Buy! Buy! Buy!

March 9, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

If you aren’t yet, you might want to consider watching “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” – it is really, really good.

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Because we have allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want yours back you’re going to have to pay for it.

The Cost of Paying Attention

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And yes, I did just recommend a series on Netflix, where you basically have to pay for the privilege of not being advertised to. (At least not overly so.)
That’s how things are now.

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If you had any doubt that we are living in the future, here is a woman flying a fighter jet simulator with her mind. That is pretty great – except, you know, maybe not do that with military hardware? But I guess that’s where the money is.

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Have a good week, everybody.
We’ll get through this together.

Llama

March 2, 2015

Hello, internet friends.

I’m not too sure if it is genetics or an upbringing with a lot of moving around outside or maybe just the last remnants of youth, but I tend to be pretty robust when it comes to colds or becoming sick in general.
So of course when a light fever hit me last week, I decided immediately that these are probably my last few days on earth. Once I made peace with that fact – it took me a surprisingly short time – I did, what every sane person would do in my situation:

Binge-watch season three of House of Cards.

Now I’m alive and well, so:

Onwards.

By now everybody is so over that color-changing dress – it’s such old news that even Saturday Night Live made their jokes about it. Which probably means that I’ll get a picture of it through WhatsApp by my relatives in about two weeks.
I still did not manage to see it in blue and black, though, but then: who really cares anymore?

Brands

Brands care. For some reason, I still see white-and-gold-blue-and-black tweets from brands retweeted by people who I (held in higher esteem)used to?) hold in high esteem. I mean, I get it – haha, you’re some poor, tortured, over-paid Social Media Manager, who needs to entertain the masses and promote a brand – but why do grown-up, smart people retweet these things? Because virality.

Help?

Is anyone of your folks playing Alto’s Adventure? It’s very pretty and just slightly frustrating. Which is probably a sign that I am Doing It Wrong.

Oh well.

Take care, eat some fruit, stay healthy.

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.

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(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.

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

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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.

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

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How about some brutalist building models on your desk?

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

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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

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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.

Acceptable

January 26, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

For no apparent reason it is Monday again. Onwards!

The New York Times is excited about messaging apps. I have been excited about messaging apps since ICQ, which is still around. Here is me.

Big in the 90s and still around now? Marilyn Manson. He has a new album, which means interviews – I liked those in Esquire and on Grantland.
And the album itself? Well, I quite like it. But then I was also big in the 90s and happen to be still around.

I have completely no musical skills or talents, but I’d still like to play around with these little synthesizers.

Sometimes I compare the IRL people in my life with the internet people in my life and I always feel like, why can’t the IRL people be more like the internet people?

– ​I Took the Internet Addiction Quiz and I Won
Obviously I picked that quote to tell you how great you are.

Take care, treat yourself to something nice today.

Ramen in Space

January 19, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

How nice to see all of you still reading this, it means a lot to me.

I never heard of “Lucky Peach” before, but at the moment they cover a topic near and dear to my heart: ramen.
There’s a biography of Momofuko Ando, a timeline of the history of ramen and a guide to the different types of ramen.
Now excuse me while I hide a bit in the corner and cry about the fact that the only way to get some halfway decent ramen nearby where I stay just got way more expensive.

Since we’re already on the subject of Switzerland: if you happen to be a robot that orders illegal substances and fake passports over the internet, the Swiss police will come and arrest you.
2015.

In a very different way just as cyberpunk-y (if not more so) as robots in jail: turning a modern inexpensive compact camera into a waist-level Rolleiflex replica.
I am pretty sure there’s someone thinking about putting a pre-made kit for these up on Kickstarter.

More things that are old: coyotes, British mars spacecrafts, VHS tapes and old websites.
Me, especially on Monday mornings.

Have a good week, take care.
Eat your vegetables.

The Orange of Everything

January 12, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

I signed up here – the dangers of it becoming a Tamagotchi are pretty small, though. I mean, after all: this. Onwards!

Always good to know: What caused Gandhi’s insatiable bloodlust. Well, in the first Civilization game at least.

Talking about numbers that don’t add up – here is Ev Williams’ take on website statistics.
In case you wonder: I measure “greatness of readers” for this newsletter and the numbers are through the roof. (And now I also raised the kiss-ass metrics, so all is well.)

How Lego Became The Apple of Toys – worth reading even with that cringe-worthy title. Can we just stop calling anything the “Apple of X” this year? Or basically the “X of Y”?

Scroll Slow. Have Fun.

Damn.

Take care, people.

Properly Whelmed

January 7, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

Epiphany is a public holiday where I am, so for all intents and purposes, today is Monday. Onwards!

The Pacific Standard wonders How Ambient Intimacy Became So Overwhelming. Sometimes I wonder, too.
I still really like both the term and the idea behind it, but in many ways the services we use to stay in contact with our friends or even random interesting strangers do not scale. (Remember issue 63 and the smattering of articles about how Twitter is not the internet porch anymore?)

So, here are a few predictions how 2015 might be for media. Here are some more.
Mostly it seems like media brands will enroach more and more on our ambient intimacy tools.

How Millennial Are You?
Hey, let’s compare scores! I’m apparently 80 units of millennial. (Which is more than I should be, based on their own calculations.)

If your Millennial score is not too high, you might remember when Jurassic Park was released. If you watch it these days – more than 20 years later – it is astonishing how well it holds up. Much of that can be attributed to Phil Tippett, who seems like an interesting fellow.

Well, fellow millennials, take care!