Hello internet friends,

I know, I know. It’s Tuesday. Life happens. Here we go anyway, let’s do it.

I do have a metric (hah!) buttload of Brexit articles in my Instapaper but I am pretty sure we’re all slightly sick of hearing about it at the moment, aren’t we? So in the spirit of escapism, why don’t we take a breath (you know, without our bloody watch telling us to do it) and watch a bunch of capybara videos on the YouTube. I don’t know about you but it calms me down considerably.

As a big proponent of the “more selfies!” movement – which I might have just invented, who knows? – I am obviously pretty much in favour of all the angry tweets (are there any others these days? I am not too sure anymore.) triggered by this New York Times article.
A few personal favorites.

So, capybaras and selfies, are we all nice and calm now? Well, depending on your personal disposition this ode to gentrification might either make your head explode or maybe you just nod along. Either way, it is interesting.

If you have a lot of time on your hands and want to read something extremely disturbing how about this? My four months as a private prison guard.

I do enjoy magazines quite a lot, but somehow I never quite felt in the target demographic of either of them. But finally there is one aimed directly at me.

That’s it for today, let’s go outside and warm ourselves on our own personal little trash fire.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

remember way back when YouTube was really new? lonelygirl15 ruled it back then, a vlog by a young lady with an increasingly weird back story. It turned out to be the first real web series that used that medium to it’s full potential. A whole bunch of years later we now get an oral history of lonelygirl15.

As a formerly-avid Flickr user and veteran of Geocities I am always a bit scared when Yahoo buys something I use. They’re not really doing Tumblr any justice, too.

It must be a fun job to be the Social Media person for Smash Mouth.

Last Monday was Apple Keynote Day and while most of the stuff they announced was pretty alright, there is now one big question out there: Is Apple’s New Meditation App More Full of Shit Than Deepak Chopra?
Another unrelated but equally important question: Celery: Why?

I always thought that my friend Martin is living the dream. Turns out this chicken is easily better at it than him.

Hot Lust In Space.
Hot Lust In Frogs.
Hot Lust In Popes.

Most people like to use GPS on their phone mostly because it’s a convenient way to get to where they want to go. (Which, turns out has a pretty significant influence on the design of online maps.)
For nerds like me it is also a rather calming thing to look at: here is a map, here is a little dot that tells me where I am. It’s nice, really.
It’s also highly inaccurate. GPS signals bounce around, are blocked by houses or trees, the phone will try to guess where it is, using cellular and wifi reception. So if you use some app to keep saving your current location, it will wiggle around quite a lot. If you’re like me, you’ll shrug. But if you’re more artistically inclined, you’ll see a pattern of ghost movement.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

I have bad news for you: What you read on the internet may affect the complexity of your own writing. I’ll try to find you some quality content to make sure you’re not getting a lot dumber just by reading this email.

How about some information on the domestication of dogs?
It’s a bit a false label, though – mostly you’ll learn about scientist beef and how they hang in Ireland and drink to get over their differences. And well, dogs. Great illustrations, too.

“Pho is fun, but you can’t have it every day. You would get bored.” Try me.
But before you do, maybe you want to learn about the history of pho. Which is also a good way to learn more about the history of Vietnam.

What else do you want to learn today? We do have some follow-up on our favourite space news, both courtesy of Popular Science: that planet, that might be in our solar system, is probably, if it is even real, not really part of our solar system. Ehm. Or it is, but we might have lifted it from somewhere. Which would probably make us “cute shoplifters”?
Here, have my apology for this terrible segue, let’s get back to space! Scientists are still pretty unsure if the alien megastructure, which might be a meteor shower, is an alien megastructure or not.

Man, scientists sure bicker and disagree a lot. Which is, just in case you were having even the slightest moment of doubt, a sign that the system and the scientific method is working.
And hey, in the end we might get the science for some fancy outdoor entertainment.

The first time I heard about adult coloring books, I was amused and figured it was a coloring book with, well, adult drawings. Instead we get books for adults with flowers and such, which is slightly less amusing. But on the other hand: “You can do it stoned, or you can do it drunk, and at the end, you still have something pretty to put on Instagram.” And who could find something wrong with that?

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

I am still not sure how to react to the news that some asshole nerd – who is most famous for telling people not to go to college – used his dot-com-money to hire Hulk Hogan to punch someone who wronged him ten years ago in the face.
Obviously that’s not exactly what happened, but, wow.

Guess who said it?

Weapons are always used for a wider purpose such as saving the world, and are part of a child’s development.

Hm? Hm? You probably guessed wrong.

When we move around ~the internet~ we have cookies dropped on us, because advertising. (Yes, sorry.)
Advertising companies try to use the data collected with these cookies to understand who we are. Given that the company who probably knows me better than any other – Amazon – is still trying to get me to buy a second TV after I bought my first one, I am not so sure how smartly they actually use their data. But of course the whole thing might be slightly weird because they can never know the real us – besides, who can? – but only a ghost of us.

“You took away the fire roads” – map making is serious business and not everybody just uses turn by turn directions.

I have never even heard of the Luwians but then I’m not really a bronze age scholar. Other people are and they decided that the Luwians are a thing.

So, I watched the new Top Gear and oh boy, do I have opinions. So does everybody else.
idk, I’ll give it a bit more time. It is also quite amusing to pretend that Matt LeBlanc, who already was the best part of that first show, is the Matt LeBlanc character from Episodes. Which is a TV series you might want to watch – it is really funny and you have probably not heard of it, yet.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

if today’s email seems to be even more disjointed than usual it might be because last night I discovered the joys of crack cocaine.
Well, let’s have a coffee and get going.

So, how’s that thing with the self-driving cars going to happen? Why don’t we just ask someone who knows what she’s talking about and look at Johana Bhuiyan’s complete timeline to self-driving cars?
One data point from China: Baidu is actively testing their self-driving cars in the city of Wuhu. And no, I also haven’t heard of Wuhu before, it seems to be pretty small by Chinese standards, only 3.5 million people live there.

Meanwhile the plans to railgun people around are progressing, which might even be fun once we figured out how to stop people from throwing up all the time.
And while that’s all fun and obviously the future, maybe someone should tell these people about the Aérotrain and the Transrapid – two other rail-like transportation systems that are objectively very cool and obviously the future but never quite managed to be put into service. (Well, yes, except as airport train in Shanghai, which is all well and good but not the future I was promised.)

We might think that it is pretty weird that Kalashnikov wants to start making menswear but then I am sure that other arms manufacturers do these things already. (Don’t let me down on this one, ’murica. Of course you don’t.)

I haven’t even properly looked at Windows 10, yet – still, it is pretty interesting that Microsoft will finally, after all these years, have a common operating system for all their different platforms.

Well, that was a nerdy one. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Toodles!

Hello internet friends!

Sometimes I have suspicions that maybe – just maybe! – you are not my really my friends and just use me for my superior internet content curation skills.
Ahh, nah. I am sure I’m just paranoid.

Heard about that kid that managed to find a lost Mayan city by matching up a star map with the known Mayan cities? Yeah, turns out he didn’t.

A topic that we can’t just escape from seems to be – emoji! Last week we learned about the damage they do to scholars of medieval punctiation. (These links were just for a refresher. You don’t need to click them if you read the article last week, duh.)
Now this week we actually learn something interesting! Straight from the blog of an engineer who worked on Chrome an explanation how emoji work.
And if you think “a software engineer talking about the intricacies of unicode rendering is probably dry as hell” you are so, so wrong. Read it – she’s funny and writes well. You’ll be entertained while reading it and be a lot smarter afterwards.

North Korea content!
Now some of us might think it’s a good idea to travel to North Korea. If you are one of those people you probably booked your trip through Koryo Tours. A fascinating, if someone limited look (sounds familiar?) behind the scenes of that agency.
Once you’re back from that trip you might then be able to score big on this internet quiz: North Korean Slogan or TED Talk Sound Bite?

Exoskeleton news!
I am very excited about the news that scientists are working on something that the author of this article calls magical pair of trousers.

As you probably know I am a big fan of Jurassic Park (Don’t mention the sequels. Any of them.) so this story wasn’t new to me but it might be new to you and it is super fascinating: When they started to make the movie, stop motion animation was still the way to do these monster effects – but while they were working on it, computer effects started to look realistic enough to be put into a movie. (Seriously. Watch it again – except for a few weird scenes, the effects hold up.)
So what did they do? They didn’t just want to fire their highly trained animators, instead they built them a rig that allowed them to animate computer generated dinosaurs. Brilliant.

And since it’s public holiday over here, there are a few bonus links for you:

• Drugs!
• Guns!
• Snapchat!

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

did you manage to read all the articles I linked to last week? Hm?
If you didn’t, you might want to instapaper them and take them on that trip to Cuba that you want to take before it’s ruined.

If you read this chances are that you have given me your email address at some point for exactly that reason: that I can send you these letters. But what happens if someone asks for your email address just because he wants it?

I wanted to link to this article for the pretty funny last paragraph, but then I realized it’s not actually that funny and it’s about some marketing stunt for a band that I don’t particularly care about. So… meh.

Talking about meta-commentary – a lot of people tweeted that Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy article and oh boy, is it obvious why. Because it lets people look at their own miserable sad lives and go: “Hmm, well, that must be because I am so smart!”
Of course that’s not true for all of you, you are all very smart, but try to keep it in mind – it’s a fun little pattern to observe.

Now I am not so sure, though – does that mean that Danes are not very smart?

Another article that everybody linked to last week was Uncanny Valley and oh boy, this is a great one. Very well written and amusing if you think that “Silicon Valley” is a too positive look at the internet industry. (You are watching “Silicon Valley”, right?)

Now a link for people who make websites: The history of ‘this website is well-crafted’ hints – well, true. I might need to look into the whole serviceworker thing.
Now a link for people who (play and) watch StarCraft II: The life of Life: Chronicling the rise and fall of Lee “Life” Seung Hyun – this one is pretty sad. An extremely gifted player, stopped by his addiction.
Now a link for people who think about Social Media: The Feed Is Dying – ugh. But true.
Now a link for people who use batteries: Researchers have accidentally made batteries that could last 400 times longer – by “last longer” they mean “more cycles” and not “only need to be recharged every month.”

Toodles!

PS: Ahem. Why did no-one tell me I have written “Vol.2” for the last couple of emails?

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.

Hello internet friends,

while I was pretty pretty pleased with last week’s “Here are ruined things” email I also got the feedback that ~people~ will not click on links if they are presented that way. One of my friends – an online marketing viral content guru (aha!) – even suggested that this format does not convert hence the lower engagement with my content.
And we wouldn’t want that, would we? So here we go!

Neil Gaiman spoke at a memorial event for Terry Pratchett – you will never guess what he revealed there.

The amazing story of a man trying to build his own private air force.

You will be surprised which invasive species is destroying South America!

Political Correctness taken too far??!!??!!

How Blur frontman Damon Albarn and comic artist Jamie Hewlett evolved into a cartoon simian rock band

She is known as the most famous stock photography model in the world – now learn what Rebecca Givens is up to next.

They decide what you get to see online – and yet they are underpaid, overworked and barely acknowledged.

27 Ridiculously Creative Ways To Decorate Cupcakes

Now go forth and engage!

Like4like, follow4follow! Twitter! Facebook! Medium Dot Com!

---

Because reasons, here are the image credits:

• Picture of Neil Gaiman, taken by Kyle Cassidy and shared under a Creative Commons licence on Wikipedia.
• Picture of the Ayers Thrush, shared under a Creative Commons licence on Wikipedia
• Picture of Machu Pichu, shared under a Creative Commons licence on Flickr
• Picture of a pixelated Rust butt, blatantly stolen from their dev blog.
• Gorillaz at the Apollo, public domain via Wikipedia
• Photo of Rebecca Givens, via, well, a stock photography site.
• Picture of cubicles, public domain via Wikipedia
• Picture of cupcakes, shared under a Creative Commons licence on Flickr