an invitation to write my own terms of centaur service. the compression/expansion analogy helped me visualize this process:

High compression/expansion ratios in such writer-reader relationships do not mean there is low information content. A 1:100:1 expansion/compression pipeline does not mean there are only ten words worth of information in a 1000-word transmission. The other 990 words go towards mind-melding our contexts. I suspect there’s a way to model this using mutual information and alignment of priors, but I’ll leave that to the more mathematically inclined among you (assisted by your AIs). You can also have a two-stage expansion pipeline instead of an expansion-compression pipeline. People often complain I am being too cryptic or gnomic. Well, now you have the tools to get things explained to you. So with some of you, some of my posts might go through a double expansion process — say 1:100:200.

via Sentiers

brainsparks: centaur mindset (tn#106), cyborg art (tn#179), reworking, referencing, releasing (tn#125), 15 times to use ai, 5 not to (tn#206), slouching towards utopia (tn#97), strategy in the era of ai (tn#165)

🪡craft is rebellion

“in the age of slop, craft is rebellion”

Anu Atluru

’s thesis made me immediately click and explore her new series “the craft is a multi-format experiment […] all about the art of making things, and what makes the maker, too.” in the first edition, “she talks with Neal Agarwal, the indie game artisan behind Neal.fun, a cult-favorite corner of the internet home to weird, delightful, wildly viral games like The Password Game and Infinite Craft.”

i have to say i did feel some discomfort at first, because in my head the word craft is something one does offline. but of course this doesn’t make sense, as we’ve seen a bunch of digital craft (including in this newsletter.)

brainsparks: the vibe civilization (tn#221), craftivist manifesto (tn#178), new aesthetics of slop (tn#215), synthetic media (tn#18), anti-design (tn#169), glitch nostalgia (tn#34), the cult of ugly aesthetics (tn#134), model collapse (tn#211), the cult of ugly aesthetics (tn#134)

🤖how people use genai ‘25

quite fascinating to see what people are using genai for these days. therapy & companionship as #1 is quite telling about mental health, and gives a whole new meaning to self-help. healthy living being the one with most growth as well (+65 points). generate images and generate code are the second and third with most growth from the 2024, also because these features have been launched.

brainsparks: self-outsourcing age (tn#17), prompt techniques (tn#126)

🍷wine animals

You’re in a rush and you need to grab a bottle of wine for a special occasion. You’ve got $40 and no preference for red or white, but you like wines with animal labels. Which wine are you buying?

i have a crush on pudding.cool and you know it, because i always share their data explorations here (check out the brainsparks). this time they’ve outdone themselves with “the pour-igin of species ~~by Charles Dar-wine~~ by Fox Meyer with Jan Diehm. by using ai to help with image and pattern recognition of vivino’s vast wine database, they help those of us that choose wine by the bottle art. if you don’t know your wines, chances are, having an animal on the label will give you a better cost-benefit. and the best cost-benefit are actually fish. but take a look at their exploration, because it is worth it!

brainsparks: i drink wine (tn#92), tiktok killed the radio star (tn#73), invisible pandemic (tn#202), is the love song dying? (tn#199), how sci-fi has changed (tn#186), the big [censored] theory (tn#87), same gender lyrics (tn#27)

🌉thick imagination

RADAR

is doing it again, bringing mindblowing thoughts (and tools) in their new piece: “Spells, Vibes, and Thick Imagination: What We're Noticing About Crossing the Yearning Gap.”

At the heart of RADAR's 2025 focus is a simple but significant question: how do we build infrastructure that helps people cross from yearning for better futures to actually building them?
Our first exploration of this question took us straight to language itself. What if the words we have access to are part of what keeps potential energy trapped as yearning? What if our existing vocabulary isn't up to the task of bridging that gap?

they start by investigating language as a reality-building tool, as our language shapes our reality. then they explore the “latent space” in between wordlessness and explicit language “where proverbs live alongside memes, where songs and symbols operate through resonance rather than definition, where feeling outweighs logic.” and then they go on to explain the power of thick imagination, and this concept made a mark in my brain:

Thin imagination stays vague, isolated, and often trapped in yearning. It dreams up futures without pathways, without diverse perspectives questioning its assumptions, without emotional texture. It's conceptually interesting but lacking the infrastructure to become real.
Thick imagination, by contrast, integrates multiple forms of knowing — from diverse human perspectives to more-than-human insights. It emerges through what Adam Mastroianni calls "conversations with lots of doorknobs" – diverse exchanges that challenge our perspectives and create richly layered meaning, rather than just reflecting our own thinking back to us.

after that they show us possibilities of infrastructures and an invitation to join their community and labs. it’s worth the read.

brainsparks: play-full future (tn#121), fetish, glamour & grammar (tn#75), new words for new worlds (tn#111), new rules of reality (tn#149), when images matter more than reality (tn#155), how reality got storified (tn#126), good conversations have lots of doorknobs (tn#207)

🧿fascinus

never again the word fascinate will be the same after learning this, so consider yourself warned. that flying penis amulet used in ancient rome is called a fascinus or fascinum. of course, it also made me think of fascinators.

In ancient Roman religion and magic, the fascinus or fascinum was the embodiment of the divine phallus. The word can refer to phallus effigies and amulets, and to the spells used to invoke his divine protection. Pliny called it a medicus invidiae, a "doctor" or remedy for envy (invidia, a "looking upon") or the evil eye.
…
Phallic charms, often winged, were ubiquitous in Roman culture, appearing as objects of jewellery such as pendants and finger rings, relief carvings, lamps, and wind chimes (tintinnabula). Fascinus was thought particularly to ward off evil from children, mainly boys, and from conquering generals. The protective function of the phallus is usually related to the virile and regenerative powers of an erect phallus, though in most cases the emotion, shame, or laughter created by obscenity is the power that diverts the evil eye.

brainsparks: pompeii erotica (tn#45), codpieces (tn#27), how big? (tn#185), the dangers of big d*** energy (tn#104), penis positivity (tn#167), measuring manhood (tn#125), bff nude portraits (tn#79), male objetification through the ages (tn#127), origin of war (tn#95), naked education (tn#115)

🌂stateside

loving the new releases by pinkpantheress. this one is an y2k chic earworm with lots of eyecandy.

brainsparks: heaven knows (tn#147), the beauty of degraded media (tn#147)

☂️umbrella

with all those cute ~~shirtless guys~~ umbrellas i have to share this here: for those who think rihanna invented the word umbrella, think again. recently i learned the origin of the word and it’s the cutest thing: it’s a little shade (in brazil some people call it ‘sombrinha,’ if the purpose is blocking the sun)'.

It was borrowed from the Italian word ombrella, a modification of the Latin word umbella, itself a diminutive of umbra, meaning "shade, shadow."

see you next week, ella-ella-eh-eh ☔️✨

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