Hi Crowd!

As you know I am a professional jet lag experienceoor but for the life of me I couldn't tell you what time my body thinks it is right now. The last 2 weeks have seen me bounce to Tokyo and immediately jump into chaos event prep complete with early mornings and late nights for days, combined with a lovely dose of absolute horrific heat, and once the main event was done I slept almost all day trying to recover, which didn't help any kind of acclimation to the timezone - not that I wanted to acclimate because the next day I flew back to Vancouver but only for long enough to do laundry, hug the family and sleep one night in my own bed, then I red eye'd it to NYC for another few days of being "on" and sociable which is not my default state by any means, and then right back to Vancouver. It's been a few days and I keep thinking I'm somehow catching up but then I get smacked with the realization that no such thing is happening. In Pattern Recognition Gibson describes jet lag as your soul catching up, unable to travel as fast as you can on a plane so it'a arrival is delayed a bit behind you. In my current back and forth situation rather than catching my soul mid trip and saving it the trouble I ended up whipping it back and forth all over the place like a celebratory game flag. Sorry soul.

I was in Tokyo for the first live 8TARI event which went smashingly. There's a new video we debuted there which should be live for everyone to see in the next few days I think, but it great have in person conversations with a lot of people who had kind of heard what Muggs and I have been up to with the project but hadn't had a chance to fully digest it. I loved seeing the "ohhhh shit!!!" light bulb go off on faces when they connected the dots right in front of us. This is slow build thing, but I'm really amped on how it's coming together.

Speaking of cool things coming together, as you probably remember a while back Tara, Ripley and I did a little family NFT project called Shelves which, while it didn't amass a huge following, was really fun and educational and helped us lay out some ground work for future projects we'd work on together. Ripley has spent the summer heads down drawing (by hand) the art for the next chapter which is called Crow Friends and he and Tara have spent literally endless hours writing lore, designing games and treasure hunts and trying to actually make something. If you are following along it's a bear market right now and the people paying attention to whats going on in the NFT space is a small fraction of what it was 2 years ago, but there's something special about building things when no one is watching and I'm so excited for this to come together. In addition to the clues and the treasure hunt, Ripley made a crow costume that people can wear in Cryptovoxels if they want to come to the crow dance party happening tomorrow. Yes I'm biased but this is an origin story playing out right now. Don't miss it.

(On that note, if you have any of my previous projects like Robopunks or Cats or whatever you should DEFINITELY not sleep on the above, as there are perks and discounts available to you specifically.)

Speaking of missing things, when I was in Tokyo I was talking with "the kids" and by that I mean the royal "kids" being everyone who is even a day younger than me and more dialed into all the cool shit that I should have been previously dialed in on myself. In talking about lofi as a new genre that growing in popularity I was tipped off to Hyperpop and Slutpop or at least that's what I was led to believe by the note that I scribbled on the back of a sticker and jammed in my pocket to research later. As the name suggests Hyperpop does seem to be a adderall fueled genre of sped up electro-pop insanity largely created by teens and 20-somethings stuck home during covid and seeing how fast they can make the beats go on their laptops. It's bubblegum extreme midi chaos and if thats your sort of thing you probably know about it already and if not you should immediately. Sadly Slutpop doesn't seem to be a genre (yet) but rather an album by Kim Petras though you could argue that with the album itself she's actively trying to define a genre. This is like the evolution of Peaches taking the "oh you think my music is slutty? that's nothing, here let me show you how slutty it can actually be." theme just that much further. And while yes this is kind of a polar opposite from the rebellious soundtrack of my own childhood it's really not that that different in that it's kids basically telling the adults they aren't interested in the rules and examples that have been laid out for them and are going to build their own world with their own rules and I'm totally here for it.

In an absolutely unrelated musical direction, Nick Cave was recently asked and in turn asked subscribers to his mailing list to come up with a playlist of 15 songs from his extensive catalog that could bring a new listener up to speed. With the assistance of ChatGPT all of these recommendations were combined and this playlist is the result. I've listened to it several times today and if you are already a fan or Cave-curious I have to agree it's damn solid.

In a very Trumpian move it looks like Elon Musk's follower count on the recently deadnamed Twitter is totally fake. And speaking of totally fake I'm kind of glad that the new crappy BitClout knock-off friend.tech is killing itself before I even need to write about why it should die. Like Klout before it, anything that tries to commodify and monetize interpersonal relationships should be ridiculed and laughed out of existence as fast as possible. Of course there will always be the early adopter "influencers" who jump into the ponzi early and profit off getting their friends in, but that should be a transparent move at this point too. Anything that makes you question the sincerity of your relationships with others is not only shitty but dangerous, and I'm glad this most recent iteration didn't even last a month before it got to the stage of threatening it's own users to keep them from jumping ship.

Ugh, this shit makes me sick.

I'm back on the post-it notes everywhere bandwagon to try and keep track of all the shit I need to do and while somewhat chaotic it's actually a little calming because I can see everything at once. I need to organize them a little better but I'm reminded right now about several deep dives I promised I would write and need to do those before I announce some other things, so I should seal this envelope and send it out to you all. As always, thanks for experiencing this all with me.

-s

The Crowd Gets Poppy [244]