All The Great Shows

February 23, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

I really hope you’re all wide awake and full of energy – I am very much neither of these things. A weekend with little sleep in Berlin does that to old couch-potatoes like me.
Oh well. Onwards!

I did not watch the Oscars and so far the internet has been a huge disappointment – except for some “We live-tweeted the Oscars, here are all of our context-free tweets on one webpage” sites I did not find any good recap. Or even thinkpiece.
But then I probably did not watch any of the movies that won anyway, because lol, who has the time to watch a movie when we all have to binge-watch all the great shows on TV.

At least I now know what’s it like being a seat filler at the Academy Awards and then there is that TV series I will not ever binge watch. Luckily I don’t have to, because someone did it for me.

It’s a lovely story: Matt Stopera over on Buzzfeed had his phone stolen – and suddenly he found pictures of a chinese guy on it. I’m sure he’ll soon be best friends with his Brother Orange.

A lot less lovely is what the people in the shadows do to our computers and our cellphones. I am not amused.

Have a good week, everybody. Eat your vegetables.

~~

(A tiny bit of self-promotion: I started a linkblog-thing over here. If you read this newsletter – which you obviously do – you might know some of the links already. And vice versa.)

All Tomorrow’s Bots

February 16, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

Every time I hear “Minority Report”-technology I think it’s about a silly hand-wavy interface. But then there is this now.
Onwards…?

I can see a future where a police might predict that a Twitter bot might not be a threat. But maybe it is not that easy? Some of your favourite Twitter accounts might be bots already.

And if they are bots, what happens, when they tweet something stupid? After all, the guy who ran that bot that scared the police, shut it down afterwards.
Luckily we’re still not that heartless when humans write something dumb, but we might be getting close.

When bots are not writing tweets for their programmers, they are playing the dating game for them.

What a future we live in.

Brutalist Content

February 9, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

Remember when we all[1] thought that Google Glass would be the future and that we’ll all walk around as glassholes in a Google-controller world, happily searching the web while driving out driverless cars around?
Well.
Google Glass is gone and the story behind it is pretty amazing.
It is also rather amazing that this article ended up in the “Style” section of The New York Times and not in the teechnology one. I guess that’s another sign that we are clearly living in the future. Or at least a future.

~

T.J. Miller, who you probably all know from the cineastic masterpiece “Yogi Bear” bombed at some tech award show. Awkward. But hardly surprising.

~

I’ll just leave this here. Thinking too deeply about it will just make me angry. And yes:

If in five years I’m just watching NFL-endorsed ESPN clips through a syndication deal with a messaging app, and Vice is just an age-skewed Viacom with better audience data, and I’m looking up the same trivia on Genius instead of Wikipedia, and “publications” are just content agencies that solve temporary optimization issues for much larger platforms, what will have been point of the last twenty years of creating things for the web?

Well. Let’s hope there will always be a place (and the infrastructure) for [tw: douche speak] independent content creators.

Because what if not? Well: guns.

~

Looking for truely independent content creators[2] with a punk credibility that nobody ever could question? How about heavy metal musicians in Burma?

~

How about some brutalist building models on your desk?

~

A little bit too on-the-nose, but hey: Management theories from Roman slave-owners.

~

Remember Sega? Well, I think I have only ever played on a Mega Drive/Genesis once, but this interview with the product designer behind it is still very fascinating.

Probably related: How Japan became a pop culture superpower

~

Be safe.

  1. Heh.  ↩
  2. Seriously, Dominik? Seriously?  ↩

Crows

February 2, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

Because nothing says “monday morning” than “wanting to go back to sleep,” here is some help with that: Jeff Bridges’ Sleeping Tapes. It is really weird and now I want to be a crow, looking for Spanish doubloons with the dude. Right.
Onwards!

The nerd in me is very tickled by the existence of this Lego SHIELD Helicarrier. Just look at it. So tempting.

Ever since Wednesday, this short documentary on Grace Hopper has been on my watchlist. Maybe I’ll manage to watch it tonight, maybe you can beat me to it?

Why Can’t Public Transit Be Free?
tl;dr: because people are terrible snobs.

How one of the best films at Sundance was shot using an iPhone 5S
Using an iPhone and a steadycam rig, some way to have different lenses on the phone and a whole bunch of people with expertise in movie-making. I’m not too sure if maybe some other camera in the same price range would not have worked better? But what do I know.

For 10 years I have managed to bushwhack a circuitous path around them but now I’ve got to find a away around the men in hoodies and crocs.

Zoë Keating: What should I do about Youtube?

Have a good week folks.