Oh gosh oh boy it's NEWSLETTER time! Get hype. I'm hype, in case you can't tell. Let's take a stroll through the noosphere 🔮

First, I hope you saw the latest rhizomatic tendril of Wanderverse:

A gnome, her assistant, and the Nanomancer’s apprentice
Today I’m pleased to present the first three chapters of a Wanderverse[https://wanderverse.org/] contribution by Sam Wilson[https://twitter.com/Spivonomist], the researcher who painstakingly cataloguedevidence that There Was An Extinction-Level Event In 2012[https://amzn.to/2OV4Xxr]: And We All …
Sonya SupposedlySonya Mann

Members are encouraged to peruse what's on the way / works in progress:

Full Boughs
🐰🤖 esoterica 🎀 eclectica 🤖🐰
Sonya SupposedlySonya Mann
My plans morph as things move forward. Whatever I end up shipping usually kinda rhymes with my original vision, but isn't identical. In fact, if I've learned anything from these publishing ventures, it's that nothing — on any level — will ever turn out exactly how I expect. Gotta keep rolling with the punches!

Over at Pirate Wires, Mike Solana invited me to explain the furry phenomenon:

Are Furries Freaks?
from fursuits and sex stuff to literal communism, a primer for the unlikely subculture living on the frontlines of our culture war
Pirate WiresSonya Mann

Essentially, furry is all about playing pretend. Newsflash, it's fun to be silly and make up stories! A wolf with amethyst eyes would be awesome, that's why they keep putting them on those sick shirts.

If you're unfamiliar with furries, you might think the hobby sounds harmless, if perhaps a bit childish, and you'd be right. But you'd also be underestimating how ridiculously — how effervescently, and sometimes tumescently — over-the-top furries can be. Furries go hard for what we enjoy. By my way of thinking, the unabashed passion in face of constant ridicule is exemplary.

Because yeah, if you're not a kid and you roleplay as a fantasy animal version of yourself, people will make fun of you. FYI.

My headline asks, are furries freaks? Contra Betteridge, the answer is yes (and I'll get into why, don't you worry). Oddballs have a way of rolling into corners together. When it comes to furries, our insistence on aberrance has made us infamous, at least if you're sufficiently immersed in certain ecosystems of digital degeneracy.

I was flattered that Greg Fodor responded with "The Rise of Avatarism," an almost-manifesto that is delightfully brash and ambitious in its predictions:

The Rise of Avatarism
The next decade is going to be wild, and weird. The wave of disruption sweeping over our society from the Big Bang-like creation of the Internet seems to only be accelerating, and many long…
MediumGreg Fodor

Next, a few podcasts. I feel like I'm drowning in podcasts — it doesn't take many to count as inundation when your baseline is zero. But hey, maybe you don't feel that way? 😎👉 I'm great at this aren't I.

It was an honor to help my dear friend, the voluble raconteur @eigenrobot, welcome his serialized salon to the world:

wherein the eminent Sonya Mann holds forth religion, how one might try to even conceive of god, and the importance of hurting your audience with information about demons.

And I talked to another truly lovely person, Henry Zhu, about the insistent thingness of everything:

Essence (Sonya Mann)
How do we think about ourselves and the communities we move into? Sonya Mann and Henry continue a chat about the nature of conversion: about using jargon within a community, individuation, and transformation. Topics include the tools of a worldview, flavors of faith, the good of questions, essence a…
Hope in Source
Go listen, or scroll through the transcript.

Lastly in the podcast department, I had the pleasure of joining gracious host John Lamberton for a wide-ranging conversation:

Sonya and I chat about coffee, cypherpunk, cyberpunk, nootropics, admiration for Gwern, Tor, Signal, Bitcoin, SciHub, PGP, opsec, threat modeling, encryption as a hermetic seal, Tarot vs Tetlock, zine making, artifact vs art, physically tangible art vs digital art, anarcho capitalism, distaste for cannabis culture, communicating across frameworks, becoming a theist after being an atheist, costly waste signaling, media diet suggestions, and more.

Further recommended listening and/or watching — this section is unusually large today, so don't be afraid to scroll vigorously if you're a text-only person (trust me, I get it). The rest of you, for your consideration:

The Outgroup #1 - Conspiracy Media
Listen now | In the inaugural episode of The Outgroup, I talk with one half of The Damn Woods podcast Jake and Dexter from The Gaslight Hour about the outgroup of conspiracy media. We talk about the origins of conspiracy media, namely Coast to Coast AM hosted by the late, great Art Bell. We also loo…
Highvy's House of Hot TakesIvy Astrix
Turtles have a nifty trick or two tucked under their shells.

To read... abundant material for your perusal, so please follow whim and whim alone. Let your intuition and curiosity do the work!

Lastly, dreamily, a black-and-white film series by Avy Faingezicht:

Photography - Film, I
For fun, and to force a creative constraint upon myself, I bought an old film camera. This is the first roll I’ve shot on film since I was twelve, or so.

Okay actually lastly, if you like dreams, come step into mine. Talk soon 😘