🌚✨The Nexialist #0287

welcome to your weekly cyber-shenanigans, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. these days have been hectic around here (and in here 🧠), so i’ll just have a short intro and ask you to send me some good vibes. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

another amazing visualization from pudding.cool, this time about the history of menus, or how menus tell us our history. this is focused on the us, but i would love to see this from different cities/countries. you can view the full stunning menus from the frank buttolph collection and the analysis of each meal in this 8-course-experience tell us about that moment in time. from the french wannabe decades zeitgeist, to the introduction of à la carte and different cuisines, to a broken ice monopoly… i was invested — and wondering what qr code menus have to say about us.

A menu describes what a restaurant serves-but a menu also describes who is being served.

They reflect the class, gender, political, technological, and environmental shifts of history.

brainsparks: decadence (tn#242), snobbery vs spicy (tn#193), warmer climate, spicier food (tn#145), methexis in darkness (tn#85), cosplaying as poor (tn#62), hooked on coffee (tn#164)

another reason to hate qr code menus… a few years ago i wrote about this but it had such a harmless name, dynamic pricing. the discourse was that it would be more accessible for people with lower incomes, but we all see what’s happening, right?. i love the rebrand, calling it for what it is, surveillance pricing: “Most of the things you interact with online are tracking your location, your device type, and your digital footprint to predict exactly how desperate you are to buy something. If the algorithm thinks you have money, or simply lack options, it alters the price in real-time.” chris shows how difficult it is to trick theses systems. btw, this is the same country saying brazil’s pix is unfair market practice. unfair to whom?

brainsparks: protesting under surveillance (tn#232), surveilance as love language (tn#209), panopticon aesthetics (tn#218), critic of tech (tn#121), how supermarkets rewired the planet (tn#241), failures of globalization (tn#236), a frictionless world is boring as f*ck (tn#163)

level six is a creative studio that has been making this stunning series called born from culture, and as title says, this one is based in georgia (the country). this is the ensemble apkhazeti and i’m still in awe of how they move, their clothes (and the beautiful moustaches), all of it mixed with different soundtracks. watch the other ones as well, about the samoans and the māori.

brainsparks: culture is the client (tn#203), storm (tn#276), collectivity as a technology (tn#260)

sam kean, author of dinner with king tut: how rogue archeologists are recreating the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of lost civilizations.” in this video, he tells us some stories from ancient rome: how they were producing self-healing concrete, their iconic fermented fish sauce, and my favorite: the story of how a hairdresser solved an ancient rome mystery.

her name is janice stephens, from baltimore, and at a museum she started wondering about the beautiful hairdos in the ancient roman statues. she tried to replicate them at home, without success, and got curious, found research papers, but it was not making sense. when using google translate to check a phrase from latin she understood: the hairdos were sewn with a needle and thread. stephens published a paper and is now one of the leading experts in roman beauty/hairstyling. she calls herself an experimental archeologist of ancient hairdressing. such a nexialist thing to do!

brainsparks: ancient amazonian urns (tn#230), roman baths (tn#98), ancient jungle cities (tn#222), ancestral future (tn#112), el dorado (tn#78), 5000 years of coexistence (tn#170), out-of-place artifact (tn#126), lycurgus cup (tn#243), ancient computer (tn#48), shipwrecked treasures (tn#219)

i thought i had shared this here before, but the word canicular arrived in my inbox this week and i couldn’t find a mention here in the nexialist. a few years ago i started a playlist with these summer songs that went beyond the usual “summer song” radio vibe, maybe more mellow. lana del rey’s summertime sadness was the inspiration. the dog days are yet not over in europe (even if in amsterdam the weather hasn’t been the best)

The Latin word canicula, meaning “small dog,” is the diminutive form of canis, source of the English word canine. Canicula was also the name for Sirius, the star that represents the hound of the hunter Orion in the constellation named for that Roman mythological figure. Because the first visible rising of Sirius occurs during the summer, the hot sultry days that occur from early July to early September came to be called dies caniculares, or as we know them in English, “the dog days.”

brainsparks: cucumber time (tn#185), dog (tn#196), doggos (tn#34), top dog (tn#117), rose of the winds (tn#181)

since we’re looking up at the sky and celestial bodies, i remembered how learning this made my jaw drop: “Lunatic is a term referring to a person who is seen as mentally ill, dangerous, foolish,or crazy — conditions once attributed to “lunacy”. The word derives from lunaticus meaning “of the moon” or “moonstruck.”

The term “lunatic” derives from the Latin word lunaticus, which originally referred mainly to epilepsy and madness, as diseases thought to be caused by the moon. The King James Version of the Bible records “lunatick” in the Gospel of Matthew, which has been interpreted as a reference to epilepsy. By the fourth and fifth centuries, astrologers were commonly using the term to refer to neurological and psychiatric diseases. Pliny the Elder argued that the full moon induced individuals to lunacy and epilepsy by effects on the brain analogous to the nocturnal dew. Until at least 1700, it was also a common belief that the moon influenced fevers, rheumatism, episodes of epilepsy and other diseases.

brainsparks: cloud forms (tn#271), naming clouds (tn#271), rose of the winds (tn#181), blue skies (tn#1)

d’leesa is the synthpop diva we need right now, singing some soft sapphic soul to cleanse your timeline and heal your soul. thank me later.

What emotions do you usually pull from when writing songs?

Definitely yearning.

brainsparks: soft porn (tn#104),

i recently shared bia soull’s pornografia auditiva (tn#278), and this video just came out, i’m so obsessed. the lyrics are not for the faint-hearted, extra sexy

someone commented: “If two women can’t reproduce, how come Bia Soull and Nanda Tsunami are my mothers?

brainsparks: brazilian female rappers (tn#278), ugly boys (tn#177), i’m bad (tn#110), quente (tn#281)

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