Substrate

I like the idea of "activist neuroaesthetics" - of an aesthetic life being about process rather than product, and focused on the relations between us and our environment. The side benefit? Lowering our cortisol levels.

Although there's a whiff of NFT vibes here, I think titles.xyz could be much more viable/useful. Essentially, artists (or anyone) pre-trains an AI model in a virtual 'studio'. Others can then create art based on that model, and the original artist gets a cut of the money changing hands.

Back in the early days of We Are Open Co-op (WAO) three of the four founding members, including me, were "wet behind the ears" when it came to running a business. Thankfully, we had Bryan Mathers who had already built and sold a couple of companies by that point, as well as running a non-profit, and his own consultancy business.

In a recent note, I wrote:

I have a tendency to 'push through' when I encounter resistance/obstacles in life. I call this 'Beast Mode' and it takes me from a place of comfort, through useful stress, into a place of strain. It means that I potentially don't have great interoception which would explain why I ended up with Stage 3 Overtraining Syndrome...

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Some mornings, if I wake up earlier than I want to get up, and my wife is still asleep, I scroll through Are.na's Explore page. It's pretty much the only time I mindlessly scroll through an infinite page, but it's so useful in terms of some of the gems I would never otherwise come across.

The Head of Open Source at Sentry, a really well-known (and seemingly well-loved) guy by the name of Chad Whitacre, has "retired from tech" to go and work at Home Depot. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this, but the way he did it was pretty awesome.

Last night, having watched the Champions League final, I spent an enjoyable couple of hours trawling Are.na for links and other resources relevant to my upcoming zine: Field Notes on Productive Friction:

• Are.na | dajb ●～* | Productive Friction
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I remembered the term 'bliki' today, coined by Martin Fowler in 2003:

So I decided I wanted something that was a cross between a wiki and a blog - which Ward Cunningham immediately dubbed a bliki. Like a blog, it allows me to post short thoughts when I have them. Like a wiki it will build up a body of cross-linked pieces that I hope will still be interesting in a year's time.

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I had reason to ask my little robot friend to create a simplified version of the W3C VC-EDU "Verifiable Credentials for Education, Employment, and Achievement Use Cases" so I thought I'd share it here for future reference: