Quinque the First
Five Links to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them (each week)
I’ve had a modest uptick in subscribers over the past few weeks
and I've been exploring anxiously pondering how to deliver more value, more often, more quickly to my subscribers (hey where have I heard that idea before?).
It’s incredible that in this Great Online Game there are not insignificant amounts of people opting in to allocate a piece of their finite time on this blue marble to reading my thoughts.
Accordingly, I want to return back something more valuable than just sporadically posting stream of consciousness admonitions (also there’s an ammunition joke in here somewhere)
FLASH CUT TO: Quinque
It hit me around hour 6 of Wii Shop Bossa Nova 1 Hour yesterday that I look at links all week.
Like I do work and stuff, but also I read, watch, and think about mountains of content.
This may be obvious given the meme density of my writing, but I haven’t really thought about that in a while.
Ostensibly, I do this as part of my thesis on Creators and sure I'm saving some of the more useful ones to revisit later like a wishfully monkish squirrel, but mostly I just read and incorporate these links into my implicit knowledge base - then cast them aside forever.
That (partially) stops now!
I'm gonna share the things I find that seem pretty credible, but to be honest they're all going to exist in the bucket of "This Seems Probably True, but Caveat Emptor".
The internet is more fun that way.
Each link will be interesting though… yet I reserve the right that anything you find unfunny or boring is actually a deliberately elaborate comedic experiment that you aren’t equipped to enjoy yet, but your kids are gonna love it.
Of course, this is partially inspired by the GOATs Tyler Cowen, Packy McCormick, and FizzBuzz boldly pioneering the hard-hitting genre of listicles, but I’m going to focus on curating things that I believe are a bit… off the beaten path.
And may the Bohemian Grove Owl curse me if I shill a vanilla topic du jour link.
And there will be 5 of them every time I post.
So.
Quinque.
(Quinque means 5 in Latin)
Why Quinque?
I just like it…
and there’s not enough Q words in common parlance.
Plus for me the Latin evokes a bifurcated mental image of every left leaning reader of mine slightly uneasy at the intrusive thought that I might secretly be a Stoic bro and every right leaning reader of mine gradually comprehending the depths of my liberalist Catfishing…
And honestly “Freedom is Goodness” chaotic alignments really make me laugh so here we are 🫡
Let’s see what the crab pots pulled in today!
The List
Turns out you can’t! 🤷
So technically you’re simul-reading both “Five” and “The Five” right now 😩
Fascinating, but basically unwatched English dub of Russian “100 Years of Design History Series”
I signed up for a niche SAAS Goals Tracking app Timestripe because I really like how they think about connecting goals across time horizons (I’ll do a post on this in the future probably maybe) and while it’s barely supported by the (you guessed it) Russian core team there’s a lot of interesting links I wouldn’t normally find as an American.
I’m working through one of these short videos a day - which is how the app recommends you consume them - and frankly am learning a lot about design history, which admittedly I know nothing about. Lots of pretty visuals and aesthetic thinking about form and function!
Composable, Creator Driven Content Prototype (with guns)
I care about the Creator economy.
Basically, I think it gets much bigger much faster than is predicted (mostly due to COVID effectively creating an American UBI and showing people they can claw back TFP driven lost wages through less effort at work) so I’m always on the lookout for innovations in this sector.
This video is one.
I’ve been following this equities analyst turned Call of Duty streamer with 3M total YouTube subscribers for almost a decade now and have seen his content evolve multiple times. Activision recently released custom online matches and Stonemountain64 has been cranking out hours of unique, scenario driven content by bringing his own community onto the stream to play together (both alongside and against). Anyone familiar with the Web3 ecosystem knows the promise of sharing composable power with Creators and Stone is already bringing that thesis to life in the current era.
Ancient Egyptian Interpretation of Depression
"I feel my limbs heavy, I no longer know my own body,
my eyes decline, my ears harden, my voice is speechless.
Should the Master Physician come to me?
My heart is not revived by their medicine.”
Connections across spacetime always fascinate me.
Reid Hoffman’s Chief of Staff/Biographer Self Examination of his Writing Process
This one is borderline normal, but I think straddles the razor edge between compelling and cringe well. Ben Casnocha writes about actually cowriting “The Startup of You” as Reid Hoffman’s Chief of Staff and does a convincing job recreating the hard parts of doing hard things - crucially explaining how “the key skill is managing the self-disappointment bordering on self-loathing that can overpower other emotions through the long, hard slog.” (same)
I linked to the specific part of a much longer essay about a lot of other interesting things
How are we feeling, gang?
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