#Dante's fireside chats

[out-of-the-deep-and-into-the-sky]

Those are the first two stories in the series off short stories that will each feature a different central character related to the larger project I mentioned in the teaser. I’m hoping to experiment with different writing styles with each of these stories, and I’m excited to show you all what I have in store!

[candied-marlboro]

books! books! books!

reading is one of the things I really enjoy. so here’s a list of some books I personally adore. hope it’ll be useful for someone! 

novels with mental disorders theme

“The Bell Jar” Sylvia Plath

“Lolita” Vladimir Nabokov

“Veronika Decides to Die” Paulo Coelho

“She's Come Undone” Wally Lamb

“Sharp Objects” Gillian Flynn

“The Virgin Suicide” Jeffrey Eugenides

“Girl, Interrupted” Susanna Kaysen

“The Minds of Billy Milligan” Daniel Keyes

“The Girls” Emma Cline

“Norvegian Wood” Haruki Murakami

“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” Stephen Chbosky

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” Ken Kesey

“White Oleander” J. Fitch

“How I Live Now” Meg Rosoff

novels and thrillers about serial killers/ psychopathy

“Zodiac” Robert Graysmith

“Psycho” Robert Bloch

“American Psycho” Bret Easton Ellis

“The Collector” John Fowles

“A Clockwork Orange” Anthony Burgess

“Columbine” Dave Cullen

“Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders” Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry

“The Stranger Beside Me” Ann Rule

classics 

“The Outsiders” S. E. Hinton

“No Exit” Jean-Paul Sartre

“Catcher in the Rye” J.D. Salinger

“The Quiet American” and “Our Man in Havana” Graham Greene

“The Stranger” Albert Camus

“Hotel” Arthur Hailey

“On the Road” Jack Kerouac

“Catch-22” Joseph Heller

“Play It As It Lays” Joan Didion

“A Life” Guy de Maupassant

“Room at the Top” John Braine

“Candide” Voltaire

“The Divine Comedy” Dante Alighieri

“Dangerous Liaisons” Choderlos de Laclos

“The Scarlet Letter” Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The Mystery of Edwin Drood” Charles Dickens

“The Picture of Dorian Gray” Oscar Wilde

“The Sorrows of Young Werther” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Letters to a Young Poet” Rainer Maria Rilke

“Hello Sadness”, “Sunlight on Cold Water” Françoise Sagan

“Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented” Thomas Hardy

“Crime and Punishment” Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The Painted Veil” Somerset Maugham

“Three Comrades” Erich Maria Remarque

horror/gothic

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle” Shirley Jackson

“Flowers in the Attic” V.C. Andrews

“Dracula” Bram Stoker

“It”, “Joyland”, “Misery” and “Cujo” Stephen King

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Washington Irving

“Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” Mary Shelley

“The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” Robert Louis Stevenson

Everything by Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft

poetry

“You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense”, “Love is a Dog from Hell” Charles Bukowski

“Ariel” Sylvia Plath

“The Drunken Boat" Arthur Rimbaud

“A Season in Hell” Arthur Rimbaud

“The Flowers of Evil” Charles Pierre Baudelaire

Everything by John Keats, William Shakespeare, George Gordon Byron, Robert Frost

memoires

“The Journals of Sylvia Plath” Ted Hughes

“Autobiography” Morrissey

“Life” Keith Richards

“Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain” Danny Goldberg

“Ten Days in a Mad-House” Nellie Bly

The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

[clickstarter]

What happened to Clubhouse?

Real time conversions via audio in an app that brought together the general public with the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and a swag of celebrities who couldn’t wait to get on top of the next big digital thing in the middle of a global pandemic.

So what went wrong?

1. Live audio is a feature, not an app

2. Marketers ruin everything

3. Something else was the next big thing

Live audio wasn’t new, innovative, or even wanted

While 30 million people flocked to Clubhouse, today you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a couple of million people on it now. And they’re not very active anymore. And one main reason is that what Clubhouse did wasn’t anything new.

It was essentially talkback radio through your phone. Not exactly ground-breaking. Not that any of us saw it that way at the time. And to be fair, this app was pitched at a generation that hadn’t exactly been served by traditional talkback radio that tended to be aimed at angry, ageing, middle class white men who felt marginalised by a changing society.

As Clubhouse gained in popularity, other platforms started rolling out their own live audio features. First there were the copycat apps like Fireside and Stereo. Then Twitter added live audio. And Facebook soon announced they would do the same. And then LinkedIn, probably the one network that could really benefit from this, jumped on board.

By this time, Clubhouse fatigue was starting to set in on the early adopters. If you weren’t online when something compelling happened, you missed out. If you weren’t in the California, New York or London time zones, you missed a lot. By the time sun was shining over Australia, all the best stuff was over and done. At least talkback radio records their highlight for podcasts. Clubhouse was 100% here today at 1pm and gone by 2pm.

The features of Clubhouse became obstacles to its mass growth amongst everybody but marketers. And they, I believe became the true downfall of Clubhouse.

Marketers ruined Clubhouse (just like we ruin everything)

Facebook was a lot of fun back in the early days. Connecting with old friends, playing silly farm games with new friends, and watching funny videos. And then it became a business marketing platform and the ads that appeared felt a little too creepy to those of us who didn’t understand remarketing and contextual advertising.

While Clubhouse never quite reached the point of monetisation before it began to implode, it became overrun by Bitcoin bros, Influencers seeking fame and marketers trying to build their lists and sales funnels.

I hopped into Clubhouse hoping to offer fun chats about business growth challenges, idea collaboration and support for those struggling with some of the things I had skills in. I guess I was hoping to be something of an early small business influencer on the platform. But each time I’d open a room, other marketers, influencers and social media managers hoping to hock their wares would flood in and within a few minutes we’d have thirty experts and two question askers. It wasn’t fun for the listeners, the experts or me. After about a month of hopping on and off, looking for an opportunity to turn Clubhouse into something of a channel, I gave up. The land grab for popularity, rooms and clubs had descended into a “Who’s That” of get-rich-quick gurus, crystal-waving energy healers and motivational speakers quoting their own books.

The interesting conversations seemed too hard to find, the big rooms were too full of American accents and every third room seemed to be about how to make money on Clubhouse. It was a cesspool of spammers and scammers.

It turns out that something else was the next big thing

Clubhouse was not the next big thing we thought it might be. While it seemed perfectly pitched at a pandemic audience hungry for human connection, it fell from popularity very quickly. The universe hates a vacuum though, and those same people who flooded on to Clubhouse didn’t just disappear.

If you follow social platforms as closely as I do, you might have noticed that there was suddenly a rush of marketers and wannabe influencers back on to Instagram Reels which was really starting to pick up momentum on the heels of TikTok. And those same people were starting to pick up on the fledgling YouTube Shorts as well. Not that I think they are doing very well yet, but a million marketers who are hungry for something to replace their previous favourite platform must go somewhere and try something. So, it was back to short-form video. And that seems to be where they are staying for now.

Which begs the question… what’s next? There are some brave marketers who are heading for very niche networks in fandom (like gaming, pop culture and fantasy forums and apps) and while there is no obvious monetisation there just yet, they are trying out some cool stuff that is way out of my pay grade to understand just yet. There’s also a lot of moves into the idea of the “metaverse” which translates as something like virtual worlds. For those who remember Second Life, a similar concept called Soul has emerged from China where people are creating avatars and exploring “worlds” full of people with similar interests. It’s something that Facebook is exploring as well.

What does all this mean to the average Aussie small business? Not a whole lot yet. Things like fandom and metaverses are well beyond all but the most cashed up marketing agencies and big brands for now. But there’s still a lot of untapped potential in Instagram Reels, Stories and IGTV, a tonne of space to do creative things on TikTok and heaps of room on YouTube to be doing some very effective small business marketing.

Want to learn more about being the best small business marketer that you can be? Hit up the learn section or book your own guided session at clickstarter.com.au.

Dante St James is the founder of Clickstarter, a Facebook Blueprint Certified Lead Trainer, a Community Trainer with Facebook Australia, a digital advisor with Treeti Business Consulting, an accredited ASBAS Digital Solutions advisor and presenter, and the editor at The Small Marketer. You can watch free 1-hour webinars and grow your digital skills at Dante’s YouTube Channel.

[hodldrgn-blog]

New Post has been published on https://www.cryptomoonity.com/devcon-iv-a-welcome-dose-of-humanity/

Devcon IV: A Welcome Dose of Humanity

Devcon IV: A Welcome Dose of Humanity

Food with a view: Devcon IV, Prague Congress Centre, 2018

It’s only been a few short months since dipping my toes into crypto full time, but man, does it feel longer. The handful of conferences I’ve been to have spanned the chasm of blockchain, from shillfests to hackathons galore. And sadly, each and every one has left me feel wanting; from dry lectures covering not-so-subtle infrastructure pitches to here’s-our-new-whiz-bang-library-that-utilizes-our-system workshops. I’ve walked away from each event drained from the pitches vying for my attention, technical conversations knee-deep in newly-learned jargon and non-stop transactional interactions with other attendees.

I was starting to lose hope I’d ever find an event with any real substance — one where I’d walk away fulfilled. So I was pleasantly surprised to find something a little different in Prague last week at the annual Ethereum developer conference, Devcon. What I found was something I’d almost given up expecting to see in this space, some humanity.

Quite frankly, I’ve never been to a venue quite like it, and instead of emerging bleary-eyed and run-down each day, I’d walk out invigorated.

The first thing that struck me was the space itself. The Prague Congress Centre is a gorgeous venue with lush view over the city, and tons of natural light. Each day had a wide selection of local and healthy food choices, with reusable plates and utensils to reduce waste. Quite frankly, I’ve never been to a venue quite like it, and instead of emerging bleary-eyed and run-down each day, I’d walk out invigorated.

The next thing I noticed was the tone of the interactions. It’s hard to find people in the blockchain space — including Ethereum — who aren’t constantly pitching themselves, their project and their ideas at you. Yet I noted time and again, that the anxious, sometimes arrogant behavior so common in the industry was much less present at Devcon than at other conferences. Sure, conversations in the hallways were still very transactional, but the tone was more curious than questioning. Perhaps the MC Jonathan Mann and his endearing songs helped set the mood as we laughed along with each other about Ethereum’s woes (Vitalik’s refrain “that didn’t work” for the number of Ethereum 2.0 false starts really hit the mark).

They challenged us all to stand up for the freedoms we espouse.

Another contributing factor to the humanism I felt was the content. As expected, there were deep dives on a number of upcoming Ethereum v2 (ahem Serenity) technologies, yet there were also a number of talks touching on social responsibility. This included Lane Rettig’s presentation on Wednesday (Towards a Socially Scalable Etherean future), Cory Doctorow’s lecture on Thursday (Decentralize, Democratize or Die) and the fireside chat with Stewart Brand — hacker and author at age 79 — at closing on Friday. While the crypto froth of 2017 may have brought a large number of undesirables into blockchain, there is still a strong libertarian undercurrent that these speakers paid homage to. They challenged us all to stand up for the freedoms we espouse. I found their passion for humanity refreshing and inspiring.

The agenda also focused heavily on user experience (UX). There was the implicit acknowledgement of the need for better usability in blockchain — something many of us agree is sorely lacking. UX after all is the intersection between human and machine, and the creation of that interface layer requires both strong technical skills as well as empathy. There were a number of designers in attendance, some of whom volunteered their time each day with UX insight on fledging projects. They not only brought their diversity of experience, but also their refreshing perspectives.

Speaking of refreshing, I also found the Artifaqts artworks to be a fun addition to the week — those computer terminals decked out as sacrificial alters from Dante’s Inferno — they added a welcome creative flair to the conference. Hats off as well to the Hellhound team, who hosted the very fun — and challenging — Escape the Room. We didn’t pass level 3, though I blame myself for that (not to mention those similar-looking shapes!).

The effect was… stunning. I found myself sneaking off there a number of times to meditate and unwind.

Finally, I have to mention the Neptune room. It was put together as a sensory reprieve from the intensity outside. I’m a sucker for acoustic instruments, world music and soundscapes, so needless to say Neptune was my heaven. The artist Laura Inserra performed on instruments from around the world into microphones arranged in an inner circle, with corresponding speakers placed in a circle outside. The audience was encouraged to bask in the space between, lounging on beanbags and ottomans, as she mixed acoustic sounds with prerecorded soundscapes underneath the flow of responsive LED lights. The effect was… stunning. I found myself sneaking off there a number of times to meditate and unwind. Kudos to whomever in the conference organizing committee pushed for it. I felt truly privileged to have experienced those performances each day.

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I never thought I’d find a tasteful decompression within a conference. Inspiring and nourishing. Chambers of AWE at #DevCon, performed by @laurainserra https://t.co/R3nCGzdCiI

 — @justinjmoses

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So all that said — how can the event improve?

As an engineer in web technologies, I’ve been to a number of JavaScript (JS) events in recent years. The JS space — and umbrella organization JSConf — works hard to be inclusive, with strict Codes of Conducts (Devcon has one as well), open budgets, a commitment to more diverse speakers and safe spaces for those from underrepresented groups. Diversity of backgrounds, ideas, opinions and perspectives is one of those things that people don’t even realize are missing until they’ve experienced the difference. I think Ethereum and the Devcon team still have a ways to go to make the conference more open and inviting for all. As a small example, I felt uncomfortable with one of the jokes in the keynote, but had no forum to raise concerns (other than this open Ethereum one Lane just announced). When I spoke of this to other attendees, most rebuffed any concerns I had, rather than trying to imagine scenarios where someone might be uncomfortable, or even unsafe, in a space they find “harmless”.

Another process the JSConf events practice is opening up the Call For Presenters (CFP) selection so anyone can see all the submitted talks that the chosen were taken from. This gives attendees a peek behind the curtain at what kind of content the community is submitting, and what the organizers have prioritized. There is also a tendency at JSConf events to include surveys after talks to ensure speakers’ receive feedback, hopefully improving their craft. I would have dearly loved to see improvements there, as a number of speakers have a ways to go to make more approachable and engaging sessions.

In terms of engagement — I think there was room for more interactivity. One of the more enjoyable sessions during the week was a workshop on Building Bounties Based Products to Change the Gig Economy. It was designed as an unconference — topics were suggested and voted on initially, then we were encouraged to split up into fresh pairs to discuss, before bringing ideas back to the whole group. What I appreciated the most about the session was how inclusive it was — everyone had thoughts and ideas on online reputation, ethics and quality assessment, and all disciplines were welcome — developers, designers and product managers (among others) were all able to add their thoughts and opinions.

We are a rich community, and we can do so much more than just drink and talk.

While that workshop was a good step, I feel there’s even more audience participation we can foster at events such as these. We are a rich community, and we can do so much more than just drink and talk. We all have knowledge and experience to bring to bear, so I’d love to see more discussions around topics such as personal freedoms, human connection, empathy to our fellow beings and social responsibility.

Devcon IV really impressed me. It showed me that while the blockchain space is awash with wealth, ego and arrogance, there are some trying to do and be more. I commend the Ethereum Foundation for their efforts and hope to help do my part to give back to the community to help strengthen it.

A huge thank you to the organizing committee of Devcon. I know from experience how much work goes on to organize a developer conference, and for 3000-odd people to walk away smiling, an army of people have to be thanked.

Disclaimer: While I was at Devcon on behalf of Havven, these opinions are my own.

Prague, Czech Republic

The Neptune Room

Cory Doctorow’s “Decentralize, Democratize or Die”

The case for Proof of Stake

A conversation with Stewart Brand, hacker and author at 79.

Devcon IV: A Welcome Dose of Humanity was originally published in Havven Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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[out-of-the-deep-and-into-the-sky]

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, well there’s my first post from my own setting I’ve been building, there should be many more, especially this month. Expect me to alternate between short stories and setting primers.