Some Curated Curiosities

📜 Codex Entry 3; Curiosities 1 🌌

💔 A Failed Project / Intro 💔

Ah! I’m feeling just a little bit defeated this week, as I had put a fair amount of time into a project with the explicit intention of leveraging it for this week’s Codex entry. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. With the scrapping of this particular project, that will almost certainly make a future return in some form or another, I am instead here to welcome you to this week’s Curiosities. The Corbin Codex’s Curated Curiosity Cabinet, or something equally as absurd.

To give a brief introduction, one of the original thoughts I had for the Codex was to share the sorts of things that were particularly eye-catching or interesting to me that week. I hadn’t abandoned this idea, and I’ve instead been quietly collecting and annotating various articles, videos, etc. each week. Though I may not yet have a precise structure in mind for these Curiosity-filled Codex entries, I have plenty of interesting things to share!

🎬 Art/Media: christtt’s Video Mix ✝️✝️✝️

I’ll kick off with some art and say, I suppose that my ideal way for this video to be consumed in the context of this Codex entry, is for the reader to play the video (see below) right about now and continue reading at a normal pace. The mix begins with ~18 seconds of silence before the music begins and ultimately sits in the back for some time before demanding more attention, at which point the reader can choose how best to distribute their attention.

I really enjoy christtt’s music. I’ve embedded it elsewhere on my site already, but this time around I’m sharing a full video mix of his. Though I wasn’t able to make it to New York this August for all of the vaporwave-related shows, christtt thankfully took the time to put this copy of his Summer Slushy Fest set on YouTube.

It feels like
A low level of despair
You live in.

Where you're not getting any answers,
But you're living okay,
And you can smile at the office.

Since this set was originally tailored for a more slushwave-themed festival, the first 40% or so consists of music released under the 아버지 (father2006) alias; it’s a lot slower, more “drone-y,” “dark ambient” than his work as christtt. I would also describe it as relaxing and perhaps brooding. The transition into the christtt moniker works really well, and is accompanied by his signature video style of something like a rapid assault of images either tangentially or directly related to “internet culture.” It may kick off with the not-as-niche daxflame and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but it isn’t long until you’re treated to just a small sample of christtt’s absolutely massive, and frequently esoteric, image collection.

👓 (Don’t) Throw Your Glasses Away 🗑️

A week ago, Twitter recommended me a video, posted by @this_is_mallory, a self-proclaimed anti-“wellness industry/influencer” and anti-multilevel marketing¹ user. The video was from a TikTok influencer claiming that “your optometrist doesn’t want you to know” that you don’t need glasses.

The next day, the TikTok “wellness influencer” hosted an $11 “Vision Healing Masterclass” that @this_is_mallory decided to sign up for and tweet through; the thread has plenty of humorous (and admittedly worrying) gems to warrant a quick read. It really feels like every outlandish opinion or belief manages to find a home of like-minded people online, and this is perhaps only partially explained by the heavy marketing of a known MLM¹ as the presentation continues.

As an aside, I’m just now realizing that isthisanmlm.com has been offline for upwards of a year now. A shame! But this list still exists.

🔒 Privacy Not Included 👀

Privacy Not Included is Mozilla’s site for checking how much a particular product respects your privacy. When possible, it also provides tips on how to configure these products to better respect your privacy, such as tweaking account settings or disabling hardware when not in use.

A new category went up earlier this month that Mozilla says is the absolute worst product category they’ve ever reviewed for privacy: cars. I find this both surprising, and somehow not surprising at all; I distinctly remember feeling a little “weird” about the privacy policy I was signing while buying my car from a Toyota dealer several years ago. Whatever weirdness I felt at that time, I certainly don’t recall any mention of my “sexual activity” or “genetic information.”

Nissan earned its second-to-last spot for collecting some of the creepiest categories of data we have ever seen. It’s worth reading the review in full, but you should know it includes your “sexual activity.” Not to be out done, Kia also mentions they can collect information about your “sex life” in their privacy policy. Oh, and six car companies say they can collect your “genetic information” or “genetic characteristics.” Yes, reading car privacy policies is a scary endeavor.

🎩 Magic Box Design 📦

My first microblog post isn’t written by me, and isn’t exactly micro, but it is short and worth your time. It’s an essay about “Magic Box Design” that discusses how Apple’s influence has led to product design that both makes people a little more “stupid” (author’s word) and harms the consumer.

If you have any interest in Linux or “right to repair,” you can likely intuit much of what the essay has to say but can still appreciate someone putting it into words. For anyone else, I urge you to consider if you could have otherwise been the type of person to “tinker” with your technology if it weren’t for all of the profit-driven barriers put up in your way.

I imagine the answer is frequently a knee-jerk “no” for a variety of reasons, but I can’t help thinking of this as something like having a deaf sibling in the house: the opportunity for and utility in learning ASL are both more obvious and heightened. Learning a new language not only creates additional opportunities for communication, but also enhances metalinguistic awareness, which aids in learning additional languages in the future.

Programming the VCR for your parents, or tweaking the number of lives in a TI-Basic game you put on your graphing calculator, or having the experience of replacing a failing hard drive helps build technological literacy and exercise computational thinking; this ultimately aids in demystifying technology and helps view these systems as being understandable, tweakable, or repairable.

✔️ Conclusion 🔚

That’ll be it for this week, I think! Rather than pursuing a more structured approach to these sorts of Codex entries, at this point I’ll be continuing to stick to what’s been working, and so far that seems to be: whatever I feel like writing about that week. I hope something of interest caught your eye this week.

Now that you’ve finished, perhaps it’s time to make a game out of counting how many images in christtt’s video mix you know the reference to? Or is it time to dig more into one of the images that you’re so sure you recognize, but can’t remember from where?

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