🎈✨The Nexialist #0272
alô, alô, marciano | craving aliens | coinbase commercial breakdown | the hypercurious mind | silica gel packets | in search of banksy | what do people want from ai | bounce house
welcome to your weekly undigested cyber-digest, the nexialist
hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. since i’m back from brazil i’ve been noticing a brazilian shift on my daily breakfast (and how that cheers up my whole day), thanks to two new kitchen tools i brought home: the cutest ever cuscuzeira and a tapioqueira (a flour sifter). also, we got our first above 20 degrees weather with a blue sky. you’ve probably gotten it already, but i’m a metereopático (tn#168). i’ll leave you to it, enjoy! 🫀✨
⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks on this day over the past years:
post-luxury status symbols, the concept of now, experimental mindset, competitive wellness, aparatchik (tn#220), artificial intimacy, risk-aversion, vicarious, risk zones in ethical operating systems, natural intelligence, metereopático (tn#168), hawthorn effect, digital esoterism, therapy speaking, allowed to f*** up (tn#116), funambulism, the moodboard effect, pareidolia, fade to grey (tn#66), emotional plurality, deletion death, architecture ft. music, social infrastructure, imagination as necessity (tn#15)
🛸 alô, alô, marciano
i know the artemis ii mission is around the moon and not mars, but all this space talk while earth is in chaos feels adequate. this videoclip was launched in 1980 and it remains so contemporary. another hit from one of brazil’s biggest voices, elis regina, written by rita lee, who i’ve shared here quite a few times. if you’re not brazilian, do yourself a favor and let your brain experience this, if you are, it’s an opportunity to sing along to this timeless tune. the lyrics is full of commentary of war and classism:
Hello, hello, Martian
This is Earth speaking
As usual, we’re at war
You can’t imagine the madness
Humanity is in a major frenzy because
It’s getting further and further down in high society
[Chorus]
Down, down, down
In high society
brainsparks: grok (tn#141), águas de março (tn#12), RIP Rita Lee, the jester of rock (tn#120), rita lee (tn#15), more rita lee (tn#26)
👽 craving aliens
i do feel like aliens are an evergreen theme, but it’s true, they’ve been having a moment: barack obama said aliens are real a few weeks ago which led to some commotion, and people are betting when the us will confirm extraterrestrial life on polymarket. philip teale shows many other examples in pop culture where the otherworldly is showing up: pluribus, bugonia, mickey 17, project hail mary. more importantly, there’s a vibe shift.
While aliens used to be viewed as aggressors and invaders, the idea of them as friends, even saviours, has been making its way into cultural storytelling. In times of climate turmoil, AI disruption and a geopolitical order that feels increasingly hostile, the classic tropes we’ve attached to aliens have started to seem almost quaint. The idea of them as a threat represents a simpler anxiety for a simpler time, when the real danger wasn’t humanity itself. This wave of pro-alien stories may signal a wider moment in popular culture: a yearning for an external force to undo the wreckage we’re doing to ourselves, here on Earth.
brainsparks: james webb telescope (tn#39), deep space (tn#78), sex is space (tn#21), how sci-fi has changed (tn#186), moon tree (tn#264)
👾 coinbase commercial breakdown
i hadn’t seen this coinbase commercial, “your day out”, before, and it’s quite mindblowing. in this video we hear from the director, oscar hudson, the process of making reality feel like pre-uncanny valley videogame. from video-game designers making the outfits, to a choreographer to create this npc-human movement, to the casting decisions, there are so many layers of craft, so many people involved, so many skills. it’s such a beautiful example of how we’re craving craft in this age of synthetic fatigue. more of this, please.
this is a shot that we called the reality run. And the idea of it is that it begins in the isometric kind of game world view that we’ve established early on and slowly sinks down and zooms in and becomes handheld. kind of as our character sprints down the street and the world around him kind of gradually becomes more and more human and textured and tactile and messy and there’s sparks and smoke and all kinds of things that don’t belong in in game world.
brainsparks: craft is rebellion (tn#223), craftivist manifesto (tn#178), laborer, craftsman, artist (tn#161), friction-maxxing (tn#259), reality hunger (tn#201), non-playable characters (tn#132), mechanomorphism (tn#118), research practice = creative identity (tn#271)
🤯 the hypercurious mind
“The hypercurious mind: ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information.” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writing for aeon, always nice when two worlds/people you admire collide. of course, when i see that curiosity got in the hyper train, i had to click.
This attentional profile is what I call ‘hypercuriosity’, an impulsive motivational drive toward novel, uncertain or unresolved information that may be especially prominent in certain individuals with ADHD – though it likely exists as a broader dimension across the population – and that can override other priorities, even when doing so conflicts with longer-term goals or external demands.
Hypercuriosity offers a useful lens for understanding many puzzling aspects of ADHD.
i have no adhd diagnosis but i do have moments where my attention is everywhere or lost (or found?) in rabbit holes — hence my need to write here every week, so i can channel this somewhere. le cunff does a great job and describing what hypercuriosity is and isn’t — definitely not a superpower. but also, how can we value this trait?
Rather than focusing on how to regulate hypercuriosity, we might ask how to design environments that work with it.
brainsparks: the perils of hyper-literacy (tn#264), hyperstition (tn#262), hyper-optimization (tn#210), hypernormalization (tn#210), hypernormative (tn#200), hyperpunditry (tn#224), hyperindustry of the artificial imaginary (tn#118), experimental mindset (tn#220), mental gym (tn#156), the age of artificial creativity (tn#113), hedgehog vs fox approach (tn#130)
👅 silica gel packets
for the curious of us out there: turns out, yes, you need to know this. i tell you, everytime i touch these silica gel packets i question how it works, so it’s nice to see such a cute explanation: from its chemistry, to its +100 year history, to the fact they can be dried out in the over (!) and why you should not snack on them.
Inside each silica gel bead is a massive microscopic network of tunnels. This dramatically increases the surface area of each bead, with a single gram of silica offering over 700 square meters of surface area.
brainsparks: the truth about airplane mode (tn#135), cute aggression (tn#104)
🎈 in search of banksy
thank you, Maria Clara Villas, for sharing this. i actually like that we don’t know who banksy is, so this whole obsession with figuring it out feels a bit pointless. but i’m still human and curious, so i read through the whole thing. wow, the investigation is a documentation of the artist’s long history, to all the “suspected” banksies, many of their works and how much money it generates/donates. quite impressive.
brainsparks: pixo (tn#156), grey city, reclaiming the concrete jungle (tn#7), the dystopia of são paulo (tn#83)
🦾 what do people want from ai
amy webb said a few weeks ago that the trend report is dead, and maybe this is what is replacing them? anthropic published a few weeks ago a new kind of researchL by using an ai interviewer, they could talk to 81 thousand people across 159 countries in 70 languages, collecting “rich, open-ended interviews at extraordinary scale.” the insights are rich indeed, full of nuance, and the novel method is quite impressive, and honestly, what got my attention the most. you can see the data, but also dive on each point support by quotes from the interviewees. such a great material, go read it.
Across interviews, hope and alarm didn’t divide people into camps, so much as coexist as tensions within each person.
brainsparks: risk zones in ethical operating systems (tn#168), critic of technology (tn#121), is your job safe from ai? (tn#165), strategy in the era of ai (tn#165), techworry (tn#33), writing with probabilistic machines (tn#255), children’s ai manifesto (tn#218), doomprompting (tn#244)
♥️ bounce house
i know i just shared a video by gelli haha in the last edition, but i have become obsessed with this one: put the video on fullscreen and get ready to get hypnotized and smily. it’s very willy wonka meets castelo rá-tim-bum meets 80s kids tv show. maybe the coolest think i’ve seen with a 360 camera.
brainsparks: klouds will carry me to sleep (tn#271), continent of play (tn#240), drops of joy (tn#16), play-full future (tn#121), imaginals vs imagination (tn#19), playscape (tn#67), why do we dream? (tn#72), mercurial (tn#72), top dog (tn#117)
see you next week, hypercurious 🎈✨
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