I am a little late finding this list, but I am looking forward to listening to these albums. Like most of us, when I listen to music I end up in a bubble of stuff I know that I like. These sorts of lists help me break the bubble, spread my wings, climb towards the sun in a musically enlightened arc like a giant audiophile eagle!
ahem….
What I mean to say is, it’s a cool list 🙂
My watch woke my whole family up at 5.45am this morning with an alarm. Is this the start of the rise of the machines? Maybe it starts with unreasonably early, unexplainable alarms to soften us up into sleepy victims. Then the computers can have their way with us and Skynet will bring us down with nukes.
I will be on the lookout for balls of lightening and naked Austrian bodybuilders for the rest of the day.
I found this cool video of Pearl Jam titled with a probing question. It got me thinking about what the work we do means to us. Clearly we can’t all be Eddie Vedder answering a call to sing while surfing (how’s that for a fairy tale?) – but I believe we can always make our work more meaningful. In fact what better thing to try and do in life?
One of the biggest annoyances in this life is when someone puts you in a box which you don’t feel like applies to you. For example, Insurance companies, governments during visa applications, teenagers picking on each other at high school.
Any tech which helps alleviate this pain is most excellent, which is why I think this product might just be the way of the future for insurance: https://www.sanlam.co.za/gocover/Pages/default.aspx
Being able to pick and choose elements of insurance for your specific needs through a mobile phone sounds a lot less box-like to me than the existing models of insurance.
We are inundated with stories of Google, Alexa, iPhones, VR, AR, and autonomous cars. But the most impactful tech is often less exciting and personal, more functional and industrial.
Take the rather unexciting field of electricity transmission. China is leading the way in implementing technology which is better suited to carry high voltages over long distances (the technology is called Ultra High-Voltage Direct Current, or UHVDC). These high capacity links make the grid greener and more stable than the usual alternating current transmission which works well over shorter distances, but becomes tricky with high voltage and longer distance.
Concerns over pollution have driven the Chinese government to set up coal fired power stations in remote areas away from urban populations. Hence the need to transmit.
This all just struck me as a technology story which is saving the planet, and is happening as we speak – but for some reason it is deemed to be uninteresting compared to consumer tech….which is quite interesting.
I am on a constant mission to try to limit the amount of rubbish I read. When I started this mission, the internet was my friend, a whole world of opportunity waiting to be tapped. All I had to do was filter out what was thrown at me through free and easy channels (Twitter, Facebook).
Trying to filter information is a tricky thing, and can have unintended consequences. Online personalization can effectively isolate people from a diversity of viewpoints or content. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook do not work how I want them to work. Maybe it is just a matter of me not spending enough time curating the content, but the  barrage of rubbish just kept coming with seemingly little quality control despite my efforts to block, promote etc.. And so I am coming full circle and subscribing to what I think is quality media.
Paying for content after years of winging it on the internet feels surprisingly good. Whether it is music or news or tv series – the quality of what I am consuming has raised dramatically compared to the old Facebook feed.
I remember asking my parents when I was a teen “Should you focus more on what someone does or what someone says?”
At the time I was talking about a love interest who was playing games with my heart (cue Backstreet Boys song) but the sentiment still is important.
And the answer is that action trumps words every time. Words come and go, but action shows someone something that is undeniable.
The next question of course is, what are you going to do next? What do you want to show to yourself and to those who are important to you?
In a personal crusade against time wasting, I am trying to add purpose to any online activity. We have a Netflix subscription, but just like TV and cable, there is a lot of junk on there. So, I am trying to focus my watching on classic and new Sci-Fi to self-educate on the topic, and hopefully help to make me a better Sci-Fi writer.
So far I have watched Stranger Things and Black Mirror – both fantastic but very different.
Sometimes of course my wife demands non Sci-Fi for casual watching. Happy Wife, Happy Life!
But I plan on using lists like this: http://www.stuff.tv/features/15-best-sci-fi-movies-netflix to continue the education 🙂
Following on from my previous posts, Dune is becoming more than a pleasant read for me, it is so good that I am treating it as a sort of Sci-Fi guru and teacher. A reference book to refer to when creating futuristic worlds.
Its scale and scope started out very large and wide – moving between two planets, explaining complex political relationships, alien life forms, technologies, religions and histories. However, passing the half way mark the author has chosen to zoom in on a few characters, killing off a big presence Ned Stark style, and focusing on subtlety and detail in the characters and their particular situations. It’s very absorbing!
This ‘zooming in’ technique (for want of a better word) has been a revelation to me and I plan to try and use it in the future.
I have been away for about a month and barely written anything in that time.
I am trying to get back in the swing of things. So to start with, a simple re-blog. I don’t believe in resolutions every new year, but I do believe in long term behavioral goals. This list sounds pretty good to me:
More creating
Less consuming
More leading
Less following
More contributing
Less taking
More patience
Less intolerance
More connecting
Less isolating
More writing
Less watching
More optimism
Less false realism
Chimpwithcans 