November 19, 2023
Sundays have always had a certain texture for me, a gentle nudge toward the reset button where kind of like the beginning of each new day we have the opportunity to let out a deep exhale on the week that was, and inhale the week that will be. I’m experimenting with this new format to share some of the things that impacted me most throughout the week. As weeks fly by, sometimes we forget to pause for even the briefest silences to unravel the threads of fleeting moments that taken together are the substance of our thoughts and feelings. In these quiet Sunday moments, I aim to capture those fleeting whispers, those unspoken thoughts and overlooked wonders, weaving them into a narrative that is as seemingly random as it is meaningful.
Short Stuff
Progressive Ownership: A Model for Application Tokens by Li Jin
Web3 has been trying to solve an incentives problem in applications. Problems with incentives have been stopping web3 from doing so. Li Jin offers progressive ownership as a “this time is different.” We’ll see.
Who Do You Think You Are? by Andrew Printer
We often hold on to these ideas of ourselves, not even knowing where they came from or how they serve us, but still accepting them as if they’re ours. Part of life’s meaning comes from recognizing these personal fictions as a first step to writing your own story.
repetition is tedious by Ava
Even in the best case scenario where you spend your time doing what you love, you will still spend time in cycles of tedium. Indeed part of being good at those things requires doing the tedious thing that most people are unwilling to do.
A Tale of Two Cycle Memes by Venkatesh Rao
Viral memes are the result of a kernel of truth taken through a system of selective pressures to produce the greatest spreadability per unit information. So it is unsurprising to see that the world viewed through memes turns out to be two-dimensional. What Venkatesh discusses in this essay are two specific examples in the strong/weak cycle and the hurt/hurt cycle memes.
Why is Everyone Mad at Spotify? by Chris Dalla Riva
This is a good overview of how artists get paid in the new-ish paradigm of streaming. The pro-rata system makes some amount of sense in how I would naturally think about distributing revenues but it will be interesting to see if any other models gain steam.
Long Stuff
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner
My first contact with this book came in its jacket copy’s description as “A fiction analogue of the best drug you ever took.” To which I responded (1) not sure what that could possibly mean and (2) not sure I could resist the impulse to find out. And now that I’m partway in, I can testify: reading this novel — if you can even call it that — feels like what I imagine it would be like if you mated TikTok with the literati and observed what came out while on amphetamines.
Life’s Work: A Memoir by David Milch
There is a poetic quality to this memoir, a symmetry in the way you feel reading it and the way Milch talks about feeling as he created the stories he’s most known for. He has a way of bringing you into his story, where even as an outside observer you feel a tremendous sense of empathy. The way he put it in the memoir captures this sentiment nicely: “It’s the business of writing to get all the things that are spinning inside a person going at once, because then what you wind up with is that irreducible obstinate finality of a human being.”
Sonic Stuff
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Visual Stuff
