23 Sep 24 Monday Briefing
Come play with us in Chiang Mai!
News Roundup
Note: at this point, the running joke in our household is that my better half more or less curates the editorial content for the Monday Briefing editions of this newsletter through her chronically online magpie-ing.
Which Moo Deng are you today? Personally, I started at 2, spent most of the day going hard at 4, and am now vacillating between 6 and 7. Stay moisturised and mouthy, dear readers.
I don’t really have thoughts on the Fed’s 50bps rate cut last week nor do I wish to. I’d heard chunters of 75 but told myself I’d settle for 25. Anything from a market rally to a market crash is possible. What a time for gold and crypto.
What I do have thoughts about is how utterly fishy the Taiwan (if your company name is Gold Apollo, I will absolutely look at it sideways) and Budapest links to the pager-as-detonator debacle is.
Watch/Scroll
20th-century BankerBro™ (who met financial ruin during the 1929 Wall Street crash) funded CameraBros in jollies around the world to take photographs to promote… world peace. Trust me when I say I went down a rabbit hole researching Autochrome technology and marvelling at how the Tibetan monks’ headgear have not changed in any substantive manner.
The raccoon energy in me revels in this Cards Against Humanity vs Elon Musk spat over a piece of land that basically got acquired as a sort of mega group buy.
For something potentially more edifying, here’s Japanese baby Jesus with a cute bob.
Read
It is an awful thing to be stateless in this current paradigm of nation-states and international organisations, and even more awful if you grew up in a state that does not recognise you because of an accident of birth. That Singapore has 853 such stateless people on its territories is perhaps the saddest thing of all.
Ponder
If I defined my worth by the 403 subscribers I have on this platform, I might feel very poorly about my influence compared to others with more followers than they could ever possibly know in their lifetime. Dunbar’s number is instructional here – if I can really only have 5ish people in my innermost circle (and I’m fortunate that I do), and about 10-15 I would consider the next layer padding the inner sanctum, and about 150 people whose names and faces I know, then 403 is a very cozy virtual circle I can cultivate. And yes, I’ll get round to writing a book at some point if I ever want to “expand my influence”.
Seapunk Playshop!
Friends, potential friends, potential collaborators, potential someones! Back in June, I recapped the Datus and Nusas workshop I attended at the invitation of
and the Summer of Protocols programme, and reconnected with a long-time friend Sam, who seeded the idea of “Seapunk” as a unique Southeast Asian dialect of Solarpunk.Over the months, one thing led to another, and together with
, Kabesa / Leader of the Indigenous Creole Kristang people of Singapore, we are delighted to announce the first-ever Seapunk Playshop in Chiang Mai this October to November, running alongside other fabulous popup villages taking place in that historic city such as .Please come play with us in this amazing, artsy, spiritual city for as long or as short a time as you can!
We are bootstrapping this Playshop because we believe in it, but if you are well-heeled, well-connected, or both, and would like to support this grassroots venture, please get in touch for sponsorships, grants or donations!
Counterpoint on writing a book: https://gwern.net/book-writing