Table of Contents
Introduction
This week we speak with Noah Kumin, also known as ~librex-dozryc, New York human, if such a thing exists, a genuine Tycho with the good fortune to make the lists of Urbit and Stack elite. Making the Stack elite can’t be done by the effete, no, but there is a bit about Noah’s blueberry cointreau.
We talk about authors and books and who’s getting a look in the pages of the Mars Review, Noah’s scheme to publish in the face of much that’s rubbish, but not too exclusively clubbish he’s building a team out of half Urbit and half New York writers. And thus an Urbity print magazine that will find its way to Very Cool Places, like the lower platform at 63rd and 3rd in Manhattan. I have no idea what that means, I just googled ‘worst subway stations in New York’. You will also be able to find it at Noah’s local bodega, which is another New York thing. I come from Georgia, where we just call them ‘stores’. We also call bagels round bread. Pizza is round bread with sauce.
By the by, a note and a correction. Note: this episode was recorded on the first or second day of the Ukraine invasion, so it’s a bit dated in that sense. [New shit has come to light]
And a correction: it was Sherwood Anderson and not Wallace Stevens who died from swallowing a toothpick. I’m sorry to the Stevens family for maligning him. Stevens himself was simply a miserable old prick who couldn’t take a punch. Splendid poetry though.
And now, the News.
Uqbar is getting more public. Blockchain OS has a shiny new palace at uqbar.network. Join them there as well as on their presences Discord or Telegram. Read the whitepaper. Get excited. Buy in. Pump up the price of my Urbit real estate so that I can retire to a nice, quiet little Eastern European country and be the don of some local equivalent of the bass pro shop.
Speaking of the Uqbar people, Escape continues developing. They have added emojis to the chat! They are the same size as the text font and I have discovered that I am too old to see them clearly. Blindness for very small faces is a blessing of old age, however. One no longer has to notice the Irish. Escape’s Urbit app also brings notifications to Android and iOS, a game changer! Let me see who has just sent me a message. Ah, it’s Andy. “Drinking blueberry cointreau with some New York friends”. Well, Andy’s dead to me now.
And finally, Urbit’s own little chatbot, %crow, has gotten a major upgrade thanks to ~rabsef-bicrym and the good people of ~dalten. Crow now can manage simple talk-back applications but also manage stateful libraries and threads that users can write and connect to chat activities. It comes prebuilt with a Robot9000 library, an invitebot library, a give-a-gora thread and an aggressive ipfs-conversion thread. All of these interact with the graphs you point them to. crow can respond to any sort of graph post we have in chats today (urls, code, etc) AND it knows when people join and leave the groups to which the chats it watches are connected.
Amazing, plucky little beast. Don’t, however, try to pluck it. You will be called a plucker, or, if a mother, a mother plucker. The same if you try to pluck a mother. Or, if plucking another, another plucker or another mother plucker. You may say ‘aw, shucks’ but then you’ll just be thought of as a shucking plucker, another shucking plucker, or another shucking mother plucker. You should only shuck corn, but this thing has gotten corny enough already.
Episode
Gratitude
Many thanks to Dalten Collective for sponsoring this episode. We are deeply grateful for their continuing support.
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