image by me.
Hello all! I hope your week went well and you are having a pleasant enough Sunday at the moment?
This edition is probably the first time I have tried to communicate something I am actively working on, so I hope it doesn’t come across too disjointed or confusing as these thoughts and ideas are definitely still emerging and coalescing into patterns for me, albeit, based on existing structures from prior research I have been engaging with over the last five years or so.
The idea of manifolds as I am using them under Newtype practice is one that will be featuring a lot from now on, so I hope this serves as an introduction into my thought process around them at the beginning. Building using techniques inspired by indigenous oral traditions and building upon the play framework - embarking on a more deliberate and explicit exploration of games and game design. It’s been a lot of fun to be honest.
When we speak about futures and alternative practices, I don’t think a lot of us spend much time speaking about how these futures and practices feel to engage with. This is fun. It feels like this is the sort of world I want to live in and bring up a child in. One where play, fiction, slow maintenance and consideration of the planet, opening oneself up to the complexity and generative chaos of the universe is a given…it’s a really great feeling.
One other thing I have been experimenting with a lot lately is Airtable. If you checked out my list of apps and software, you would have only seen a super basic way of using it. It has all sorts of interesting functionality and they just launched some features that look interesting around enabling more low barrier-to-entry software development. I am firmly in an information organisation and management headspace, so if anybody has recommendations similar to this, do let me know!
Links
Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality by Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland (I don’t know if I am allowed to share the PDF freely via this sort of channel, but if anyone is interested in the doc, hit me up!) - Thanks to Carmen for pointing this out in the first place
Deep Wealth by Art Brock and Eric Harris-Braun
What I am reading/watching/playing/listening to
Annabel Scheme by Robin Sloan (this one is interesting as it came out of a newspaper serial that he made available online after a crowdfunding campaign to enable people who couldn’t pay for it to gain access. I am just starting it so can’t comment on the actual content yet, but so far so good. He also has a very cool newsletter). // Web, Book
Among Us (I generally enjoy social deception games where out of a group of people a minority are bad actors trying to mess up the big plan. Lots of deception, laughter and distrust usually result. This is a very cool digital version of this and there are a whole host of YouTube videos showing people playing to give you a feel for what it is like. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!) // Game
Upstream Colour (I plan to do a watch and read through Shane Carruth’s films and screenplays over the coming week, starting with Upstream Colour, next is the amazing screenplay for his canceled film project A Topiary. Bonus point - A Topiary is a huge inspiration for the work I am doing with units and unit operations) // Film, Screenplay
image via
The Newtype Vocab #10 - Games, Flows, Unit Operations