This site is a weekly newsletter on topics for the curiously minded, such as crypto, blockchain, investment, startups, Internet, climate change, autonomous driving, etc. On a lighter note, it will also share street photography around Shanghai, prepping, books, productivity hacks, digital self-reliance, career transformation, and Brompton. It might even feature from time to time sci-fi novellas from drawers brushed off dust. It's neither as ambitious or methodical as Tim Ferriss, nor is it as funny or thought-provoking as Tim Urban, though it certainly draws inspiration from both. It's a feeble attempt to build a circle of like-minded friends who would appreciate that in this fast-changing time we all live in, it's better to anticipate the tidal waves, embrace changes and bask in exhilarating ideas, rather than living in the legacy glory and slowly being phased out.

Among the four motives for writing articulated by Orwell, the first one stroke accord with 1082 particularly well.

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful business men – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

- George Orwell, WHY I WRITE, Gangrel, No. 4, Summer 1946

If any questions, please drop a note to clayton@1082.xyz. Thank you.