Sportsball

April 7, 2014

1.0 Link Link Link

Okay, let’s try something different: a bunch of links to stuff I liked.

1.1 Stage

You know what’s good? Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. You know which episode I really enjoyed this weekend? The one with Josh Radnor, who seems to be quite a swell guy.

1.2 (Like a Record)

Priceonomics on Why UPS trucks don’t turn left. Spoiler alert: they still turn left once in a while.

1.3 History

Marco Arment on “Political Views” – if that is the result of John Siracusa prodding him towards speaking up on non-tech, non-coffee issues, I am all for it.

1.4 Click click click

Really good documentation about the 2011 DotA2 tournament in Cologne: Free to Play. Completely worth the time if you’re interested in professional gaming or even just like good documentations.

2.0 I’m (not) prepared to let you go

I am using Twitter – a lot. And I follow way too many people. And yet I love it – here’s how: The “Mute” function in Tweetbot. I blanket-mute everything that is annoying. Keywords, oh so many keywords. A whole bunch of apps. A few urls. A whole bunch of people.
My rule for muting people is pretty easy: for any really stupid and/or sports-related tweet I mute people for a week.
I know I could just unfollow people, but I don’t actually want to – some people are just randomly stupid and/or interested in sports and I might want to read their usual tweets some time later on and this is a pretty elegant way to do so.

3.0 Game of Codes

So there is a new season of “Game of Thrones” (Trailer) and a new series called “Silicon Valley” (Trailer) and I am excited.
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Have a good start to the week.
Dominik

Fingers in Food

April 4, 2014

1.0 Tiny, Tiny Letters

Hello, new readers! I don’t know many of you and that’s okay. I am sure you are here because Mr @darth sent you, thank you very much. I’m not going to pretend I have a lot to offer. (FYI: That sentences works about as well as a pick-up line as you might expect.)
I am pretty sure that all those personal (or not so personal) newsletters turning up lately are a bit of a fad, but so far I quite enjoy it. Both as a reader and as a (TW: douche language) content producer.
So, when are you starting one? I’d be happy to hear from you.

2.0 Monument Valley

I am probably preaching to the choir, but yes: Monument Valley is really that good.
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I don’t have more for you today.
Have a nice weekend!
Dominik

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2

April 3, 2014

1.0 Become A Fan

1.1 Venn

Myke Hurley asks the guests on his brilliant podcast CMD+Space the same question every time:

What would you like to be known for?

It’s a genius question.

Someone once told me that human beings have three dimensions: how you see yourself, how others see you, and how you want others to see you. The closer the distance between the three dimensions, the more at peace you are and the more stable you become.

And here is Marwa Rakha explaining in her novel The Poison Tree why it is so good: the guests are asked to disclose that third point, while knowing fully well that the listeners have their own point(s) of view and that those two things tend to by wildly different than how they see themselves. Plus, the answer is probably almost never really how they want to be seen. It is almost impossible to answer that question without admitting to a certain insecurity while not sounding like an idiot.
As I said: genius.

1.2 Huge Fan! H u g e Fan!

(Remember when this was still a thing? Kids these days probably don’t even get that joke anymore!)
Given that I won’t ever appear on that show, here is my answer to that question: (Or at least one possible answer. It’s fluctuation so wildly.)
Currently on the internet, I’d like to be known for being a fan. A fan of the internet and of the people on it and of the stuff they are doing with it.
There is so much cool stuff online. So many smart, creative people. So many hilarious gifs of animals.

2.0 How I Met Your Season Finale

Just like probably everybody else I have seen the season finale of How I Met Your Mother and just like seemingly everybody else I have capital-O Opinions about it. (If you have not seen the episode, yet, and managed to avoid any spoilers, here we go: it was all a booze-fueled dream, Ted doesn’t have any children, he never found his true love, so he became a crack addict and told two creepy dolls he found in the garbage how he wanted to find someone.)
Anyway: Opinion! (Notice how that suddenly become singular? It used to be plural, just a couple of words ago.)
In my Opinion it was basically an okay How I Met Your Mother episode. It was pretty neat how they managed to bind it together with the pilot and that they knew all along where they were going.
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Anything else? Anything?
Have a good day.
Dominik

Mergers and Acquisitions

April 1, 2014

1.0 A good story

It must have been the fall of ’96 when I first got “the internet” – pretty late, all things considered. The web was already important enough that Microsoft used Internet Explorer to kick Netscape around, and yet HoTMaiL was still it’s own service and not owned by them. (Btw: my first email address was, yes, at HotMaiL (please notice the spelling!) and yes, before they became part of Microsoft. And the address still works: dominikschwind@hotmail.com – it’s pretty amazing. Hardly anything from way back then still works. My websites on various free webspace providers – gone. (Remember GeoCities? Tripod? Angelsomething? There were so many around.))
But I don’t want to do this about how ephemeral the web is – while “the internet never forgets” might be true when one wants to forget or be forgotten, it usually forgets a lot. Again: a topic for some other time, if I don’t forget about it.
What really made me fall in love with “the internet” right away was the fact that it is basically a wide open window to the whole world. A place where people can just create something great and put it online, for almost free of charge. (See also above, the free webspace providers. And my own blindness to the fact that my parents paid a crapload of money for the highspeed internet, delivered to my bedroom by a 14.400 modem. So, yeah: free!) And because it was still quite early in the history of the web and the whole highspeed thing was not very fast, those great creations were usually text and even more usually in the form of stories.
And that is still the number one thing that I feel the web excels at and that still fascinates me so much, even after more than 17 (ugh? really? that many?) years: telling stories. Basically everything we create on the web tells a story. Or more precise: fragments of a story. That Instagram picture of Les Rambles – a fragment of a travel story, maybe. A romantic getaway to Barcelona (One might hope.) or the story of a self-centered social media addict who thought: “That looks great with the Hefe filter, I am sure I will get many likes for it.” (More likely. Still a story. Certainly a more familiar one.)
And what are these emails other than short stories about some dude who is trying to entertain the great self-selected group of people who are willing to listen?
So, yes – story telling. It’s the web’s greatest feature and for me personally companies or projects that realise that fact and build around it, are the most exciting things online. Flickr, WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr – even gauche websites like Yelp or Quora – can be used for story telling.

2.0 April Fools

Don’t believe anything on the internet today.
Dominik

Irregularity