⛲️✨The Nexialist #0227

digital garden | de-capitalizing language | murmuration brain | irreversible | dr. know it all | wonderfully well | one thing | the new soft boys | guitarricadelafuente | labradorito | scuttlebutt

welcome to your weekly cyber-dew, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well! this week, the world lost one of its most prolific documentary photographers, sebastião salgado, who documented nature and the indigenous realities. something i didn’t know is that sebastião and his wife, lélia, had a reforestation project, with their own money and effort, which is such a necessary kind of legacy to leave. meanwhile, the brazilian government is voting on a bill that makes it easier to deforest…

on another note, my other side project, flaccid zine aka paumolice, will premiere this weekend its printed manifesto in a queer exhition, festival vórtice, in são paulo, for pride month. it’s the first time something i made get curated into an exhibition, so you can imagine how proud i am. there will be only a few copies available, in portuguese, and i want to do another batch later, in english and portuguese. wish me luck!

for now, that’s it. i hope you enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

1 year ago » ⛴️✨The Nexialist #0175 : all eyes on rafah | the boat | the posthumous memoirs of bras cubas | the iliad | the disappearance of men | out of sight | menina

2 years ago » 🍇✨The Nexialist #0123 : priDEMONth | eudaimonic vs. hedonic | keys to the city | less colorful | the age of re-enchantment | the age of pleasure | pleasure activism | ARTificial | padam? | erotica

3 years ago » 🧑‍🎤✨The Nexialist #0073 : Conformity x Dissent | Countercultureless Society | The Ownership Economy | To Be Cringe is To Be Free | TikTok Killed The Radio Star | Made With AI | Imaginology | FINIMONDO | Taste so Good

4 years ago » 🌼✨The Nexialist #0022 : Dandelion | Wish-Processing Facility | 4-day Week | It’s All Coming Back | Post-Pandemic Socializers | The Ultimate Gaslighting | Bubblegum Misogyny | The Tail End | Storytelling Periodic Table

⛲️digital garden

mattprebeg

A post shared by @mattprebeg

matthew pebreg shared about digital gardening and i absoletely love the concept and the solution he is offering. i just realised i had shared one of these before, for i thought it was its own concept, not a movement (futures garden: tn#107).

i feel like what i do here is a digital garden of sorts: the nexialist has been this effort of learning in public, imperfectly, while building upon past ideas with the brainsparks listed under each content. so now i am considering having this alternative way of organizing the ideas i share every week by theme. let’s see…

digital garden: an online collection of interconnected writings where ideas cultivate over time.

he based on maggie apleton’s article, which is great to understand the origin of the concept (it’s decades old) and how it has changed over time and what defines digital gardens. it’s worth the read. (it also got me thinking how these gardens welcome rabbit holes 😜

They’re not following the conventions of the “personal blog,” as we’ve come to know it. Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis.

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.

brainsparks: futures garden (tn#107), cozy tech (tn#202), cozy futurism (tn#17), can solarpunk save the world (tn#97), second brain (tn#132), reworking, referencing, releasing (tn#125), releasing > posting (tn#210)

👅de-capitalizing language

atmos

A post shared by @atmos

then i was hit with this call to de-capitalize our language and it’s a perfect concatenation: the first example suggests moving from ‘building an empire’ to ‘growing a garden.’ there are some other nice examples.

Capitalism has left its mark not just on what we buy and how we livebut on how we speak. ⁠
⁠
Everyday idioms often carry perspectives that can be harmful to both people and the planet. But what if we flipped the script? Nature offers a different rhythm—one that values patience, interconnection, and care. It teaches us to grow together, to move at our own pace, and to celebrate each being’s unique role in the ecosystem.⁠

but then, part of my brain imagined how this can also be a greenwashing tool.

brainsparks: language maps (tn#20), sad and pale paper (tn#113), seedless fruit: futureless tech (tn#198), inner rewilding (tn#164)

🐦‍⬛murmuration brain

luiz pessoa wrote this article which also fits perfectly in today’s nexialist. “the entangled brain - the brain is much less like a machine than it is like the murmurations of a flock of starlings or an orchestral symphony.” i shared a long time ago a podcast about how the brain is liveware (in opposition/addition to software/hardware), but this analogy is so beautiful. luiz is the author of “The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together.”

Complexity science is an interdisciplinary field that studies systems composed of many interacting components whose collective behaviours give rise to collective properties – phenomena that cannot be fully explained by analysing individual parts in isolation. These systems, such as ecosystems, economies or – as we will see – the brain, are characterised by nonlinear dynamics, adaptability, self-organisation, and networked interactions that span multiple spatial and temporal scales.

his analogies are beautiful and go beyond bird murmurations or an orchestra: financial systems, language evolution, the global airport network, roman empire’s roads. great read to know a bit a lot more about how our brains work.

brainsparks: liveware & malleability (tn#56), interstitium (tn#151), linear opposites or closely related? (tn#126), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126), brain rot (tn#202), kiss your brain (tn#60)

🦢irreversible

eefje is one of these artists that has such a consistent artistic vision, and a stunning, unique sound and aesthetic. her new single, onomkeerbaar (irreversible) is full of nature imagery (she often has the translations in the subtitles), while she’s doing her gymnastics with rosed cheeks. the novelty this time is with some geometric/psychedelic repetitions.

brainsparks: dutch poetry (tn#2), microdose movement (tn#162)

🦷dr. know it all

ana frango elétrico’s jazzy sound is so delicious, refreshing and chic. this video makes me proud to be brazilian, you know? lush nature, diverse bodies, and a sound that hugs your soul. we love culture nurtures queer imaginaries! more of this, please.

brainsparks: polygendered brazilian music (tn#8)

🏕️wonderfully well

thank you,

Dimas Henkes

, for sharing julia mestre’s new album ‘maravilhosamente bem’ (wonderfully well). i’m crushing hard on this groovy sound, her sweet voice, the 70s and 80s vibes. it’s worth the play. reminded me a lot of rita lee’s early stuff.

brainsparks: rip rita lee, the jester of rock (tn#120)

🥊one thing

i don’t think i’ve shared lola young’s hit messy here, though i’m a fan of how it heavily references fleetwood mac’s dream. a couple of weeks ago she released ‘one thing’ and i just love all the fruity men and soft boys she’s flirting with in the video, taking the more leading role in the dynamic.

brainsparks: fruity men (tn#182), music and time (tn#2), the perpetual infantilization of millenial women (tn#139)

♂the new soft boys

protein shared corbin shaw’s performance and artwork in their newsletter about the new soft boys. they use shaw’s work to expand about the a more hopeful shape of masculinity (which i also defend in my project, flaccid zine). it’s always nice to see men reflecting on this.

In the past, Shaw has talked about how his practice is not merely aesthetic; it is therapeutic, both for himself and for those who see themselves reflected in his work. He is part of a wave of young men who are challenging the stigmas around mental health, who are willing to admit that the old ways of coping – bottling up pain, masking fear with aggression – are no longer tenable. In this, Shaw is emblematic of a broader cultural undercurrent: a move away from toxic masculinity toward a softer, more reflective masculinity that values empathy, emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Of course, he is still in the minority.

brainsparks: the alpha male myth, colonial masculinity (tn#127), masculinity (tn#48), straight men kiss (tn#95), on heteropessimism (tn#174), drag kings (tn#82), men in the media (tn#28)

🐎guitarricadelafuente

álvaro lafuente calvo, or guitarricadelafuente, has been sharing some beautiful songs with such well done homoerotic imagery. i do have dubious feelings about it though: though it is artistic and we love the imaginary it invokes, i can’t unsee the lack of diversity. the same debate was brought when troye sivan started his new era, and i think it’s important to keep this conversation open.

briansparks: rush (tn#130), gay body culture goes mainstream (tn#190), queering the future (tn#5), lesbian gaze | dyke camp (tn#12), bigorexia | how to feel better naked | body shaming stories (tn#79), male objectification through the ages (tn#127)

🦮labradorito

these two artists are both new for me, and i just love the unapologetically gay duet, while apparently on date. most of all, i love hearing mondra singing in galego, the most similar language to portuguese. also calling the other guy a “little labrador” is cute (but also kinky, i guess).

brainsparks: same gender lyrics (tn#27), bdsm test (tn#6)

🍑scuttlebutt

scuttlebutt
noun | SKUTT-ul-butt

a: a cask on shipboard to contain fresh water for a day's use
b: a drinking fountain on a ship or at a naval or marine installation
c: Scuttlebutt refers to rumor or gossip—in other words, talk or stories about someone or something that may not be true.
// According to the scuttlebutt in the financial markets, the company will be downsizing soon.

to close today’s nexialist, a new word i learned recently and i have to adopt it in my vocabulary.

brainsparks: linguist tech support (tn#221), new words for new worlds (tn#111), why do we have butts? (tn#27), callipygian (tn#139), anasyrma (tn#79)

see you next week, softies 🫀✨

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I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist. 

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