The 1st Pill 💊
(You're reciving this as a subscriber of Netsphere Pop, a newsletter on Composable Culture. This is a new addition to the newsletter, a more digestable one)
Composable culture is all about mixing cultural artifacts, such as movies, music, and books. But it’s also digital design, curation and product-building. All of this cannot exist without context, and the qualitative signals are often drowned by a sea of noise. Meaningful and engaging experiences such as music albums, graphic novels, tools and games are lost in the cacophonous river. I will snatch them out for you.
Once a week (on Thursday morning, 9:00 CET), you will receive a few recommendations for various types of content, with each email being no longer than 5 minute reading time. I hope this will help you shape your perspective on topics like culture, philosophy, and entertainment, and free you from the algorithmic recommendation system that has been shaping our preferences for the past couple of years. And maybe, it may encourage you to explore further?
I will also include one app (or a webpage) that has made an impression on me and is connected with Composable Culture in some way - it could be a vault for digital assets, a webpage that stood out, or an Instagram account that enriches my scrolling experience. Each recommendation is limited to two sentences to ensure coherence, reduce reading time (so you can dive right into the content), and maintain quality. I hope this will be a valuable addition to the longer pieces I'm creating.
Please let me know how do you feel about this (by commenting, sending me an email or poking me here) and will it be useful for you. Your feedback is superimportant! 🙏🏻
Thanks to Monika, Rafael and Mariusz for the feedback.
Here goes the first batch of recommendations:
📺 Movie / series / short - Pulse (Just Watch, Youtube or do some diggin’) - An absolute meditation on loneliness, that uses early commercial internet technology as an entry point. The feeling of dread here is unmatched.
🎧 Album to listen to - Lab’s Cloud - Build Of Silence (Spotify / Bandcamp / Youtube) - soundtrack to (almost) perfect relaxation. Psychill with some echoes of dub and ambient.
🎮 Game to play - Citizen Sleeper - Cyberpunk-inspired late-capitalist role-playing game excels in character development, side stories, and world-building. Stellar example of how a relatively short gameplay time can be immersive and make you think about potential storylines.
📖 Book to read - Mitch Horowitz - Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences (Goodreads, World Of Books, Bookfinder) - Always reluctant to jump into New Age but always intriguied by writings that not only work as a magnet towards this topic, but challange my way of thinking, show different paths and ask different questions, rathen than provide answeres. Horowitz does just that and roots his views of the occult not in the Ouija Board seances and ghost-viewings, but rather thoughful research, philosophy and psychology.
🪄 Tool - Goblin Tools - Despite my reluctance to add new tools to my already crowded arsenal, this gem proved irresistible with its unique approach to task management. This to-do list application stands out by breaking tasks into small, manageable subtasks at various levels, making it especially beneficial for those with ADHD (both, for personal productivity and team collaboration), despite lacking export functionality to other task managers.
📱 Internet WWW - Rapping About What’s On Steam - So now we have computers rapping about Steam games. Combine GPT-3, some tidy JSON info, mixed with Python and Uberduck.ai to get a full-blown Totally Human Rapper (with my personal faves Bleak Sword DX, Etrian Odyssey HD, The Sims 4 Growing Together Expansion Pack) and get those tunes out in the streets.
Inhale the narratives, get inspired, pass it forward.
✌️
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