paradeiser | how to be a lichen | hoick! | from nothing, everything | mapping bob dylan’s mind | sesiones gelatina | heavy water

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Subscribe here for more 🫥✨The Nexialist #0251 paradeiser | how to be a lichen | hoick! | from nothing, everything | mapping bob dylan’s mind | sesiones gelatina | heavy water Rodrigo Turra Nov 13   READ IN APP   welcome to your weekly cyber-schnitzel with a side of brainsparks, the nexialist hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. i’m back to amsterdam and had such a beautiful time in vienna (i’m trying to get into the habit of documenting my trips as tips, so here they are). the city is atunning, the food is delicious, the weather was great. thank you for all the messages after last week’s milestone! i’m grateful for all the nexialist readers, lurkers, browsers and subscribers. now, to this week’s nexialist, mixing new words, philosophy, cultural analysis and some artists. i hope you enjoy! 🫀✨ —Rodrigo Turra 🙏🏻the nexialist is a free newsletter, but consider going paid (or a one-time contribution) if you find this content useful for your life, soul or work. or invite me for a collab. read more at the bottom of this e-mail ✨ Upgrade to paid 1 year ago » 🏷️✨The Nexialist #0199 : urbanity | sweet charity | is the love song dying? | quantitative validation | nexus | cybernetics | a life without labels 2 years ago » 💿✨The Nexialist #0147 : the beauty of degraded media | ab.solve | heaven knows | la_original.mp3 | speak-o-phone | oralitura | ai pin | best inventions of 2023 | future creatives report | life trends 2024 3 years ago » 🍆✨The Nexialist #0095 : the porn conversation | how tech is reshaping male masturbation | the origin of war | dreamer | strong | softness as a technology | straight men kissing | estás buenísimo | how qatar bought the world 4 years ago » 🌬✨The Nexialist #0045 : Eroticism in Hard Times | Aphantasia | Onlyfans ft. Museums | Pompeii Erotica | Army of Lovers | World Wide Wood | Four C-words | Ideas Report 2021 | New Shapes | Opening Doors & Open Spaces Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️ 🍅paradeiser @austria_inmalaysia Austrian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur on Instagram: "Learn Austrian … i loved to learn that in austrian german, another way to call tomato (tomate) is paradeiser: from paradise apple (paradiesapfel). the fruit was brought to the old world from latin-america. also, for potato (which also came from the new world) they use the standard german kartoffel, but also erdäpfel, translated as ‘earth apple’ — similar to the dutch word aardappel. apple obsessed much? brainsparks: pitanga aka surinam cherry (tn#109), history of popcorn (tn#137), tomato vs potato europe (tn#235), warmer climate, spiciers food (tn#145), snobbery vs. spicy (tn#193) 🪵how to be a lichen maria popova’s newsletter, the marginalian (fka brain pickings), is one of my first newsletter obsessions, and has been a great inspiration for the nexialist (she’s been impressively writing it since 2006!). well, this title caught my attention and it was such a joy to read, as i had no idea lichens are such complex creatures. did you know that “lichens are part algae and part fungus, with a sprinkling a bacteria — three kingdoms of life in a single organism, not warring for dominance but working together to make it one of the most resilient life-forms in nature and a keystone of many ecosystems.” maria has an obsession with them, and has collected and and photographed lichen from all over the world, and shares some life-lessons she learned along the way. this quote also hit me hard: anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. maria closes the post with a poem by elizabeth bishop, written for the love of her life lota de macedo soares, a well-known brazilian architect and landscape designer. i learned about their story last year in an episode of radio novelo apresenta, so it had an extra layer of loveliness. here are the titles of each learning, go read the full text: Contain multitudes without inner conflict. Roots are overrated — invent other structures of belonging. Cultivate healthy attachment that doesn’t syphon the energy of the other. Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of before. When you can’t change your situation, change your attitude. Know that you don’t need a partner to fulfill your life. Leave the world better than you found it. Have great patience with the arc of your life. Become a living poem. brainsparks: de-capitalizing language (tn#227), fantastic fungi (tn#31), designing an economy like an ecologist (tn#112), ask nature (tn#86), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126), language maps (tn#20), sad and pale paper (tn#113), seedless fruit: futureless tech (tn#198), inner rewilding (tn#164) 🥊hoick! “All of my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced to this one: study the modes of the media, in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, non-verbal realms for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purpose.” NAEB Report, 1960 learned a couple of new words in this piece by andrew mcluhan: “Marshall McLuhan’s Top Recommendation - “Hoick!” (McLuhan’s word of advice on how to escape the media maelstrom.)” hoick is like a yank, like an abrupt pulling. maesltrom: “a powerful often violent whirlpool sucking in objects within a given radius.” andrew mcluhan walks us through the “the medium is the message” maxim, comparing it to eintein’s (e=mc2) and the shift to understanding media as an environment. quite an insightful read. “Any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given material embodiment, tends to create a new environment. This is as true of clothing as of speech, or script, or wheel. As an environment it is imperceptible except in terms of its content. That is, all that’s seen or noticed is the old environment. But the effects of the environment in altering the entire character of human sensibility and sensory ratios is ignored.” -Marshall McLuhan - ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,’ 1965 braindparks: critic of technology (tn#121), media & machines (tn#224), algorithmic condition (tn#219)), intention economy (tn#209), dopamine culture (tn#164), ontological design (tn#3), superindustry of the imaginary (tn#28), hyperindustry of the atificial imaginary (tn#118), fracking eyeballs (tn#150), nexus (tn#199), plantations, computers, industrial control (tn#125) 🫥from nothing, everything Dimas Henkes shared this link and i’ve been saving it for later. from robert rauschenberg’s white paintings (1951), to john cage’s 1952 compositio 4’33” which staged 4 minutes and 33 seconds to silence, we go on a journey of how the idea of nothing pushes the limits of thought and influences art, philosophy and science. it’s a great philosophical/linguistic text which left me equally confused and inspired. Is there a way to speak or even to think of nothing without making it something, betraying its character as nonexistent? The idea of nothing pushes at the limits of thought and language, demanding new modes of analysis and expression. Moreover, if nothing is something, that would seem to complicate the definition of ‘something’ as an entity that really exists in the world. And if it is not something, then what ‘is’ it? A paradoxical question if there ever was one. More than just a linguistic puzzle, the idea that ‘nothing exists’ challenges our understanding of existence itself and spurs more nuanced theories of reality. To speak of nothing raises questions about everything. One can see why philosophers and artists alike have been drawn to it.brainsparks: atypography, anti-design, nihilism, ontological design, minimalism. brainsparks: linear opposites or closely related? (tn#126), the art of saying nothing (tn#141) 🎸mapping bob dylan’s mind another gem from aeon, a beautiful application of LLMs/gen ai: finding patterns in a body of work, in this case, bob dylan’s discography from 1962 to 2012. personally, i’m not super familiar with bob dylan’s work, but i enjoyed the explanation of the methodology and i felt guided through the analysis. Figure 2 below makes the changes across time unmistakable: Dylan’s lyrics move from a near balance of literal and metaphorical expression in the 1960s, to a catalogue where metaphor steadily takes the lead. In the 1960s, about 60 per cent of edges are metaphorical and 40 per cent literal. By the 1980s, metaphor pushes past two-thirds. By the 2010s, it swells beyond 75 per cent, leaving literal connections at less than a quarter. The trend is clear: across six decades, Dylan’s writing grows more figurative, his metaphors crowding out the plainspoken. Critics had long sensed that Dylan grew more oblique, but the AI lets us put a number on it: metaphor’s share climbs 1–2 percentage points per album, a change too gradual for the naked eye to track. brainsparks: more political music? (tn#249), is the love song dying? (tn#199), tiktok killed the radio star (tn#73), same gender lyrics (tn#27), identifying generation music gaps (tn#2), madonna-ology (tn#211) 🇦🇷sesiones gelatina i brought this argentinean singer here, marilina bertoldi, a few months ago. recently, youtube recommended me this live performance of this and other songs and i’m obsessed. (today’s gif was taken from another video, de caza, which i also recommend) brainsparks: autoestima (tn#222), crisis (tn#211), post-punk (tn#84), countercultures x counter-futures (tn#10) 💦heavy water now, this was also suggested by youtube and i loved it, very depeche. based in detroit, JH-X9 takes us back to the 80s. love the the synth, the vibe, the outfits, the blasé vibe. i’m into it. brainsparks: electronic body music, post-punk (tn#84), fade to gray (tn#66), mistress violet (tn#31) see you next week, lichens 🫀✨ 🫀✨thank you for reading The Nexialist. This post is public, so feel free to share these brainsparks 🧠✨ Share ❓Wait, what is a Nexialist? 🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot. 💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻 🔌Let’s Collab? I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist.  I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below: thenexialist.xyz You're currently a free subscriber to The Nexialist. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid   Share     Like Comment Restack   © 2025 Rodrigo Turra Amsterdam Unsubscribe