A few of my favourite things
A few of my favourite things
Sorry for the delay with this month's little newsletter. After 3 years in Berlin, I have finally gotten over myself and have started learning German. So my time and brain have been preoccupied with learning gendered nouns, how to pronounce 'sprache sprichst' and feeling that I need a hobby. Other than struggling through class, I've had some great opportunities to meet some v interesting people and studios in Berlin. During one of these meetings, I was asked where I find inspiration for my projects. At the time, I really struggled to come up with a good answer. Hence, I thought I would take a stab at answering that question here instead.
So here are a couple of books, podcasts and Youtubes that have influenced or inspired my work or thinking:
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Books
The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber &, David Wengrow
The Dawn of Everything is a book about early human history, with a particular focus on critiquing traditional narratives about how we became 'civilised'. It has been a real endeavour to get through, and I will say some of it did bore me (great to fall asleep to). However, it has made me rethink everything I know and understand about power structures and hierarchy, and in so doing made me more optimistic about the future. It sometimes feels like utopian anti-speculative Design (is there a better term for this?) and I really want to make some experiences inspired by its ideas.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a (problematic) collection of short stories dealing with many things (mainly masculinity) but in particular deals a lot with the neurotic and dark thoughts that lurk in people's minds. The book's themes and ideas aside, the reason it inspires me so much is how Wallace experiments with form and the semantics of those forms. Some stories are told as interviews where each question is hidden from the reader, others as pop quizzes or dictionary entries. It's changed what I think a short story can be, and in so doing has made me want to explore different formats for my own work.
Podcasts
Imaginary Advice - Episode 83: All Work and No Play
Ross Sunderland's Imaginary Advice is a wild ride of audio-fiction experiments that are really hard to group into any coherent epithet. However, as someone who loves semantics and their use in creating design fiction that provokes through subversion, 'All Work and No Play' really excited me in how it co-opts the language of podcast to tell an unexpected story. After hearing that episode I actually reached out to Ross to collaborate on turning Big Data Girl into an adult audio story about a guy dating someone with the power of Big Data, alas the timings never worked out but maybe one day.
Love + Radio- Episode 27: The Living Room
Love + Radio is in some ways the non-fiction version of Imaginary Advice, its episodes vary from interviews edited to be riveting stories, to collections of audio snippets about certain subjects, to an annual secrets' hotline episodes that present listener submitted stores, backed by music, to create a challenging but cathartic experience. I probably talk about and recommend this podcast way too much, but each episode feels like a master class in storytelling and constantly subverts my expectations. It was probably the biggest inspiration in why I tried to structure and present Ventually's Start-Ups in a way that takes viewers on an emotional journey from excitement to fear.
Youtubes
suckerpinch - Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need
Tom 7's suckerpinch is a channel full of little nerdy computer science videos, each one trying to make good on an absurd premise. What happens if you try and combine every English word into one 'Portmantout' , can you train an Ai to make Upper-Uppercase Letters and are my covid test are better storage device than Blockchain. He is my favourite kind of content creator (for want of a better word), he creates one or two amazingly playful videos a year and seems to have very little concern for the Youtube algorithm. After binging nearly all his videos in a weekend, I was left feeling inspired to make (not think about) more weird stuff and equally felt less pressure to feel the need to constantly create or put out things
Vsauce - Did People Used To Look Older?
Vsauce is a YouTube institution who puts out videos so rarely and unexpectedly that each one feels like a special treat. It's hard to explain the appeal of his videos, but if I was to describe them, I would say, "It's just a weird guy saying a lot of science stuff in a bizarre way that continually blows your mind." Every time I watch one of his videos, it's all I talk about to people I meet, relevant to the conversation or not. While not a direct inspiration to my work, Vsauce forces me to think in new ways and reframe my understanding of the world.
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Anyway, that's all from me this month. Thanks very much for reading, check out any of those things if they take your fancy, and please send me anything you think I would enjoy.
Fred
p.s. This newsletter's image was generated by Dalle-2 with the prompt "Imagine the Dawn of Everything with Hideous Men making older hard drives."
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My Website: https://www.fredwordie.com
My Book: https://www.bigdatagirl.com
My VC: https://ventually.xyz