Social

• I got a new musical toy, watch me play Zombie with the little palm-sized synth

• Wrote a blog on some thoughts about the future of Bitcoin

• I can’t buy any Oculus games now I’m locked out of Facebook

• Some progress made on my latest VR Cartoon.

• Complaining about people complaining about refugees

• I looked into making some NFS, and they are stupider than I thought

• I went to a gig: The Wedding Present in Kentish Town

• Comment upon fears for censorship now Jack has left Twitter

• Talking about vaccine patents and vaccine mandates

• Watch me playing a Cud song with the loop pedal to celebrate their gig

That’s just the highlights this month, you can always follow the full feed on the fediverse at boing.world or join the telegram group

Reading

I read Ravenous Brain by Daniel Bor: How the new science of consciousness explains our insatiable search for meaning.

The essence of evolution, he reckons, is for genes to build up an encoding of their environment. To represent it, or at least survival strategies within it. Evolution hones that representation, weeding out the poor representations and leaving only the best. And at levels of biology above that the same holds: The organism strives to encode understandings of the world. Creates vast internal worlds to represent the world outside, and that those vast internal representations eventually encode representations of the organism itself.

Great book, held my attention as it talked about that that attention itself is.

Watching

Doctor Who continues, final episode tonight I think. It’s been a really busy series. Cut down to six epsiodes and it feels cramped and incoherent at times but it’s been a great adventure through time and space and that’s what we want from The Doctor for sure.

Been watching Fort Salem on the Beeb: A show about an alternate America where witches run the army. Three new trainees in the boot-camp of magic-school, fighting America’s wars and the prejudice from with it’s borders. Politics of leadership. I like the way the witches vocal chords are the source of the magic and it’s all down to sounds, which can be trapped in a balloon or a bottle.

Links

• Wombo - AI Art Generator Simple web-interface on that Neural-Net art-from-text-prompt thing.It’s going way faster than it was when I ran it in docker on my machine. They must have a ton of compute behind this given how much I’ve seen it being used.

• Laugh Cry Nation - Blog from Huw The UK will soon have an “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry” Blitz-Spirit, where caring about a single other fucking person on earth will finally become totally taboo"

• Johnathan Pie on COP Longer video than is usual 2 minute rants, more in-depth.

• Lyn Aldan blogs about Crypto Currencies Stable Coins are centralized operators and in the case of a chain-fork it will be them who decides which side of the chain is “real”, not the users, not the nodes, not the miners. Also didn’t realize Solana’s slashing is still manual. Proof of stake is really terrible.

• PhotoMosh - Make weird glitching images Nice little photo-editing app

• Honest Government Ad on Cop26 “Net Zero” Authorized by the department for blah blah blah.

• Kunt and the gang Xmas single Kunt and the gang’s Xmas single, pretty catchy, very sweary. Quoted for truth.

• Kurzgesagt - Is Meat Really That Bad? Spoiler: Yeah, it’s pretty bad. Not even just for the animals.

That’s just the highlights this month, remember you can always see my full public bookmarks at my website and/or follow my link-bot on the fediverse.

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