1.0 Silly

The main reaction I got to my participation in the “100 happy days” project was: well, that’s silly. Or: I thought about doing it, but it’s too silly. And then this was probably the worst (THE WORST!) reaction:

Railing against the silliness of inspirational posters and images but doing inspirational internet challenge projects.

Err, yes. I am well aware of this dichotomy. In fact, I find the whole 100 happy days to be awefully silly, too. But hey, it gives me a reason to actually take pictures and try not to take the same picture every day. Because at some point, “blue sky with sun” gets incredibly boring.

2.0 Fluff

I have a lot of half-written sections for these emails. I start to write them, often with a short sentence that would make a medium-good tweet, then I start to elaborate on it and suddenly

a. the content of that first sentence starts to look incredibly dumb and
b. start to ramble without finding a proper point that ties everything back together.

So yes, basically I am now at a point where I can only manage thoughts that are about the length of a tweet and often have the substance of a cotton ball. Don’t stare too hard, it might catch fire.

3.0 Queue

If you are familiar with Tumblr, you might know their queue system. It’s a rather ingenious feature that allows the user to, well, queue posts instead of posting them right away. This way it’s not completely apparent at which times someone is online and (re-)blogging, the danger of completely dominating the dashboard of the readers is mitigated and, well, one spreads the posts more evenly over the day to constantly command attention.
It works well for blogs with a theme that are often consciously uncoupled from the blogger’s personality. These tend to be the blogs that end up getting book-deals because they are about something and not about the author.

As some (or most) of you know, I am way too active over on Tumblr. It is not much work and has instant gratification built in – exactly the kind of Skinner box that works well on me. And because I like to try things, I put stuff in the queue instead of instantly reblogging them this morning. The effect for me was very strange, the uncanny valley of Tumblr. When the posts appeared on my blog and on the dashboard, they were carrying my name and I do know that I put them there and that I liked them when I reblogged them, but the context was suddenly a different one.
I guess I am already too conditioned to get the instant joy of seeing “my” post right there on the dashboard.

4.0 Gracias

I hope you’re all doing well. (In the words of the wise Louis CK: Hoping is all I can do for you.)
Dominik

1.0 Coffee!
Still slightly fired up from being angry about being angry – good day to you all, wherever you may roam. This is the first picture of that silly challenge:

2.0 Second worlds
So, Facebook bought Oculus.
For those who didn’t follow the story so far: (I know I didn’t, because I’m not much of a gamer. So if I get anything wrong, please let me know – just reply to the email.) Oculus is a Kickstarter-funded Start-Up that works on a Virtual Reality headset called Oculus Rift. A lot of indie developers jumped on the idea of an independently financed VR headset and began creating (or porting) games over.
Now that Facebook bought Oculus for a bucketload of money, many people of course feel slighted, mostly for two reason:

1. People don’t trust Facebook.
2. Once again the evils of capitalism crushed an indie dream of collaborative creation and cooperation. This is very much the stronger point here. None of the people who gave money to Oculus through Kickstarter is getting any money back. (As far as I know.) And all of those smaller indie software companies, that thought they’d grow together with an indie hardware company to shape the future of gaming and virtual reality, do now have to deal with a huge, mostly anonymous entity. I guess if they want that, they can just go back to developing for Sony and Microsoft hardware. And as someone who had contact with Instagram developer relations people before the Facebook deal and after, let me tell you one thing: it does make a huge difference.

Just read the blog post by Markus Persson, the guy who gave the world Minecraft.

3.0 Green! Super green!
Have a good Wednesday, everybody.
Dominik

1.0 Arnold

It might not be such a bad idea to listen to the Nerdist podcast episode with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It is pretty fascinating, I don’t think I have ever heard or read an interview with him that was more than the usual movie promo stuff.
Go ahead, listen to it. I’ll still be here later.
…
Now I know he is a rather controversial person and I wouldn’t agree with many things he said, but it is fascinating nonetheless how he managed to get to where he is now. For people who actually learn lessons from stories like that, his might not be the worst one. (Work hard, invest smartly, be at the right place at the right time, don’t take yourself too seriously. Learn English.) Needless to say, I prefer the last two.

2.0 Happy!

You probably don’t know me as the most upbeat, optimistic and cheerful person around. The word that might come to mind is “grumpy.” (Which might also be because I’ve used that extensively in the past to describe myself.) I have even extensively quoted Marc Maron on positivity and yes, I do maintain a certain distrust towards “glass half full” kind of people, because they seem to be in denial about reality, man.
But fuck that. I am currently surrounded mostly by people whose main conversational topic is being angry about stuff or that things are wrong and that people are not behaving the way they are supposed to. (Remember? It is pretty bloody toxic, to be honest and I have no idea how to be part of those conversations.) I mean, what the hell is going on when I think there is too much negativity around?
So I will actually do something that I made fun of just a couple of hours ago: I will actively do that stupid #100happydays thing. Yes, it is really silly. Yes, I have figured out that it is just a thinly veiled attempt to sell people their own pictures as photobook. I have no real interest in that – all my photobook attempts so far have ended in disaster. But still! I should be able to think of a thing or two a day that at least has the potential to make me happy. And while I am at it, I will try to research something positive that can start a conversation.
“These stupid people can’t park!” – “Have you heard? They renewed ‘Episodes’ for another season!”
Maybe something different than that. But it might be a start.

3.0 Happy Happy!

I still hate those “Happy” videos. I get it, people have access to a camera and to dancing and to the internet these days. Wow. Much viral. Such Pharrell.
—
Yours, still grumpy that he’s not the most grumpy anymore,
Dominik

1.0 Public Transport

Fun fact: I actually enjoy public transport. That is probably due to the fact that I was never really in a position where I had to rely on it for more than a couple of days. But nonetheless, I actually find it to be pretty interesting to take a train. (Or god forbid, a bus.)
I am pretty sure because it is the perfect way for an introvert to be amongst people. There are people around – something that the social animal called human seems to enjoy for whatever reason – but one is not required to interact with them. In fact, it is highly discouraged to interact with them and it’s usually the starrers and talkers that seem to be attract the ire of people.
In a way, taking public transport, especially during commuting times, feels a lot like lurking on the more open social parts of the internet. One gets to experience (for better or worse) a lot of different people and their life choices – something that opens the mind and the heart to the fact that, yes, people do take very different routes through life and that this is mostly a good thing.

2.0 Gadgets!

After I mentioned my Bluetooth speaker in my last email, I got a few questions about it.
I have the Logitech UE Mini Boom, which I bought after reading about it on The Wirecutter. It’s rather small but has a good sound quality for a speaker that size. It pairs well with my iPhone, I tried it once with my mother’s Lumia, which went well, too – so I guess it works with every device that supports audio over bluetooth. The battery life is pretty incredible – once it’s charged all the way I can listen to music and podcasts on it for the whole remaining day without having to think about it. It’s much more likely that my phone ends up yammering for a recharge.
—
That’s all, folks.
Thanks for reading, have a good start into the week.
Dominik

1.0 Lifehack

Don’t use the bathroom before going to bed. Nothing helps you get out of bed faster in the morning than a certain amount of pressure.

2.0 Shower music

I tried listening to podcasts during my morning shower. I noticed pretty soon that I have trouble listening to people talk while water is flowing onto my head. So I checked the next possible source of audio entertainment on my phone and found Spotify.

My taste in music is very much “it depends” – something that tends to freak out fans of a specific genre of music. I am perfectly fine to listen to country music one day, dubstep the next one, classical music on the third day and trippy surfer music the day after that.
Now I am really tempted to write a little script that runs around the time I am usually done with my morning rituals, checks if I listened to any music in the last hour, take one random song and post it somewhere.
Useless? Yes. But it might be interesting and could even help someone discover new music.

Yay or nay?

2.1 Wait, what?

Yes, I listen to music from my iPhone while taking a shower. No, it’s not in there with me, I’d be scared to have water damage. I’m a bit less scared for my little bluetooth speaker to have water damage, so that one is in the bathroom and the iPhone is outside, nice and safe.
Maybe I should even consider spending money on a waterproof bluetooth speaker, then I don’t have to crank it up to 11 to hear it on my side of the shower curtain.

3.0 !!!!1111!!!

Once we all use smartphones, nobody will understand why we put ones in our row of exclamation marks.
He said, not knowing where non-iPhone smartphones have the exclamation mark on their virtual keyboards.

4.0 Hello, new readers!

This is what you get, it won’t get any deeper or smarter.
Take care,
Dominik