A weekly-ish email to my internet friends
Hello internet friends!
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A link to TechCrunch: (sorry) There’s Something Rotten In The State Of Social Media
Of course we all know. Oh, how we know.
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Why German newspapers are publishing in English – saving you a click: Because they want to reach people outside the German-speaking countries, which is not easy, because nobody speaks German.
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Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul
Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul
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This might be enough for today?
Hello internet friends!
Twitter did something bad last night – again. And everybody is grumpy and angry and wants to go to laconi… appdot… ello…?
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WordPress 4.0 is out. So enjoy updating all your blogs that you randomly started at some point and never really got around to fill with words.
Or is that just me?
(Totally unrelated: I bought two more domains yesterday.)
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Read this profile of Rhianna Pratchett over on Polygon – it is good and it includes this important information:
she, too, is quite fond of badgers.
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Friday!
Dominik
Hello internet friends!
Everything you need to know about the celebrity image hack is over here at Playboy.com.[1]
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Remember how I stopped using Facebook? Yeah? Good times. In my quest to find the magic that the “early”[2] web was to me, I also decided to quit Twi… wait, no. But I decided to finally – finally – deactivate all the emails that Twitter keeps sending me. Of course there would be a lot less of those if I didn’t have a whole bunch of one-joke joke accounts.
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Alan Jacobs claims that Big Twitter is over. His article is a lot smarter than “Big Twitter is over” so if you’re into that sort of thing, it’s worth reading. And so are the articles he links to. And those that they link to.
Wow, it’s almost as if this blog thing is not such a bad idea after all.
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In case you were wondering, here are the articles he links to:
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And in case you were really wondering: Twitter is still very much “my internet porch” and I am still pretty happy when I see that people I meet somewhere are active on it. A lot of this has to do with Tweetbot, though. Without its mute feature and the fact that it is just running there on my desktop, acting as a sort-of but-not-really chat room and window into the world, it might just not be all that interesting.
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Anyway, wednesday!
Have a good one.
Dominik
Hello, internet friends!
Now that it’s September, summer is over! Get used to dark, grey, cold and rainy days again. Opposed to dark, grey, rainy and not quite so cold days that were our summer.
I write this as if everyone of you is in the same geographic region as I am, which is of course a bit silly. Maybe you had a lovely summer.
And I hope you all have a great fall. Colorful trees, a stiff breeze from the south that keeps the clouds at bay. You know – the works.
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(Lazy newsletter request: does someone have the time to go through the UTF–8 charts and find a smiling version of that little dude?)
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I deleted the Facebook app from all my devices and things are good. I also logged out of FB in my main browser and deleted all their cookies. Not because I was making A Point but because it just got a bit annoying. I don’t need a push notification when someone shares a link. Especially not when I explicitely switched off all the notification.
Now I get about three emails from FB per day, which is okay – I can filter my email inbox automatically – unlike push notifications.
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Dee dee dee dee duh duh dee dee duh! How The ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ Melody Came To Represent Asia
And as usual, I quite like the MeFi discussion.
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Hang in there, Monday is only once a week.
Dominik
Hello internet friends!
There are quite a few new faces around – so I either caught the tail-end of that Techcrunch newsletter article or you’re all friends of Bob Sherron[1] who noticed that my newsletters look nice in Instapaper. My HTML game is strong, indeed.
Hello new readers! Have a cookie.
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Lately – and mostly because my friends and me are a bunch of soon to be middle-aged, just slightly too nerdy to be hipsters[2] who like to make fun of “youth culture” – the concept of YOLO has been part of conversations around me. That and the rather related topics of sleep and the comfort zone keeps creeping up and to end those discussions (“I can sleep when I’m dead!” “You will be dead pretty soon if you keep not sleeping.”) here we go:
Dominik’s unified theory of ramblings on YOLO, the comfort zone and sleep.
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WordPress plugins will soon have fancy icons. I know that some of you have mad crazy icon skills – anyone want to donate an icon or two for my plugins? I quite fancy those that look inappropriate once you have a dirty mind but innocent to those who don’t.
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Well, sorry about all that. Have a good day.
Dominik
If not, you might want to consider subscribing to his newsletter Periodically, too. He doesn’t ramble as much as I do and he has a regular publishing pattern, which I don’t. ↩
Sorry. ↩
A fancy way to say YOLO and a slight tip of the hat to the late Robin Williams. ↩
We as in: Humanity. The generations before us. Not necessarily us who write and read stuff on the internet. ↩
Hello, internet friends!
A new week ahead! That means we’re all a week older, yay.
So far today, I had one cup of coffee, a glass of water and a pretzel. You subscribed to these emails for this important information.
Onwards and upwards: the US west coast had an earthquake on the weekend and this is how it affected sleep in that area – according to Jawbone sleep data.
At the same time, I watched some pretty clouds moving around outside my living room window.
I posted that video with “TW: Boring” on Tumblr and it didn’t take very long until I got an angry message, that I shouldn’t make fun of trigger warnings and that I am The Problem.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Constant source of amusement: Cloud to Butt Plus.
That’s all, maybe you guys saw/found something intrigueing during the weekend? Hit reply and let me know. (That might now look like some silly social media manager trick to “drive engagement” but I’d seriously like to know: all I did this weekend was trying to find out how to make those time lapse videos, watch the F1 race and sleep. So… my brain is not only wide open but actually yearning for interesting stuff.)
Hang in there.
Dominik
Hello, internet friends!
I hope you’re all doing well. It’s Monday for me today, which is pretty convenient since it is Friday tomorrow – it’s great how that works when you take three days off in a week.
Well, it still makes today a Monday.
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For no apparent reason[1] I travelled in First Class[2] yesterday.
At the time of booking it was not such a big difference but it was amazing what a hugely different experience I bought for less than what I sometimes spend on coffee. I got on the train in Köln and it was packed. Seats were all taken, people were sitting on the ground, crying babies – train travel business as usual, I figure. Not so much in the part of the train where I had my seat – basically nobody was in there, there were actually employees of the train company around and they were friendly and kept giving me[3] candy.
It wasn’t quite Snowpiercer, but it was a pretty strange experience.
Of course I used my leisurerly time in the couch-like leather seat mostly to complain on Twitter about how the high-speed wifi on the bullet train that took me halfway through Germany in under four hours wasn’t working flawlessly all the time.
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I don’t know what to say about Social Media raffles that are based on using company’s hashtags. I guess some person can then tell their #boss that the #brand #engagement went #through the #roof? Yeah, that will sell a couple of €100k cars. #hashtags.
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Yeah, a big bouquet of flowers is going to fix that problem, buddy.
(Seriously: WTF?)
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Be safe out there.
Dominik
Which is the nice way of saying “YOLO” I guess. ↩
Deutsche Bahn doesn’t mess around with their naming scheme. You’re either a first class or a second class traveller. No ‘Economy’ euphemisms. ↩
Not just me. The old man using his Surface Pro and the Yuppie family with the little boy and his iPad also got some. Yes, I recognize these devices. Nerd alert. ↩
Dear Internet Friend,
With trust, I faithfully write to you as I know this mail will definitely come to you as a huge surprise, but I implore you to take the time to go through my mail carefully as the decision you make will go a long way to determine the future of my business prospect with you.
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It has been a while since my last mail – mostly because I used every free minute playing OpenTTD and watching Vietnam war movies playing around with a bunch of APIs to work on my website.
You can look at it, it’s almost done.
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For the second time in a week, my iPhone decided last night that charging was too much work. So I woke up to an empty battery again.
It’s weird how I don’t know what to do between waking up and leaving the house without the ability to immediately check Twitter.
And if you can’t trust your phone to charge, what can you trust these days?
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Did I mention that I like Vox? (Not the German TV station, the explain-the-news website.) I generally like having things explained to me.
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Have a nice weekend everybody!
Hello, dear internet friends!
I hope all is well with you.
Instant gratification is the best kind of gratification – says the internet. So here is Push for Pizza and here is an article on re/code on instant gratification.
It makes me slightly grumpy. Not because I am in the “In the olden days, we had to walk thirty kilometers through the snow to get a pizza! Uphill both ways!” camp that thinks hat instant gratification destroys all that is good and well but mostly because these things are probably not available where I am.
Here it’s Amazon Prime, two small food delivery services and a lot of “People, who don’t hunt and grow their own food, are lazy and being lazy is morally wrong.”
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Tina Fey is the best, we can all agree on that, right? Good. So here’s an old-ish article by her from the New Yorker: Lessons from Late Night
I like “Never tell a crazy person he’s crazy.” – I know. Just tell them, they’re your internet friend and they’ll be happy.
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Remember when OKCupid experimented on people? Well, the good thing is that it triggered Tim Carmody to write this article on why exactly this is wrong and why it’s a problem with the whole social web these days: The problem with OKCupid is the problem with the social web
Related, if you want to hear the other side speak, here is the OKCupid dude on a (short, so just go ahead and listen, won’t you?) podcast: TLDR 32: An imperfect match. Lovely fella.
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Public service announcement: Everyone on the Internet does Venn diagrams wrong
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Have a good day, folks.
Dominik
Hello internet friends!
Have you seen ‘Lucy’ yet?
I haven’t but when I will, at some point, I won’t be able to not see it through this lens.
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Those who hit the paths for 150 minutes or more a week, or who were particularly speedy, clipping off six-minute miles or better, lived longer than those who didn’t run. But they didn’t live significantly longer those who ran the least, including people running as little as five or 10 minutes a day at a leisurely pace of 10 minutes a mile or slower.
I’m not even all that sure if “living longer” should really be the goal, to be honest.
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I am quite tempted to get one of those quadcopters with a camera. Posts like this are not helping.
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The Case Against Cards Against Humanity:
I want to believe everyone’s motives are pure, even though I honestly don’t even know that about my own motives.
I want to believe that I can have absolute confidence that neither I nor any other people around me are horrible. Cards Against Humanity is built on that wishful thinking.
I have honestly given up on that, which is freeing in its own way.
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Have a good day, folks.
Dominik