Onwards!

January 1, 2015

Hello internet friends!

A happy new year to all of you, may things be great for you and those you care about! (And slightly inconvenient for those, who you secretly wish ill upon.)

2014 in tech.

2014 in science.

I wanted to round up this very short list of 2014 reviews with “2014 in goats” because obviously goats where the big winner of our hearts. But either the internet let me down or my googling skills are deteriorating faster than I want.
So no goats for you, sorry.

Be safe and brace yourself: once the whole holiday and new year ordeal is over, you’ll get these email in a more regular irregular pattern again.
Thanks for reading, I enjoy writing these. And say hi if you want.

79: Spicy

December 16, 2014

Hello internet friends!

Pretty soon I will write these emails on a fancy new device. Lovely, uh?

I’m usually not a big fan of “Oral History” articles – they tend to look too much like lazy copy-and-pasting of old interview quotes. This one here of Boogie Nights is pretty interesting to read, though.

Men who like spicy food are actually more alpha – a headline that made me laugh-cry while I was generously applying hot sauce to my lunch.

I used to play Transport Tycoon a lot, back in the days[1] and tended to be pretty proud of huge rail networks. But I doubt it is possible to simulate trains going from China to Spain.
It took about three weeks, that is pretty impressive.

Take care people – it’s the darkest week of the year for those of us in the northern hemisphere.

  1. a couple of weeks ago. Thanks OpenTTD.  ↩

78: Portrait Of A Man

December 9, 2014

Hello internet friends!

OMG, no regular Irregularity this week?
I was busy all day yesterday, got up at 4:30am and didn’t got any rest until around 11pm. Such is life. Onwards!

How about some Rijks Emotions!

Rijks Emotions is a student project from Hyper Island, using the Rijksmuseum and Sightcorp api. We’re matching people’s emotions with their relatives that hang on the museum’s walls.

It works pretty well, too:

You are a 52 year old Male with the facial expression of fear

Now that the computers know me that well it can’t take long until they finally take over.

I am quite happy to be 52, though. So the terrible 40s are already behind me and I don’t have to look forward to that in my future anymore.

Completely unrelated yet interesting: (I’m too tired for better seques and still too proud for stupid puns. (Not that those would have been allowed in this context anway.)) Chinese Mobile App UI Trends.
If you want to say hi – here is my WeChat QR code.

Did you hear, there will be a new James Bond movie. In their old-school way they opted for unveiling a car and the people in the movie at some event – without even a teaser trailer that silly internet people could link to or embed.
Let’s just hope the new Bond movie fix one of the biggest problems of Skyfall.
At least Monica Bellucci and Daniel Craig are about the same age, so that’s something.

A brief history of web design for designers is pretty fun – especially the GIFs.

Let’s try to get through this week together.
You can do it! (And I’ll somehow manage to muddle through, somehow.)

77: Not Faux

December 1, 2014

Hello internet friends!

I had delicious fondue last night and it still seems like my insides are lined with cheese. Onwards!

Two movie trailers touched our collective nerd hearts last week – sometimes in a way that even feels a bit inappropriate.
The Jurassic World trailer scares me. Not the good kind of scared, either. Between CGI that looks like it would fit better into a videogame cut scene and the premise of a genetically engineered super-raptor, I am not sold.
Especially since the dinosaurs have no feathers.

Wired is worried, too:

Okay, as with any emergency situation, the first step is not to panic. We don’t need to tell you what’s going on in this first trailer for Jurassic World, or about all the concerns we suddenly have, because we’ve all watched it by now and are all unbuttoning our top buttons to alleviate the tension sweats.

But they do have a few good points why the movie might be better than the trailer. If you need your hopes brought down again, listen to Lisa Schmeiser and Philip Michaels ruin the movie for you.

Now if you wonder why the CGI looks so plastic-y, the answer might surprise you! (Saving you the click: it’s very early in the production schedule and the visual effects are in a rather rough state.)

A slightly shorted and better looking trailer comes courtesy of Star Wars! The Force Awakens. Probably after a short nap?
I’d need a nap, too, if I were busy rolling around the desert, though.

And of course the nerd world exploded – because what we really need are shot-for-shot replays of very short teaser trailers.

Anyone still reading after all this movie trailer talk? Here are some very beautiful street photographs of 1950s Hong Kong.
And if you like pho, here you go: How To Eat A Bowl Of Pho Like You Know What You’re Doing. (And if you don’t like pho, what’s wrong with you?)

We’ll get through this week together. Say hi!

76: Never Equally Distributed

November 24, 2014

Hello internet friends!

It’s another monday and I am still not over the fact that “Can you forward me that email?” translates to “Print the email and put it on my desk.” for some people. Oh well. Onwards.

If someone had told me I’d read a profile about a software engineer on vogue.com that is not a total puff piece, I’d not have believed them.
Well, here is one: How Pinterest Engineer Tracy Chou is Breaking the Silicon Ceiling.

Talking about professions in magazines that I would not have thought to be possible, here is an article in the New Yorker on The Rise of the Professional Cyber Athlete.
After reading the article you might actually want to watch that Bomber vs Scarlett match – it’s a thing of beauty.

A very different thing of beauty is the idea and execution behind this gallery: 24 Photographs Taken at the Exact Same Moment All Around the World.

This is a very fast train. And it’s maybe a bit less disappointing than the Shanghai Maglev that even at full speed feels a bit like a metro. (Which is probably by design – it is how it is used, anyway.)

Have a good start into the week.

75: Pretty Chill

November 17, 2014

Hello internet friends!

It’s 2014, that poor little probe we landed on a comet is already out of juice. A bit like my iPhone around lunchtime.
Talking about probes: at least Uranus might be full of surprises.

Last week I mentioned Serial and how I wouldn’t listen to it because reasons. Well, those of you who know me might have guessed it: I had to give it a try anyway. I’m still not too sure what to make of it – from what I have heard in my binge-listening-and-then-unsubscribing this weekend, it seems to me the guy did it and now a whole bunch of people who were hoping to put this behind them are in the internet’s spotlight.
Serial is a big hit, though – and suddenly people like podcasts.
Suddenly?

Besides listening to podcasts my weekend was eaten away by 0h h1. Curse you, addictive browser logic game!

Oh, wait, no – back to podcasts. (Sorry.)
The wonderful Allie Brosh was on Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast – it is a great interview and oh boy, does it get dark.

Too dark for you? How about some knowledge about the weird reproductive cycle of jellyfish and how they’ll soon take over the world?
Or you know – space sloths.

Be safe.

74: Basil Goes With Everything

November 10, 2014

Hello internet friends!

74 newsletters in and I still didn’t bother to check the rules whether there needs to be a comma behind that “hello” or not.
Onwards.

2014: An enormous bitcoin mine went up in flames.
Is this the future? It sounds enormously cyberpunk-y to me.

Talking about enormously cyberpunk-y things – my copy of City of Darkness arrived this weekend. A stunningly well-made book about Kowloon Walled City I will probably be busy looking at the great photos and diagrams and reading about the inhabitant’s lives for quite some while.
And yes, one of these cross-sections made it into the book as well.

A Call For Web Developers To Deprecate Their CSS ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The big podcast du jour is The Serial which chronicles a reporter looking into a murder case from 1999. Apparently it is very well made and yet – I am not all that willing to give it a listen. Mostly because I am afraid I might like it too much and then forget that these are real people and not something like Lost or Twin Peaks.
Obviously I am not the only one with those ideas. Especially since some listeners seem to start looking into the case by themselves.

And hey, sure, why not? Cooking 101: An Infographic is worth a thousand recipes.

Be safe.

All Tomorrow's Parties

November 3, 2014

Hello internet friends!

This weekend I flooded my kitchen with coffee.

I also finished reading William Gibson’s new book “The Peripheral” and it is unsurprisingly very good.
I always thought that it is unneccesary to tell people about him and his work, but “What’s a William Gibson book? Is that like Harry Potter?” made me rethink that.
Turns out, William Gibson is already here, he’s just not very evenly distributed.

Of course a new William Gibson book also means a lot of William Gibson interviews. Here are some I enjoyed: (Warning, some are quite spoilery)

And then there is this long portrait of Mr Gibson.

That should keep you busy for a while – if you’re not that interested, here, have a sleeping puppy:

Or the best wombat movie ever made.

Or some Japanese rock music.

Be safe.

72: Uncanny Grape

October 27, 2014

Hello internet friends!

I was like “I know a guy who can eat a whole grape.”
Marcel the Shell is voiced by Jenny Slate, who we all know as Mona-Lisa Saperstein and who has a strange little origin story for Marcel.

Talking about women on TV – I am sure we all wondered what happened to the girl in Journey’s “Separate Ways” video? Well, now we know.

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Apparently we use filters on our photos because they would be slightly creepy otherwise? Who knew.

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If you need icons, here are some icons from Google. They’re CC-BY-SA, so go for it.

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If you need to know the time in Japan – and who doesn’t? – here is a handsome man and a pretty lady clock for you.
And then there is always the uniqlock.

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Almost every sitcom is set in New York – but where in New York exactly? Here we go: The Most Famous Sitcom Residences In New York City (↬ @fab1An)

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On Saturday I actually managed to leave the house. I got rained on, which I should have known, but I didn’t.

Stay alive.