Newness: a guide for boomers
It's easy to forget, and sucks to remember, how newness can kinda be scary sometimes.
Howdy! It’s the first newsletter since the rebranding! I released a whole new device, and it finally has Dayflower branding on it (if you were wondering why all of my UIs were suddenly the same shade of off-white and blue, Dayflower is why)! Things are definitely going!
Down to business: TikTok is horrifying
This past weekend I went home for Fathers Day, notably after stumbling upon free soup dumplings at Shanghai You Garden in Flushing (when I tell you I had a transcendent experience eating their scallion pancakes, I am not exaggerating). My dad — in talking to my partner about keeping relevant these days and the general concept of influencers — wandered onto the topic of TikTok. My partner, the angel that she is, offered to screencast her For You Page onto the living room TV to give him a general sense of what TikTok is all about.
I’ve long felt like there’s something especially off about TikTok, but 1) seeing it take up an entire TV and 2) being hyper-vigilant of the usual fodder my partner often shows me between her meetings, I couldn’t shake a distinct feeling of terror. Now in the shoes of a 60-something year-old, I was being truly pummeled by wave after wave of Miguel O’Hara fancams and cats wearing AR sombreros set to ranchera, helplessly clinging to my seat as the feed endlessly refreshed and iterated over itself. There were countless Shih Tzus (if you know my partner, you know), endless home videos of quebredita rapida dance routines(once again, if you know my partner, you know), and a few videos with that one audio about margaritas, which we very deftly scrolled past.
I was overwhelmed. I found myself sharing a father-son bonding moment a la Clockwork Orange, eyes collectively glued to swaths of curated content. Seconds turned to hours, days, years — I was an onlooker in an algorithmically perfected dance choreographed to my partner’s score; I was complicit in exposing my own father to the unbridled torrent of information that comes with endless feeds. Within a minute or two, I couldn’t tell, it ended.
The typical pace of life resumed. I remained in awe, struck with a distinctly new feeling: I’d somehow psyop’d myself into a new perspective, with social media as a horrifying and all-consuming stampede of kids doing dumb things and references I could never hope to understand. Did I suddenly connect the dots to old, white reactionism? Had I cracked a code to understanding the conservative tendency to cling to things as they are, to see the perpetual shifts of culture as a threat to life itself; a drive to marry the respect for what was with the excitement and dread of what’s to come?
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No.
But I did realize that, sometimes, things that are new can be scary. And that’s okay! Newness is a sort of unquantifiable, uncontainable force-of-nature, occasionally blessing human efforts with a chrome-y sheen exclusive to things that approach things differently. Someone somewhere surely has a better definition and understanding of newness, and would do a great job explaining its ineffable nature. They’d probably also mention something about how newness is often a currency in the world of art, and how those who make strive to make things that redefine or innovate. Something about the false notion of progress only existing as a means for profit, a poignant critique of late-stage capitalism, maybe a manifesto on the act of making as a foundational act of love.
I don’t know. I just make my little devices, like this one:
The fun part: live.wander!
We’re past the walls of text, thank God! Now, we can talk about things like audio delays and randomized parameters and all the good stuff, which I’m sure sounds extraordinarily interesting to people who aren’t specifically me.
live.wander is a 4-tap delay effect — in normal people terms, it’s an echo effect that contains 4 distinct echo chambers. The goofy part about live.wander is that these echo chambers all feed into one another, meaning that they can hypothetically (and often do) iterate over themselves endlessly to create absolutely massive, warping textures.
live.wander was made as a delay effect to (kinda) end all delay effects. It takes the concept of audio delaying to the extreme by turning it into an instrument in-and-of-itself, able to take any input signal and massage it into any sort of warbling wall of sound its generative heart desires. It works largely based on controlled randomness, allowing users to have a bit of control over how the delay will sound, but not much. live.wander really does wander, meandering along its own path. If you’re a fan of letting go and letting God, live.wander might be something that interests you.
The new part: a cool thing from this week!
I have been informed that recaps, collections, curated lists, etc. are the secret sauce to getting a Substack to thrive. The space below is devoted to something that I found neat from the past week, be it software, music, design, or truly whatever struck my fancy:
This Max for Live developer, who goes by fendoap, made a functioning version of Tetris in Max. I’m gonna make the assumption they did so with JSUI, the big, scary (to me, personally) built-in version of Javascript-esque rendering and interaction that more-or-less lets programmers run wild with anything they can dream of. I adore playful interfaces, and given that this one is an entire game, I’m smitten. Give them a follow!
Also: I found myself recommending this album to someone this week. If you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and give it a listen. I don’t often recommend music, but this one means so, so much more to me than just being a great album. All these years after discovering it, this remains one of my favorite all-time songs:
You might recognize the voice at about the halfway point in this track, especially if you happened to grow up in the 90s and aughts.
The end part: see you in a week!
So, yeah. First post since rebranding! A return to the platform! A return to form? Who knows! Stick around for all the latest on what Dayflower is up to, and enjoy the solstice!
And while you’re here, be a mensch and follow me on Instagram and Twitter! And, for extra credit, maybe even follow my personal Insta!