Friday digest (1.29.2021)
Gamestock line go up is what complexity theorists call emergent self-organization
Hello gamers, and happy Friday. Welcome to my latest weekly digest, where I summarize only what’s been relevant to me since this time last week and exercise the right to ignore most everything else.
This week /r/WSB tried to blow up hedge funds, and I, a literal genius and child prodigy, reaped the (social currency) reward of buying a $GME share at $20 back in December because I saw someone meme about it online (I have not yet reaped any fiscal rewards). To celebrate, I used my very big brain and thought really hard about shorting stocks and realized that probably there are people shorting Gamestop as we speak, because it’s high and it will go down, right? Is that bad? Anyway that’s all I know about finance and I’m comfortable not learning any more this week. Besides that, here’s what else I thought about:
1. Good tweet
2. Kode9 finally new material in 6 years
The Jackpot EP by Kode9 (2021)
The new Kode9 EP is really really good. Footwork. Perfect for anything that requires typing. He’s supposed to release more solo work this year, and that’s great with me as long as he stops calling his B-sides cringe like Rona City Blues.
Unrelated techno FYI: Drexciya good, Gerald Donald side projects bad: Arpanet (“Klaus Schulze and a TR-808 collide with a physics undergraduate”) Dopplereffekt (“if progtronic Kraftwerk had a thing for mannequins”) XOR gate (I’m stopping this list because I’m just sick of listing computer nerd terminology)
3. Learned that Turpenoid and linseed oil will not actually make you better at painting
This weekend I decided that acrylics are out and oil painting is in. The only problem is that even if the medium now takes 3 days to dry, it doesn’t make it any easier for me to paint a gesture or a mood if I’m still dragging my feet through attempts at realism. Always fiddling around in the details too much. So I’ve been thinking a lot about Edouard Manet’s last paintings, which are the perfect expression of what I want to be better at.
As Manet lay on his death bed (syphilis, gangrene, amputation, all unfortunate and messy but appropriate for the time), friends would bring him consolatory flowers, and he painted them all. It made me very sad to think about how he must have felt painting something that will also wither away, trying to capture only its most timeless form. A total serene simplicity, and gratitude to the friends who brought the bouquets.
4. Is it Putin’s Palace?
To summarize everything that happened in Russia in the past week with a single pithy wave would take several posts and years off my life. 3,000 Russians were arrested in protests this week, partly spurred on after Alexey Navalny, an opposition figure and recovered xenophobe whose underpants had been poisoned by the Russian FSB, released a documentary and report about a huge property in Gelendzhik on the Black Sea that he’s traced to Putin through a network of shell companies and an oyster farm.
I watched all ~two hours of the video, which now has over 100 million views. It felt something like watching a Vyvanse-d out interior designer do a fly-through of their latest Louis XVI coke lounge render while a news reporter tries to explain only the driest parts of a gangster movie. My favorite part of the palace was the aquadisco:
But maybe it’s a hotel!?
Mash, a Russian news outlet, released a video today touring the site of the alleged Palace and concluded it’s probably a hotel, because it was empty and there were a lot of rooms. Except Mash has been pro-Kremlin since its launch, and its editor-in-chief/director/co-owner lives in a building owned by the presidential administration (his neighbors include the Prime Minister’s sons and the Deputy Speaker of the State Duma). Draw your own conclusions.
5. I wrote about how grocery store delivery crushes the spirit
If you missed my latest long-form opinion, you can find it here.
6. Find of the week: memento mori
I saw this guy in the neighborhood while out on a run. Is this a skeleton of someone who died waiting for universal healthcare??
Yours hedgingly,
N