Bill

January 25, 2016

Hi internet friends,

I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

Don’t be like Bill.

Space News!
The alien megastructure that is probably a bunch of comets is probably not a bunch of comets.
Apparently there is a planet in our solar system that we don’t know about. I’m not sure why they insist on calling it Planet Nine, though. You heard about Pluto? That’s messed up, right?

Chicken News!
When chickens go wild is an interesting article about wild chickens on Kauai. There is also an amusing gif.

T-Shirt News!
Someone bought 800 t-shirts and measured them. And washed them and wore them and measured them and washed them and… (Not a single someone, obviously.)

Tennis News!
Remember last week’s tennis kerfuffle? (I almost forgot, tbh.) Well, apparently “that’s what tennis players do."

Racist News!
Turns out you’re just as racist as everybody else, you are just better at hiding it. Well, at least if you’re a white American, which – let me look at my subscriber statistics – you are probably not.

Be safe, be less racist and maybe have a tea.

Game. Set. Match

January 18, 2016

Hello internet friends,

Mondays, uh?

~

Bet you didn’t see this coming:

Betting worth billions. Elite players. Violent threats. Covert messages with Sicilian gamblers. And suspicious matches at Wimbledon. Leaked files expose match-fixing evidence that tennis authorities have kept secret for years.

Besides the story itself I find it pretty fascinating to see the BBC work with Buzzfeed on this one.

~

Sometimes – tbh all the time – computers are acting up and even those of us who know a bit about these things are not always sure what happens.
So maybe they are cursed and need a witch who casts a bunch of spells to make them work again?

~

Why are people popular on social networks? Anil Dash says that the trick is mostly to be early.
I’m not sure how much that is true. I was (am) the second Twitter user from Germany and I’m still about as irrelevant as you can imagine. On the other hand, this makes the people who follow me a self-selected club of great people and spam bots.

~

Netflix News! They want to block VPNs and they have many, many genres.

~

Now, go forth and have a good week.

Very Different Today

January 11, 2016

Hello internet friends,

learning that David Bowie passed was surely not how I expected this week to start.

Starman

But here we are.

~

I know that most people are so over “The Force Awakens” already, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even though it looks a lot more real than the prequels, there is basically not a single shot that isn’t CGI. If you want to know how they did it, here is a great interview with ILM VFX Supervisor Roger Guyett.

~

I can’t even… everyone has the same personality online.
I am not so sure if I agree, though. Mostly because I don’t want to admit that my magic skill to judge people on how they behave online might just be prejudice.

~

Given what humanity is doing in space these days it is pretty amazing that it has only been 70 years since we very super happy that the moon would bounce back radio waves.

~

Thanks for reading, now go listen to some Bowie. Or maybe to some Nemesis instead?

A Spark of Joy

January 4, 2016

Hello internet friends,

let’s have a nice 2016, okay? Okay.
So.

Maybe don’t call chuchuk a horse penis, British dude.

I’ll probably read this article some time later, we’ll see. (And hereby recycling the joke that basically everybody who linked to this, made.)

Just around Christmas Mailchimp sent an email out to their customers with the exciting teaser that we could find out how much coffee they drank in 2015. I’m not sure anyone really cared. (In case you wonder: I had 546 cups of coffee in 2015, including espressi. Which is actually a surprisingly low number, not even reaching 1.5 cups of coffee/day.)

It is pretty amazing how many owners some aircraft go through before they are put out of service.
Just look at that beautiful Singapore Airlines livery on the first picture.

If you make or consume websites in one way or another, you might be interested in Maciej Cegłowski’s talk on big, heavy websites. (Here’s the transcript, if you don’t want to watch a big, heavy video.) It is really worth watching/reading.

Take care, people. And maybe clean out a bit. (I know I should.)