“New Nerds”

3 minutes
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Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress – Gandhi

Narrative

I am/I’ve been in Berlin for a while. Right now I am typing this from Trustย one of the many Blockchain Co-Working spaces that are in Berlin.

The team at trust.support
Photo from Saturday Night. Thanks Cory!

So… I blew passed my self imposed Saturday blog posting deadline. I don’t really have an excuse to be honest. I’ve either been really busy all day or sleeping for nearly a week.

I must admit, Berlin is not my favourite city. It has a grey spirit. It’s not hostile but I have never found it particularly receptive to approaches. The Spree was completely frozen when I arrived (Tits where indeed frozen). It’s been days of grey Clouds. Wind, Rain (as I type this), But Sunday it was 17 degrees with blue sky sunshine. We ate dinner outside in the evening. Since then it has been Raining. Really strange weather.

I’m staying at a ‘Scandi’ Hotel. It’s trying to be international chic in an Airspace kinda way. If you have ever been in someones flat that is 100% Ikea furniture you can get the picture of what the hotel is like. Nice and practical on the surface but when you look more closely everything is slightly broken, chipped or delaminating.

Continuing with my airspace existence, I met up with Johannes in an airspace coffeeshop called westberlin on Saturday. We could have been anywhere but thats the point I suppose. I have data here: The whole city opens up as a strange techno airspace-dream. Get out of the airport, call a Mytaxi via app, pay for the U bahn with its app. Pay for shit in the hotel with my contactless online bank that isn’t charging me a fee for spending Euro. All good.

I went to see theย The Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum yesterday. It wasย colossal

ishtar gate berlin

Dipping the stacks

I must admit I haven’t really been online. Its been nice. Might keep it that way

The Ministry

I’m in Berlin both for work and for a (previously mentioned) conspiratorial reason. The weekend was spent at a facilitated meeting with a bunch of awesome people. We filled a huge whiteboard with notes and planning.

Solarpunk was written about in the LARB this week by Rhys who I had a call with a few weeks ago. We met at a sci-fi convention back in September, He including a link to the reference guide which was nice of him. It’s weird that different websites that I thought would have had a much lower profile than the LARB have driven more traffic.

I met up with Terra0 whilst I was here. they are building a forrest that owns itself.

Had some beers withJulian Oliver who I have known for a while now, since the early days of the #stacktivism project. That was nice.

My good friend Alex also happens to be in Berlin and we grabbed dinner.

I’m kinda blockchained out. TBH

Reading

Even though I have like 101 books on the go at the moment, I started and finished reading Skin In the Game by Taleb this week. Its such an important concept. One of my favourite quotes is:

โ€œBureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.โ€

–  Skin In the Game Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Music

I’ve barely had the chance to listen to anything in the last week or so. The only music I have on my phone is a collection of Lightnin’ Hopkins MP3s so I’ve been listing to that tbh.

Remember kids:

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