Hello internet friends,

sometimes we need a time-out. A little distraction and yes, escapism. This is what I’m trying to do here – so, here we go.

One of the things the world seems to be using for distraction these days is Pokemon Go. So much so that the stock of Nintendo almost doubled for a couple of days. Roughly until the people who do stock things learned that Nintendo doesn’t have all that much to do with that game.
Meanwhile people are having fun out there, catching their little worms and bears and whatnot and honestly, that is a good thing.

Another good thing this summer is the Netflix series “Stranger Things” – even though it did make me yell at my TV at three in the morning.
You know you’ll be in for a ride the moment you see the title card.

Meanwhile there is a lot of cuteness in Japan. Which goes right back into our theme of distraction and escapism in the face of bad situations once you get to the last paragraph.

Remember a couple of years back when suddenly everybody did the harlem shake put ice water on their heads? Turns out that actually had some benefits and wasn’t only a fad.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

apparently we all have a whole bunch of doppelgangers running around. Which kinda makes sense – there are only so many types of faces around.
At least mine was one of the dudes who invented the car.

Not only have we learned that dinosaurs were basically giant feathery chickens, now we also know that they probably sounded a lot like them as well.
Could someone with a lot of time please do a re-mix of those scenes from Jurassic Park and just put chicken sounds where roars used to be? Thanks.

Apparently it is now a thing to sue a painter for not having painted a certain painting. This is pretty weird – at least a lot weirder than the painting itself.
Talking about art – now this is art I can really get behind.

Oh well.
Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

every week when writing these emails I sift through all the links I have collected in the previous couple of days, trying to find some things to amuse and/or enlighten you. Given that I am writing this email in English, most of my sources tend to be in the US and oh boy, have those been depressing lately.
Maybe it is time we send a UN peacekeeping mission there until they stop (not so randomly) killing each other?
Onwards.

Maybe for a laugh imagine being the person who saw Bigfoot?
And now let’s wonder what happened back in 1908 in Siberia.

If you have a lot of time and a lot of interest in China and the literature of China, learn something about the ultra-unreality of modern China.

Apparently a lot of oil tankers are idling around near big harbors, just sitting there, waiting. What are they waiting for? It is more or less the same reason why some ships rather go around the whole of Africa instead of crossing the Suez Canal.

Big sports events are what the internet likes to call a dumpster fire. Don’t believe me? Well, have a look at what the IOC wanted from Norway in case they’d run their winter games there.

Fast-forward selecta! How Flight of the Conchords outlasted the hipster – turns out mostly by being really really good at what they do.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

good news! More Tasmanian Devils found!
I mean, I don’t have any attachment to these critters and such, but all things considered, that sounds like good news to me.

So, my burning veins cry in eternity. Apparently the most metal sentence in the world. It is indeed very good to know which words are the most metal and which ones aren’t.

It is very important to have hobbies. Maybe “finding the ugly naked guy from Friends” might be a semi-questionable one. But hey, success!

This is super interesting: Multi Entry – “A decentralized collection of stories and media about the creative young people of modern mainland China and the culture they’re creating.”
And it has GIFs, too.

I leave it as an exercise to you to connect the dots in these three articles. If you’re not particularly interested in ~the web~ there’s a hint in the last paragraph of the Williams portrait.

• The Forrest Gump of the Internet
• The Moral Economy of Tech
• Farm to keyboard: why software is the next “craft” industry

It’s still Monday morning, but I’d already be okay with a drink.

Toodles.

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.