Overexposed

April 13, 2015

Hello internet friends!

It’s finally spring, which is good, because: sun!
But it also means pollen and being tired all the time. (tbh I don’t need spring for that.)

The whole internet pre-ordered the Apple Watch last week. Nobody in my direct circle of friends did, though. I actually quite like how it looks like a tiny Airstream on a wrist, though.

Science news, now!
(The kind of “I heart science” kind of science, based on probably misunderstood reporting on actual science that real scientists have known for ages and/or are grumpy about the way it gets reported. You know, science.)

We’ll meet aliens in about twenty years!
Brontosaurs is back!
Droid fishes pass the turing test!
Tiny, tiny computers!

Take care and try to eat a little bit healthier than last week.

[Hand Wave Emoji]

April 6, 2015

Hello internet friends!

How to pretend to be happy on the Internet.
Oh well. Onwards!

If you’re into the whole Harry Potter stuff, maybe The Sorting Hat Bot is something for you?

This is less of a tinyletter and more of a bad OKCupid match
I also don’t understand it most of the time, but I do tend to be amused. Enough that I keep returning and refreshing even a couple of weeks after it made the rounds on everybody’s twitter feed.

Apparently something that real people are pondering: Should Grown Men Use Emoji?
For what it’s worth: as long as your CMS can handle them, go ahead.

Go out there and have the best week possible. And if that doesn’t work out, there is always next week.

Shame

March 29, 2015

Hello internet friends!

A day early and a very short one, I’m on the road tomorrow, but the email must go on!
Onwards.

TED is… well, what it is. But what it also is is the place where Monica Lewinsky held her talk on The price of shame:

“Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop,” says Monica Lewinsky. In 1998, she says, “I was Patient Zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.” Today, the kind of online public shaming she went through has become constant — and can turn deadly. In a brave talk, she takes a hard look at our online culture of humiliation, and asks for a different way.

It is worth reading how the comments to her talk turned exactly into the point she was making – and how the community management at TED worked to turn the mood around.

What is wrong with people?

On the other hand, if you think that this is cyberbullying, you’re pretty silly.

Take care.

Tiny People

March 23, 2015

Hello internet friends!

Beware the owls of March!
Well, March is over soon, so we should be relatively safe. Onwards!

Ever since I learned about them on MetaFilter I have been fascinated with K-HOLE and their reports. (And I am sure by now you have heard of and have gotten sick of “Normcore” – which might just be the group’s “Funkytown”.)
So I was pretty excited when I found a talk they gave at the Walker Art Center. It’s rather long for the kind of attention span we have these days, but it easily beats watching a bunch of TED talks.

This one is pretty delightful: The Secret Lives of the Tiny People In Architectural Renderings.
Look at all those tiny people!

I am still pretty sad that Terry Pratchett passed away – it is a bit of a ray of sunshine that he apparently managed to finish one last novel last year. It’s a Tiffany Aching novel, called “The Shepherd’s Crown” and will be published later this year.

Have a good week, everyone!

~~

Some shameless self-promotion: I have mentioned my link blog in these emails before. If you’re into getting emails from me, you can now have them automated, too – once a day, my link blog will send out the links of the last 24 hours, so if you’d like to get those, here you go.

Nevertheless.

March 16, 2015

Hello internet friends!

Not only is Tinder more expensive for people over 30, you’ll probably also get hit on by advertising bots.
Onwards!

By now you probably know that Sir Terry Pratchett has passed away. He’s always been one of my favourite authors and I do own all of his books, having pre-ordered every book as soon as that was an option.
And then there is this delightful and very nerdy way to commemorate Mr Pratchett: sending a special HTTP header.

I am not a huge fan of ephemeral “social” live broadcasting – I was under the impression that the ability to time-shift media was one of the biggest achievement of the digital age. But even though I really don’t understand Meerkat, the fact that Twitter rained on their parade was a real dickmove.

Have a good week, everybody.

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.

~

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.

~~

(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?  ↩