Hello internet friends,

want to mess up your brain on a monday morning? Sure, then look at this optical illusion.
I didn’t have my coffee, yet, and that thing makes me so dizzy.

As far as I can tell, the Pokémon Go craze has mostly calmed down. Which is lucky, after all it is the world’s most dangerous game.

Did you do the blow? Nono, now that one. And not that one, either. The one that scared away the evil dust spirits from the game cartridges. The intersection of technology and superstition is a fun one.

One way for local governments to save some money on road repairs? Make sure those roads follow a smuggling route.

Something I have wondered for quite some while: Why Are Babies So Dumb If Humans Are So Smart?
Once you get past the clickbait-y, but in a smart way, headline, this is actually a good article on evolution and, well, babies.

The Millennial to Snake Person browser plugin delivers once again. (And again I had to disable it to send this email.)

Clown sightings have spread to North Carolina. Now police are concerned about creepy copycats. Something something viral marketing, am I right? I’d still freak out if I saw a clown standing around somewhere. Luckily I just never leave the house, so that’s out of the question.
Except when I accidentally put on my clown makeup when sleepwalking again.

That feeling when you don’t know why your rocket exploded.

We used to have more poultry news here in these emails. (And by we I don’t mean the royal or even the editorial we. I am talking about me and you.) So I am pretty glad to have this for you: A Reading from the Book of Poultry
Wow, these are some magnificent birds.

Here, if you don’t know how to cook, this might be helping.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

autumn is upon us, it is rainy, grey and cold where I am. (I write, conveniently ignoring the fact that it’s going to be bloody warm again in a few days. 30°C in Mid-September? That’s just silly.)
So let’s just take this opportunity, have a cup of coffee and see if we can learn something new.

Last week the whole world was pretty excited about a phone call from space. Turns out (and this is in the actual headline) it was just something boring here from our little planet.

All things considered, we should not be too surprised – after all, what would aliens actually want from us? Maybe check on their pyramids?

Running something big-ish on the internet is not easy and people get fed up with it. Here, I just saved you a click. But if you want more details: Who Killed YTMND?
If you’ve never heard of YTMND, good for you. Keep on reading.

Remember Socality Barbie? The Instagram account that mocked basically everything on Social Media? Now there is real Barbie and sadly nothing of it is satire.

Burning Man. Where Pokémon Go and Class Warfare meet. What a slogan.

Toodles!

Sent From My iPhone

Hello internet friends,

how about starting the week with something rather lovely? Then here we go, a long love letter to the scientifically out-dated but still rather amazing dinosaurs model at Crystal Palace in London.
That’s quite a story. A slightly more modern take on these animals – if probably just as untrue – is by this Australian company, which tries to recreate dinosaurs as real-sized animatronic models. Now where are the feathers?

They say that one should avoid the kinds of restaurants that have a menu with pictures – a piece of advice that I have found to be completely silly, as these things go. I wonder (actually, I don’t) what they will say about a menu written completely in Emoji.

Kids these days don’t really want to read their tech news anymore. (Get off my lawn… 👴) So obviously they get it from the one place where they find everything – YouTube. And this guy is the number one Tech-YouTuber out there.

Remember CDs? If you’re Japanese, you probably look at your stack of rented CDs, shake your head and think “Remember?”

A very different way to get digital content happens in Cuba, where the Internet is a very scarce good. They call it El Paquete and it is very fascinating, indeed.

Only in Russia: Moscow airport gets Kalashnikov souvenir shop

Meanwhile in Singapore: The world’s first network of fully self-driving taxis is up and running. I wonder if it’s possible to get these things to drive slow enough to breed some Pokemon Go eggs – which might be just the thing to get the country that’s obsessed with that game to adopt self-driving cars for real.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

not many things from the 90s are still pretty cool – one of the few exceptions is the Super Soaker. Learn a bit about the nerd who invented those things.

I am absolutely fascinated by the “Lost Cities” series over at The Guardian.
Some I already knew about –Babylon, Troy, obviously, because I did read the Illiad and more than one Schliemann biography, Pompeii and the Angkor megacity that we discussed before. And all the others are just as interesting.
Have you heard of Cahokia before?

I like me some geotags and GPS coordinates and maps and such things. So do millions of gadgets worldwide – from mobile phones and cameras to drones and autonomous farming equipment. Turns out that plate tectonics are now a factor on how well these things work.

I can’t really remember how many bad fantasy novels I read in my lifetime – but I do know that quite often the maps were a lot more interesting than yet another hero’s journey. Now I can have the maps without the stories – on Twitter. This bot tweets a new fantasy map every hour.
It is really lovely. And if you want to know how it’s done – here you go.

The nice thing about fantasy maps is the fact that they are, well, fantasy and don’t have to show the messy side of geography. Unlike Google maps.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

you know how bats tend to leave their sleeping areas in huge groups, forming big clouds and managing to do that without crashing into each other? Well, turns out they do crash into each other quite a lot. Make sure to watch the video, it is rather interesting.

More animal nerdery news – if you enjoy the deeps of the ocean, have a look at Nautilus Live. It’s a livestream of a remote controlled submarine with real-time commentary by a bunch of often rather giggly marine scientists.

When I was a child I spent my summers doing stupid stuff like trying to figure out how fast I can read The Lord of the Rings or how long I can pretend to be asleep in the morning before someone actually started to worry about me. Turns out there is at least one rather fascinating, yet highly questionable alternative way for children to spend a summer.

Oh, good.

Remember Marina Joyce from two weeks ago? The YouTuber who suddenly was in the middle of a strange conspiracy theory? The Guardian talked to her and her mother about this weird situation.
At least her fans only had to imagine their idol being brainwashed. Things can be pretty different in other parts of the YouTubery.

Turns out when you legalize one drug, people who profit from illegal drugs pivot their business.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends!

Are you all watching the sports thing in Brazil? Yeah, me neither. But I do like the fact that it gives us great internet things, like this analysis of gymnast Simone Biles’ signature move.
Pretty, pretty impressive.

While we silly humans amuse ourselves with these kind of games, our fellow primates are slowly plotting our demise. First they get our secret documents, then they’ll cook us.
This is not going to end well.

One of the many overly nerdy things I enjoy – and I’m not talking about the ~cool~ nerdy things, like crushing it and writing JavaScript apps – is public transport. So obviously a story of a new “bus” which drives above other cars is absolutely fascinating to me. Just look at that thing. It’s supposed to run on rails, so it is both not a bus and probably won’t scale very well.

So, apparently the internet decided that we don’t like cargo shorts anymore. Which is obviously crazy, where else would we store our cargo in summer?
If this topic is too controversial for you, maybe this will take your mind of it.

I have been saying it for a while: maybe we don’t meet aliens because we’re on one of the first planets to develop far enough.

Let’s talk about our favourite cafés. You know the one – exposed walls with a couple of prints, tables made out of reclaimed wood, that italian-style coffee maker – but what you really should order is the cold brew. Turns out these things are everywhere and they look the same all over the world.

~~~

Before I let you go out there and have a productive week (:face_with_rolling_eyes:) let’s do some housekeeping. Every week I tend to have more links than I want to put into these emails. They now have a place on the internet and usually appear there a couple of hours after you get this email. It’s an experiment and it’s on medium dot com, so I think you can subscribe to it, somehow. Hm. It has an RSS feed as well, so maybe that’s what you like better.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

sometimes we need a time-out. A little distraction and yes, escapism. This is what I’m trying to do here – so, here we go.

One of the things the world seems to be using for distraction these days is Pokemon Go. So much so that the stock of Nintendo almost doubled for a couple of days. Roughly until the people who do stock things learned that Nintendo doesn’t have all that much to do with that game.
Meanwhile people are having fun out there, catching their little worms and bears and whatnot and honestly, that is a good thing.

Another good thing this summer is the Netflix series “Stranger Things” – even though it did make me yell at my TV at three in the morning.
You know you’ll be in for a ride the moment you see the title card.

Meanwhile there is a lot of cuteness in Japan. Which goes right back into our theme of distraction and escapism in the face of bad situations once you get to the last paragraph.

Remember a couple of years back when suddenly everybody did the harlem shake put ice water on their heads? Turns out that actually had some benefits and wasn’t only a fad.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

apparently we all have a whole bunch of doppelgangers running around. Which kinda makes sense – there are only so many types of faces around.
At least mine was one of the dudes who invented the car.

Not only have we learned that dinosaurs were basically giant feathery chickens, now we also know that they probably sounded a lot like them as well.
Could someone with a lot of time please do a re-mix of those scenes from Jurassic Park and just put chicken sounds where roars used to be? Thanks.

Apparently it is now a thing to sue a painter for not having painted a certain painting. This is pretty weird – at least a lot weirder than the painting itself.
Talking about art – now this is art I can really get behind.

Oh well.
Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

every week when writing these emails I sift through all the links I have collected in the previous couple of days, trying to find some things to amuse and/or enlighten you. Given that I am writing this email in English, most of my sources tend to be in the US and oh boy, have those been depressing lately.
Maybe it is time we send a UN peacekeeping mission there until they stop (not so randomly) killing each other?
Onwards.

Maybe for a laugh imagine being the person who saw Bigfoot?
And now let’s wonder what happened back in 1908 in Siberia.

If you have a lot of time and a lot of interest in China and the literature of China, learn something about the ultra-unreality of modern China.

Apparently a lot of oil tankers are idling around near big harbors, just sitting there, waiting. What are they waiting for? It is more or less the same reason why some ships rather go around the whole of Africa instead of crossing the Suez Canal.

Big sports events are what the internet likes to call a dumpster fire. Don’t believe me? Well, have a look at what the IOC wanted from Norway in case they’d run their winter games there.

Fast-forward selecta! How Flight of the Conchords outlasted the hipster – turns out mostly by being really really good at what they do.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

good news! More Tasmanian Devils found!
I mean, I don’t have any attachment to these critters and such, but all things considered, that sounds like good news to me.

So, my burning veins cry in eternity. Apparently the most metal sentence in the world. It is indeed very good to know which words are the most metal and which ones aren’t.

It is very important to have hobbies. Maybe “finding the ugly naked guy from Friends” might be a semi-questionable one. But hey, success!

This is super interesting: Multi Entry – “A decentralized collection of stories and media about the creative young people of modern mainland China and the culture they’re creating.”
And it has GIFs, too.

I leave it as an exercise to you to connect the dots in these three articles. If you’re not particularly interested in ~the web~ there’s a hint in the last paragraph of the Williams portrait.

• The Forrest Gump of the Internet
• The Moral Economy of Tech
• Farm to keyboard: why software is the next “craft” industry

It’s still Monday morning, but I’d already be okay with a drink.

Toodles.