Curated chaos - vol.1
Ideas and images for you to plant in your thought orchard.
Hell. Blummin. O.
It’s me again.
In between my longer essay-style posts, I’ll be doing some shorter link-dumps. Sometimes they’ll have a clear theme, often they won’t.
Today is volume 1 in this intermittent series.
Tabs for you to open and maybe even look at, eventually 👇
TextFX
This is a nifty little set of tools from Google “for rappers, writers and wordsmiths.” Using AI (obviously), it’ll whip up similes on demand, break words into similar sounding phrases, find connections between concepts, and more. Go have a play!
Story of Flowers
A gorgeous, short animation meditating on humans’ relationship with flowers. The music and sound design gives it a delightfully off-kilter feel.
Scientists recorded a Pink Floyd song from patients’ brain waves
Spoiler: It sounds rubbish. But the idea behind this experiment is pretty mind-blowing, and the implications for people with disabilities are exciting.
The lost tarot deck of surrealist Leonora Carrington
Check out these beautiful hand-painted tarot cards from 1955. If you're new to this artist (like me), “her oeuvre — composed of paintings, fiction, theatrical costumes, and more — paraded strange, indelible marvels and embodied her interests in mythology, alchemy, and the occult.”
The weird are destined to change the world
When I read George Monbiot’s Captive State as a teenager, I knew this was a guy to pay attention to. He’s been one of the few consistent voices in the UK media talking about environmental issues and holding power to account during my lifetime. This passionate speech from 2019 pairs beautifully with last week’s post, Destined for weirdness.
That’s it for today. I’m off for a week in the Pembrokeshire countryside, via the World Bog Snorkelling Championships.
Catch you on the other side!