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Michael Dean

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🛰 The Mapmaking Machine Species

This month is shaping up to be a watershed moment in over 80 years of UFO investigations. For reasons unknown to serfs like me, it seems like Congress may have forced the Pentagon to show it's hand. Who knows why, but a declassified report on UAP's

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፨ The Social Graph

Social media has no shortage of scapegoats: The business model, the fame junkies, the addiction fueled habit loops, the human traits of greed and narcissism, Elon Musk. After debating a friend, he landed on the sentiment that "social media is inherently screwed." I have a more hopeful outlook,

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🦝 The Raccoon Coders of Neos

RUMORS I'd been hearing rumors of a small society of people who LIVE inside of a VR application. Maybe a hundred people or so - clocking 10+ hours a day? It was serious. I finally made the decision to dip my toes into Neos to see what it&

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© The Replication Machine

The 1990s were the last days of the Golden days of art. Musicians, filmmakers, painters, writers - they each had an unspoken understanding of the rule: Whoever owns the thing, experiences the thing. CDs, VHS, canvas, or scroll - you could put the thing in your backpack. In the days

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🥩 Hunter's Breakfast Myth

Last weekend my wife and I found ourselves staying at a bed and breakfast on Greenwood Lake. When she told me she loved breakfast, I told her "no, THIS guy loves breakfast." I pulled up the radical Hunter S. Thompson quote and read it to her as we

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🥽 Duke Surfs the Metaverse

Multiplayer virtual reality is still a "many years away" from the Spielbergian wet dream you might have seen in Ready Player One. Right now, the graphics sometimes resemble Nintendo 64, the interfaces can be confusing, and you might glitch out if you turn down the wrong alley. But

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⏳ Beeple's Mosaic

Beeple’s “Everydays” NFT sold for $69 million. The fact that it’s an NFT is the least exciting part about it. This essay is about Beeple’s process. Your craft dramatically evolves when you commit to a daily process. Time is your muse.

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🍳 The Daily Meeze

Writers can learn from cooks. Chef's store ingredients, work among chaos, and reset their workspace at the end of the day. We can adopt their rituals and mindfulness so the information we need is always at our fingertips.

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📬 Kill Instapaper

Read-later apps let us save articles for the future. The problem is, we never get to them. Thousands of articles build up in our inbox, and they rot there forever. Here’s a better way to re-route your unread articles.

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⌨️ Sleeping on MS-DOS

The virtual reality space is obsessed with physical specs. But if we look at the history of the PC, Microsoft gained dominance by building MS-DOS, the best operating system at the time. Who is building a VR-OS right now?

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📞 If You Melt a Telephone

Let’s understand Bitcoin in the context of communication technologies. The telephone was the first in a line of inventions that trended towards “co-presence.” Bitcoin is the first technology in a future line of inventions that will trend towards democracy.

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🔗 Hyperlink Frenzy

There's a new myth that hyperlinking all your private notes together leads to creativity. I disagree. I’ve made this mistake before. It comes from an obsession with categorizing our inputs. Instead, focus on outputs.

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⚛️ The Writer's Stack

It’s becoming popular to use dozens of productivity apps and link them all together using automations. Another approach: an all-in-one workspace like Notion. It provides all the functionality a writer needs.

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👗 The Gaga NFT Dress

Most of the NFT schemes in 2021 have shaky claims of value. The Metaverse will be a game changer for this space. When social VR events become popular, 3D NFTs will be scarce, non-cloneable, and valuable.

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🤑 Surreal News in January 2021

The year of 2021 got off to a strange start: Revolutions, conspiracies, financial absurdity, and another wave of COVID. Delirium afoot. Here’s a collage of all the strange news that came out during this time.