Hello internet friends,

I’m a bit late today, but in exchange you’re getting an email filled with all the dread and rage that only an eight-hour non stop meeting can provide. Soooo… onwards!

I went to an high school where Latin was the first language and all the classics were really important. So, obviously my understanding of the rough timeframe between the death of the dinosaurs and 500AD is more or less this: First there was a group of monkeys, who got domesticated by dogs. A bunch of them moved between the two big streams, where they wore Hammer pants and rubbed bottles to release snarky ghosts. Another bunch of them were visited by aliens and learned how to build big stone things in the desert. The remaining people sort of spread around the globe to provide something for Tomb Raider level designers to copy.
Out of nowhere the Greek decided to be democratic, smacked the Persians around a bit, got lazy and disrupted by a bunch of Italian upstarts. Now after those stopped killing everybody and started to sing in their bathtub while their city burned down, they were overrun by people who were barely done interbreeding with Neanderthals. At this point, everybody went into crazy religious barbarism.

You can see, that very long and proper education was really successful in teaching me about history. Turns out that this is all absolutely wrong and crazy euro-centric. Oh, well.

Fun fact frid… monday! Guess which medium the youngs like to use for getting their news!

Someone like me for whom English is the second language (actually, did you read that long “history” paragraph carefully enough to notice that it’s my third one?) has to learn this crap really carefully. And I am pretty sure I still mess up all the time.
On the other hand, it could always be worse. (And yes, ha-ha, same state as where I am from, but very different people. Obviously. Just listen to them talk.)

If you have Netflix, you probably binge-watched Luke Cage. (And if you didn’t, call in sick for the next two days and do so.) The next Marvel/Netflix thing is going to be the Iron Fist and oh boy, will they have to work hard to make that one not suck. On the other hand, they have Jessica Henwick, who then managed to be cast in Star Wars, Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not bad.

Here we are now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cheers!

Hello internet friends,

I used to think I was able to write these emails almost everywhere. Turns out almost everywhere in this case means almost everywhere with an okay internet connection and a proper computer.
Right now, for example I can’t really do that – my sister is staying in the living-turned-guest room and in my infinite wisdom I left my MacBook there. Based on the fact that nothing drains my will to exist as much as being woken up for no good reason and Luke 6:13 I’ll just let her sleep and experiment with how well I can write these on my phone. Turns out I ramble even more than usual.

I’ve linked to Maciej Cegłowski’s talks a couple of times before – they are pretty much always good. The one he held at the Library of Congress sounds weirdly positive. I really hope he’s alright.

Talking about weirdly positive – science realised that alcohol is an antidepressant and The Awl is ON IT.

Someone at the New Yorker finally figured out how to use Netflix and watched Ali Wong’s “Baby Cobra” comedy special. And they’re right – she is in fact really good.

It’s German Unity day today, so it’s a day off for me. But then for a whole bunch of reasons I do not understand not everybody is allowed to form that other important kind of union here. I mean, wtf?
But at least it’s possible to travel to almost every country where it’s better without having to get a visa, so… yay?

If you have a lot of time – and since you’re willing to let me fill up your inbox, I figure you do – why not look through almost all 3900 scanned pages of Paul Klee’s notebooks?

After a long search that left me broken and drifting, I think I have finally found my people on the internet.

Did you kill someone of your own species recently? (Oh wow, I sure hope you didn’t just nod and thought “yeah, sure.”) Turns out if you did, you might be a fluffy little desert animal.
Either that or one of those creepy clowns.

Remember Ello? Yeah, me neither. But someone did.

If you’re not bummed out enough yet, here, have something fun to read while you cry over your salad at your office desk.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

have you taken a selfie today, yet? It might be a good idea to do so, though.
Find your angle, work your angle. (Obviously the “study” is a bit baloney, but since I am pro-selfie in general, I will proudly link to it, saying: a-ha! confirmation!)

While we slowly adapt to the idea of self-driving cars, Amsterdam takes the whole idea a step further and develops small self-driving canal barges that can either be used as boats or form a pontoon bridge.

There are two airline commercials which I rather like. One is actually really good – the “Campari Soda” one for Swiss – while the other is a bit silly in its new-agey vibe. And of course, because it’s 2016, it is not only a bit silly but problematic.

You know what’s getting cheaper and cheaper? Solar energy, that’s what. Especially in very sunny countries like Abu Dhabi. But, you know, it is not like we’ll have the same conditions soon anywhere else, too.

It seems like there are not many cryptozoologists left – I didn’t really see anyone celebrating in the streets after we now finally have legitimate photographic proof of the Loch Ness monster.

The whole internet – well, those people who spend their time commenting New York Times opinion pieces on Twitter, which might be an indicator why this article struck a nerve – discussed this question over the weekend: Am I Introverted, or Just Rude?
I don’t know… do I have to pick?

Hm.

Toodles!

Let’s do some housekeeping, we have a few new faces around the table, so why not. The archive for these emails is here, all 180something issues. It also is on medium dot com, if that’s more your thing. I’ve been known to engage with replies there, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Almost every week there are links that just didn’t make it into the email, for some reason or another. I collect those over here. It has a full feed, too – so if you’re into RSS, then that’s something for you. I think that’s it for now, there is a Twitter feed and a Facebook page, too – both are there, because why not. If you get this by email, you already get it in the format it was intended to be.

Hello internet friends,

you might remember that stunning timelapse of Singapore which I linked to in June. Insider TV has a nice little video portrait of Keith Loutit, the photographer who shot that timelapse.

Back in the year 2000 (am I the only one who immediately has that Silverchair song playing in their head when someone mentions “in the year 2000”?) I actually was one of the few-ish people who went to the ill-fated Expo 2000 world’s fair. There is now a new book by Jade Doskow who travelled the sites of past world’s fairs to look at what’s left of them. Atlas Obscura has a few of her photos.

I really have no idea how books happen. Somehow they just manifest themselves in a library or bookstore, to be enjoyed by readers. Just like milk comes from a box and electricity just appears in my walls. At least the first of those mysteries is now solved by internet friend Sarah Cooper, who is in the process of turning her blog post 10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings into a book with 10x more tricks and was kind enough to give us a behind the scenes look.

In the late 90s a lot of people boxed air while being yelled at. Turns out Billy Blanks is still around and still doing his Tae Bo thing. Pretty fascinating dude.

Ants are very prolific farmers. How prolific, you ask? Well, they pick the aphids they use for their honeydew farming in a way that ensures the optimal ressource extraction from each plant.

Toodles!

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!