No stranger to e-moluments and general rentiership, the Trump Syndicate is making further furrows into dodgy cryptocurrencies not only with his own memecoin, of which a thick wallet of can buy a seat at the table but now working with congress and the Federal Trade Commission to legitimise the stable coin market, having raised millions of actual fiat cash from tokens as campaign donations as well as through the family’s own spurious ventures. Stable coins, for the individual who famously bankrupted Atlantic City, are essentially casino chips, that one can purchase from the cashier at a fixed rate and in theory redeem them back at the same rate, no matter how much time and exchange fluctuations have occurred in the interim—in order to essentially gamble in crypto market, like one’s chips retaining their value, within the venue at any case. The holder of the stable coin is left holding the bag, however, since it is a trading market and it is not always possible to find a buyer to convert back into dollars at the same exchange rate of one-to-one. In order to sustain value during shocks to the global currencies, the dollars, euro, yen or renmibi are invested—usually in something safe like government bonds—with the stable coin backers reaping any additional profit and shielding themselves from losses, the theoretical store of wealth not generating any added value for the purchaser themselves, unlike earned interest or appreciating equity. Though barriers to entry are low as with any digital product, saturation means that its a high bar to build any significant network, with the Trumps adding this instrument to their basket of IOUs.
Tuesday, 29 April 2025
very stable genius (12. 423)
Saturday, 26 April 2025
9x9 (12. 412)
crytophasia: eye-witnesses to an accident, twins speaking in unison yield insights about language acquisition
keep your cool: a 1967 garage rock number appropriate for our times by Terry and the Chain Reaction
swiss pavilion: the country’s contribution to the Osaka Expo evokes the spirit of the original venue—see previously here and here
all dams are temporary: an interesting look at the limitations of hydrological regimes
universi dominici gregis: the faithful and world leaders gather at the Vatican for the pontiff’s funeral
buying access: Trump offers largest holders of his meme coin exclusive dinner date
hilma’s ghost: a monumental glass mosaic installed in New York’s Grand Central Station—in homage to the mystic artist
on the corner: Myles Davis’ rock and funk, at first panned but now considered a masterpiece
rampant pedantry: an overview of prescriptivism and hyper-correction
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica), a massive gallery of Star Trek images plus ancient scrolls deciphered with the help of AI
seven years ago: Brutalist Tetris, Macron addresses the US congress, the mythological namesakes of the Chinese lunar programme plus conspicuous consumption and the Diderot effect
eight years ago: Japanese manhole covers, journalism from Wikipedia, more links to enjoy, the Turkish-Syrian border, a Nazi-era bronze back on display plus more persuasive maps
nine years ago: bat nurse, the Sykes-Picot agreement, US tax-havens plus cataclysmic anniversaries (caution flashing image)
ten years ago: American founding fables
Sunday, 16 February 2025
12x12 (12. 237)
little sisyphus: a challenging NES-style side-scrolling game—see previously—via Waxy
behind every robot that turns evil there’s an engineer that installed red diodes in its eyes in anticipation: Meta wants to create AI powered robots to do your chores
quipu: the largest known superstructure in the Cosmos, named for the corded knot accounting of the ancient Inca culture—via Strange Company
parataxis: storytelling loves a list
i will say this only once: John J Hoare responds to a video take-down notice for reposting an old clip—that suggests that YouTube is focused on hate speech against Nazis

pump and dump: nothing to see here, just another perfectly normal president pulling the rug out from under his country with a memecoin
return to forever: Chick Corea and friends at the forty-third Jazzaldia festival
stairwell of the quarter: more on the design efficiency of alternating tread stairs
nanook of the north: Robert J Falherty’s 1922 documentary on the Inuit
how many department of government efficiency employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb: a look at DOGE at work—via Nag on the Lake
windows, icons, menus, pointers: a cursor dance party—via Pasa Bon!
Thursday, 13 February 2025
we’re back—can we talk? (12. 230)
Enron, the energy and commodities company whose business model was based on internal fraud and perpetrated one of the biggest bankruptcies at that time has been cannibalised, zombified—the now scandalised logo created by Paul Rand (previously), the last he designed—has been somewhat resurrected with its long lifeless website reanimated and under new management taking ownership of its past transgressions and breaches of trust and promising sustainable growth going forward. Rolling out its first new suite of products (surely there are bundled) in twenty years, it is introducing the Enron Egg, a micro nuclear reactor that can power a home for a decade—and the crypto token $ENRON, which after reaching a market cap of seven hundred million has already gone through one pump-and-dump cycle. More at the links above.
Sunday, 19 January 2025
stablecoin (12. 195)
Whilst throughout history, one official currency has worked to solidify trust and confidence during periods of relative peace and a strong central authority, emperors would often mint their own coinage during times of upheaval and civil unrest with fortune and the passage of time being the ultimate arbiter of valuation and propagation. Hours before his inauguration for inexplicably a second term, the family crime syndicate launched $TRUMP, a memecoin that quickly rose to a market cap of some seven billion dollars fuelled by speculative investment. Despite a rudimentary, dodgy landing-page offering the crypto-currency for sale and lack of clarity as to the purpose of the token which almost definitely forebodes the bait-and-switch tactic of most of these operations once the purported value evaporates. A former critic of cryptocurrencies, calling Bitcoin an outright “scam,” Trump has come to embrace them as the tech sector broligarchs embraced his campaign. This pre-market development comes on the eve of the term of the Biden administration, having passed and enacted progressive policies that many millions have hung their hopes and fears to over a chance that we might globally advance the urgent fight to halt the climate catastrophe or that America could model ideals of equity and project democratic respect for national sovereignty but all those positions will be clawed back, with only some vapid and hollow magic beans as a consolation.
Thursday, 9 January 2025
brave little toaster (12. 160)
Friday, 29 November 2024
overwintered (12. 041)
Hardly redemptive though having read about municipalities getting dual-use out of the massive amounts of energy expended on bitcoin mining before, it took me a couple of readings to get how this news article was a “bit too on the nose,” about how a Dutch tulip farmer was offsetting their heating costs by hosting crypto servers in the greenhouse. We realised however reading the completely unironic reportage that it was a very apt commentary on the original mania, speculative bubble (see also) albeit now a relatively benign one is being fuelled by one in the series of benighted ventures.
Saturday, 23 November 2024
high concept (12. 024)
Though I would too defend Maurizio Cattelan piece of a banana duct-taped to a wall as legitimate art in the route of Duchamp or Warhol (and not an object with actual permanence like the hyper-realistic and satirical sculptures in the artist’s repertoire but rather a perishable piece of fruit and a roll of duct tape that need replacing with a certificate of authenticity and instructions on how to display the work—see also), the sale of a third edition (the first two were acquired by museums for a more reasonable sum of one-hundred and twenty thousand dollars) to an entrepreneur for just over six-million— well over its million dollar reserve price and paid in Bitcoin, one of the only lots for which the auction house would accept payment in that form—makes me think that the resurrection of the Trump regime, for all the obvious nefariousness, was also a vehicle to bring back the grift of crypto and NFTs. The main element of the work was purchased the morning of the auction from a local fruit vendor for 35¢, appreciating in value fifteen-million fold, by the end of the day. The two other copies were eaten while on exhibitions, as will this one, whose new owner is happy about the portable nature of the work that could be mounted anywhere.
synchronoptica
one year ago: an apparent breakthrough in general artificial intelligence (with synchronoptica) plus a counter-culture Thanksgiving tradition
seven years ago: more Thanksgiving greetings
eight years ago: another pause for Turkey Day
nine years ago: recommended gift catalogues
ten years ago: poetry and language
Thursday, 5 September 2024
doge (11. 817)
Trump has announced that Elon Musk has agreed to head a commission for his potential administration, named the Department of Government Efficiency in reference to Musk’s favoured meme-based cryptocurrency, tasked with reducing US federal spending and the deficit. Musk’s businesses not only benefit from government subsidies and also counts NASA, the Pentagon and several intelligence agencies among his direct clients, which raises the spectre of a conflict of interest in line with Trump’s imperial presidency. Musk was formerly a member of a White House advisory council but resigned in protest in 2017 after the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, although has recently recanted that decision, saying the climate catastrophe was not in need of immediate attention and has softened his opinions of the petroleum industry.
Friday, 16 August 2024
anti-mimesis (11. 771)


These pictures uncannily prevision the now acquainted superfluidity, reduplication, skewed perspectives, a-historicity, attention-grabbing and portrait-studio aesthetic that’s a buggy feature of computer-made art. What do you think it means that this thinking is becoming our default reaction? A picture broadly does not seem worth a thousand words any longer. Much more at the links above.
synchronoptica
one year ago: greenlighted (with synchronoptica)
seven years ago: Trump’s very fine people plus manipulative social media
eight years ago: the stave church of Goslar, early hominids and tolerance for smoke, safety and Helvetica Man plus assorted links worth revisiting
nine years ago: rent parties plus more links to enjoy
ten years ago: writers protest against the book market, the future of shopping plus the unfair labelling of weeds
Thursday, 18 July 2024
skynet (11. 700)
With the snowclone of a slogan “Make America First in AI” that appropriately spells out “mafia,” as I originally only suspected that Silicon Valley’s recent rally behind Trump was mostly an attempt to revitalise cryptocurrencies as a legitimate and safe store of wealth for tumultuous times, Trump’s draft executive order to eliminate burdensome regulations on development of artificial intelligence technology and military applications—described as a new “Manhattan Project” and scuttling ethical and safety-testing requirements for autonomous weapons—to ensure US dominance in the field is a worrying shift in policy. While the capabilities of AI as they currently stand are far from proven, the potential for a robot holocaust was not my first pick as existential threat that a second term would pose for the world, leaning towards either a cascading environmental collapse, a re-polarised geopolitical landscape or American irrelevance and dictatorship first and foremost. Furthermore, Trump’s vice-presidential pick as a former venture capitalist has the same mindset as the tech utopianists and accelerationists and is a vocal opponent of government interference, which if the technology realises its potential, would be wholly ungovernable.
synchronoptica
one year ago: Trump under to investigation (with synchronoptica)
nine years ago: typewriter...tip, tip, tip
eleven years ago: bad banks
twelve years ago: baubles and market bubbles
thirteen years ago: a mosquito-plagued campsite
Wednesday, 5 June 2024
8x8 (11. 608)
i’m too busy helping plot world domination to bother with such run-of-the-mill liberal brainwashing: a day in the life of Mister Anthony Fauci, according to one Congressional representative
syllabus: a reading list spanning nine-decades—via Messy Nessy Chic

foreign accent: TWA’s 1968 campaign to introduce cosmopolitan flair for US domestic flights
zoonotic: cross-species viral transmission cases is an ominous warning for the public health community—see previously
the rot-com bubble: the deterioration of tech began with iterative, virtual fetishes—starting with the gig-economy, moving on to crypto, NFTs, the metaverse and now AI, substitutes and replacements that no one asked for
anagnosology: the science of reading from Alie Ward
look at me, i’m mtg, lousy with stupidity: one of the latest from Randy Rainbow
one year ago: The Truman Show (1988) plus a follow-up on an Italian archaeological discovery
two years ago: Uncle Albert (1971) plus a selection of British tongue-twisters
three years ago: a preliminary report of the disease that would become known as AIDS (1981), St Boniface, a sophisticated place name generator plus disco lessons
four years ago: generative copy, assorted links to revisit, a zany public service campaign plus a classic from Crash-Test Dummies
five years ago: US national park typography, the palette of dying coral plus clearing up space junk
Sunday, 26 May 2024
much sad (11. 584)
Already having to deal with the loss of Grumpy Cat in 2019 and encountering a feline with similar markings, it was a bit mournful to mark the passing of the Shiba Inu named Kabosu—albeit at the ripe and respectable old age of eighteen human years and suffering from various rather chronic ailments (such is the toll of an unnaturally long life)—who was recruited into internet celebrity and launched numerous memes as Doge and a crypto currency that has generated real value for some despite its parody origins.
Sunday, 5 May 2024
the santilli film (11. 541)
First screened to invited members of the press and UFO researchers on this day in 1995, packaged and
produced by various media outlets within months and broadcast world wide with several encores and iterations, the pseudo-documentary by British entrepreneur Ray Santilli, despite its poor quality, grainy black-and-white footage and overall incredulity, became a cultural phenomenon and garnering high-ratings, an amateur video likely subjected to as much public scrutiny and debate since the release of the Zapruder film, according to some monitoring the sensation. Purported to show the postmortem conducted on an extraterrestrial crew member found in the wreckage of the Roswell Incident, a military cameraman leaked the footage from 1947 to the producer and promoter. Ahead of a 2006 feature comedy (of the same name) lampooning the infamous hoax, Santilli recanted, admitting it was a fabrication though maintaining it was a “re-creation” inspired by true events and a lost tape. The home video itself was sold as an NFT in May 2021 with the physical master-copy apparently destroyed.
one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus a classic from The Stranglers
two years ago: more on defining the metre plus the 1984 EuroVision winner
three years ago: your daily demon: Buer, malingering on the metric system plus a modest proposal for solving resource scarcity from 1983
four years ago: Lusophone Culture Day, a view of the village, artist Howard Arkley, more on the unwritten rules of English plus a green office block in Dรผsseldorf
six years ago: the material properties of silk plus self-destructing emails
Friday, 16 February 2024
world simulators (11. 353)
Although trialled previously by other platforms to varying success, via Waxy, the new text-to-video generation models from OpenAI’s Sora does seem like prising open another Pandora’s Box. Producing rather crisp and wholly convincing clips up to a minute in length from prompts and instructions, a gallery of samples have been released and for safety and further testing, the vignettes were made by user’s within the company with the participation of a select few artists and cinematographers to assess its strengths and weaknesses. Currently there are no plans to release it to the public and given the pace of change, will probably be impressive for a very short amount of time, though checking out the videos I cannot believe what I’m seeing. Building from adversarial static that transforms over successive steps, the neural network, named after the Japanese word for sky to express its limitless potential, can also extend existing footage forward and backward in time and replace missing frames. The project however has shown difficulty with continuity, the physics of causality and knowing right from left.
synchronoptica
one year ago: the tomb of Tutankhamun (1923) plus assorted links to revisit
two years ago: BBS (1978), the moon of Uranus, traditional Japanese chess plus The Simpsons Sing the Blues (1991)
three years ago: more links to enjoy, another North Korean holiday plus Ladybug Ladybug (1963)
four years ago: jamming with barcodes
five years ago: imperial America, more links worth the revisit plus night-mode
Sunday, 14 January 2024
stepford authors (11. 265)
We really were in agreement with this comparison of AI plagiarism to the 1975 horror film premising that the human wives of Stepford, Connecticut are having their identities transferred to more able cyborg replicas (to excel at household chores, cooking, sexual acts) without all the shrewish, independent aspects of their personalities that make the slightest bit objectionable to their husbands, having dispatched their biological templates and replacing them. Substituting a human writer with a synthetic one, for the publisher—or any employer for that matter—strikes one as far less bothersome. Meanwhile, the tech giants’ behind large language models arguments for “fair-use,” that machines are digesting and learning from the written word in the same way human readers do and not merely copying them is keeping lawsuits at bay within a legal-framework wholly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with wholesale violation and lacking attributions—insufficient to even form a rigorous standard to hold the robots to.
one year ago: the Human Be-In (1967), Davy Jones changes his professional name (1966), ten years of Question Hound plus assorted links worth revisiting
two years ago: Davie Bowie’s Low (1977), a short by Gรฉrald Frydman plus training an AI on vintage Batman comics
three years ago: a celebration of donkeys, Trump’s second impeachment, Laocoรถn, the US Congress’ electronic voting machines, marijuana and the munchies, premium pluralisation plus more on snail compasses
four years ago: forty-five-plus years of Fresh Air, US-Iranian relations, for America, separation of Church and State is becoming blurred plus Germany’s Un-Word of the Year
five years ago: pop-up poetry, view from a bus plus Cherubrashka
Tuesday, 19 December 2023
9x9 (11. 196)
mister jingeling: a dozen, beloved department store Christmas characters—see also—via Miss Cellania
bubblenomics: pondering the consequences of when AI goes the way of crypto and NFTs

a winter’s tale: selected readings of Christmas ghost stories—via Things Magazine
the waitresses: the cynical anti-holiday hit Christmas Wrapping that became a festive classic
infinite jukebox: a clever AI application that extends songs forever
high ground: study of the competition for space dominance between the US and China suggests America occupy Lagrange points to counter malign ambitions
52 snippets: facts gleaned from economics and finance from the past twelve months
snoopy come home: Gen Z rediscovers and identifies with the Peanuts’ character
Saturday, 2 December 2023
duck or rabbit (11. 157)
Though this gallery of visual anagrams enhanced by AI and part of a school thesis—via the always engaging Web Curios—relies on many of the familiar tropes of optical illusions, like Einstein-Monroe transformations, reversals, skewed perspective and textual ambigrams, the collection of dynamic paintings and sketches built with diffusion models that one can tweak and re-code to create works of one’s own is pretty spectacular. We agree, moreover with the editorial that one should spend a moment pouring over these examples—as considering the pace of change, the magic is only guaranteed for a limited amount of time.
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links to revisit, an unsuccessful space opera, the US Taiwan-Relations Act, celebrity anagrams plus Planet Pizza
two years ago: Angela Merkel steps down
three years ago: Wonder Woman first appears in animated form, Emil and the Detectives (1931), CBC’s Larry Logo plus Trump’s daughter ostracised
four years ago: the University of Leipzig (1409) plus outrage and polling
five years ago: more links to enjoy, Bohemian Hanukkah plus UPA animation studios
Wednesday, 29 November 2023
remainds of the day (11. 149)
The three-storey mural by Banksy critical of UK Brexit policies from 2017 executed on an old, condemned property in Dover has been demolished along with the building. Efforts were made to salvage elements like the stars and stencils and a team using LiDAR and photogrammetry technologies was commission to make a three-dimensional scan of the art work earlier in the year—capturing a digital facsimile of the physical wall and paint, but it is unclear whether these attempts at conservation were successful or if the digital reproduction good, with the artist’s consent, be recreated elsewhere.
Saturday, 4 November 2023
hypermarket (11. 095)
Via the always excellent Web Curios, we’re informed of an interesting though limited time campaign (now
synchronoptica
one year ago: the discovery of King Tut’s tomb (1922) plus assorted links to revisit
two years ago: haikus on the Periodic Table plus a competition to replace Laocoön’s lost arm
three years ago: the folk etymologies of the hangover
four years ago: a protest rally and ultimatum in East Berlin, Pigovian subsidies plus the science of voting
five years ago: back in the scent lab, a love letter to the US Library of Congress plus more links to enjoy