Hello internet friends,

because bots are so hot right now I wanted to open this email with one of those fake text message conversation pictures that some people use to amuse themselves.
Turns out every single generator for those things is sleazy af and wants me to like/share/log into it with Facebook. So… not today.

Onwards! Bots! Facebook Messenger has them now, Microsoft has a whole framework for them and of course they are old news for people like me who actually use Telegram.
But are bots actually good at everything? Well, not necessarily. Maybe they are not the best UI paradigm (yeah!) if it takes 73 taps instead of 16 when ordering a pizza.
For what it’s worth, I mostly don’t want to have media and commerce where I have conversations with my friends. Now that’s a problem that no clever API can solve for media and commerce companies, isn’t it?

I have no clever segue, so here’s an article about publishing articles on the web in 2016: Don’t Trust Your CMS.
Even if you’re not reading that article, take the title as an important bit of advice. (That being said, if you’re even remotely interested in putting words (or other content, ehm) on the web – and I figure most of you are or you wouldn’t still be reading this – it is worth reading. And give that I write stuff like this email in a text editor and then happily copy it into different CMSses the whole thing should be a proper warning to me, too.)

So, apparently the new Beyoncé album is really good but I’ll sure as hell not pay for Tidal to listen to it.

Heard that thing about the jet in the UK that hit a drone? Yeah, well. That’s more American Beauty than a drone.

Talking about the UK – what a bunch of humorless tossers. (I bet they’d love hearing that from a German person.)

I am a big fan of ramen – both the “good” kind and the instant one. And learning about the existence of the World Instant Noodles Association gave me great pleasure.

Now let’s learn more things!
Baby dinosaurs were not cute. (Except the little carnivores, who probably looked like this. Or more like this.)
Planes used to drop out of the sky in Iceland a lot, back in the days. And thanks to Justin Bieber that’s still a problem today.
It still takes a lot of work and ressources to produce a show for TV. At least if you want to make it right.

This one I mostly like for the title: Dolphins Are Helping Us Hunt for Aliens. It’s a bit misleading, though – they are mostly supposed to help us how to learn to communicate with beings that have a different way of expressing themselves than us. (Maybe we can use chatbots?)

I’m still not done! So much content to curate for you!
I never really cared about Indycar, but I’m a sucker for articles about the history of car racing. This one is pretty fascinating.

Phew. Now we’re done. You have a week to catch up – or at least to instapaper all the great links and feel bad about not reading them.
Have fun.