Writing that last note I remembered that this newsletter is named after a song by Operation Ivy called The Crowd which is somewhat critical of hordes of people living fast paced lives and not really having time for anything important because they are too busy being busy, which was picked intentionally but has become more and more relevant over the years. The album that song is on is called Energy and if for some godforesaken reason you haven't heard it you should drop everything and fix that right away as it's one of those rare perfect albums, start to finish, 10/10.
Speaking of energy, I just finished up a 4 week class with Carl Abrahamsson about his take on Anton LaVey (which I thoroughly enjoyed) and in the last class someone asked a question which led to a really fascinating discussion about charging objects with magical energy. Of course, given this was in the context of LaVey, it's important to remember this is not supernatural but rather personal intention based. Carl talked about a pen that he brings with him when he is going to meet someone special or visit an important location, so then anytime he uses that pen he's reminded of those interactions and experiences. I loved that, and especially as he's a writer so in a way his pen is his magic wand, or sword, or whatever. This is a powerful idea though, that we can chose what importance to put on things, and then use them for our own emotional/mental purposes.
Also speaking of energy, Daniel Batten has just published an incredible debunking of all the most common false claims about bitcoin and energy usage. There's a lot of bad information that spreads around unintentionally (and intentionally) and sadly even all these years later people still repeat things as fact because they heard them somewhere sometime and don't know anything about it but are sure it's true. Daniel was curious so he looked it up, did the math, got the answers and found out the truth which is going to surprise a lot of people. Anyway, if this is a topic of interest for you it's worth taking a look at his report which addresses the claims point by point and gives the data and citations to back up his rebuttals.
Related, I'm often reminded of the Kardashev Scale (not Kardashian) these days when any tech or development is discussed and critics instantly start complaining about how much energy they use. Kardashev was a Russian astronomer who proposed a scale which classified how advanced a civilization was based on how much energy they were able to harness. Basically:
• A Type I civilization is able to access all the energy available on its planet and store it for consumption. Hypothetically, it should also be able to control natural events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.
• A Type II civilization can directly consume a star's energy, most likely through the use of a Dyson sphere.
• A Type III civilization is able to capture all the energy emitted by its galaxy, and every object within it, such as every star, black hole, etc.
As you can see Kardashev was quite optimistic in his bracketing as we, humanity, are not even Type I at this point, so we've still got a long way to go. But to the point, the conversation is always "X uses as much energy as Y!" usually with panic and concern added in for extra emphasis. The thinking of course is that energy usage is bad and things should use less energy. This is what brings me to Kardashev, and I wonder instead what would this all look like if the first reaction wasn't "use less energy" but rather "how can we better harness more energy?" Of course plenty have hypothesized what humanity might do with unlimited clean energy, but that's all theory. Imagine what it might be like if how much energy something used wasn't a concern, how much further along might we be?
We just got back from Norway where we rented an electric car for the week, something totally new for us. Fun fact, the amount of energy you have left according to the dashboard is just an estimate, and driving up hill uses much more power than you think. That's a story for another time.
I absolutely love the industrial design of Breakfast Audio guitar pedals. They are works of art. And their chaotic noise is fitting. I recently got serial number 01 of this new reverb model and helped trouble shoot an power issue with it, turns out not all 9V power sources are the same and some ramp up differently, which can cause unexpected issues. I'm using this pedal as part of a new noisy project that I'm working on, and trying to figure out how to execute more betterly.
This reminds me of how much energy I've spent today writing things and rewriting them and thinking about rewriting them or just deleting them and generally what we spend our energy on. I've been thinking about this a lot actually in relation to what I want to spend energy on going forward. I've got a dozen different projects always juggling around which is fun but also prevents me from going all in on any of them, not that I could even if I wanted to and also "fulfilling to do" and "pays the bills" are rarely overlapping, but I do plan to spend more time thinking through this and perhaps moving some things to cold storage so that I can spend more time on others. I'm kind of putting together an idea of what I'd like to spend time and energy on, and working sort/classify projects to see where they fit in that - or not.
Get some sleep,
-s
