Hello internet friends,

no shit, Sherlock: Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control)
I’m pretty sure the contents of this article are only a surprise to people who don’t procrastinate. But hey, read it anyway, maybe it helps you to not have to do something else right now?

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I am in the lucky position that I have a whole bunch of very good art museums nearby. (And as with most other privileges, I just squander it by not going regularly.) And so the logistics on how certain special exhibitions with art works from all over the world happen are pretty fascinating to me: How to move a masterpiece: the secret business of shipping priceless artworks

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Click. Paperclip. Click Click Click, more paperclips. Remember Universal Paperclips? Well: The Unexpected Philosophical Depths of the Clicker Game Universal Paperclips is a very neat article with a lot of background information. Including the awesome fact that someone is working on a movie script based on the game.

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Last but not least: The case for being grumpy at work

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Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

did you find your eggs? Great. Let’s move on. And let’s hope that this wasn’t a cruel April fools joke.

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I’m not too sure if I’m interested in watching Ready Player One – I read a sample chapter of the book and oh boy, did that suck. But apparently the movie might be a tiny bit better: “Ready Player One” Is An Accidental Horror Movie About Fandom
But I’m pretty excited for that one: Excerpts from My Upcoming Novel, Ready Player Two: Girl Stuff

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Remember phone booths? Now that we don’t have phone booth phones anymore what’s the next best thing? Phone booths without phones! And they seem to be great fun: I’m the man in the Jabbrrbox

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There are a lot of fun things to put into your garden if you have a big one. Garden, that is. Gnomes. Flamingos. Fountains. But what weirdly has fallen out of fashion lately: The Strange, Short-Lived British Trend of Hiring Ornamental Hermits

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If you do this I probably hate you: Re: The Stressful Email Marketing Tactic That Will Not Die
What kind of monster would do that?

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Toodles!

Hello internet friends!

It’s April 3rd and, wow, luckily it’s not April 1st anymore and the jokes are over. Who likes these things anyway and why are they still around? The Verge is on it. (tl;dr: because brands)

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Big Duck News

Last october we learned that big dinosaurs quacked. Now we actually know (for variable values of “know”) how at least one of them looks like: For the first time, we know what Tyrannosaur faces really looked like. Go ahead, click that link. Just for that last paragraph.

Egg News

Twitter got rid of the eggs. Now before you rejoice, let’s take a break. They didn’t actually get rid of the egg people, they just got them a new icon. Now how clever is that?

Robot News

On some days interacting with fellow human beings is just so hard. Sometimes these days coincide with days when there is no more food in the kitchen. Ugh. So basically at this point there are two options: actually do grocery shopping or order some food. Both of them require a tiny bit of human interaction.
Well, at least until now – Domino’s and Starship Technologies will deliver pizza by robot in Europe this summer. Honestly the first time I read something that might make me want to move to Hamburg.

Uh-oh

As you can imagine, just from that previous section, any article that starts with “Talking to other humans, GOOD or BAD? It’s hard to say for sure.” speaks to me on a deep level. And since I’m a big fan of talking to people by typing (hi!) here we go: Messaging Apps, Ranked
I’m not sure I 100% agree on their results, but it’s a fun read anyway.

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Well… toodles!

Hello internet friends!

I’m not so sure what to think about this whole deal with the Panama papers, yet. A lot of journalists seem to be pretty psyched by their own work, which actually is pretty impressive, so: good for them.
I have my doubts that this won’t be out of the news cycle pretty soon, though – there is always stuff happening and most people have short attention spans.

Talking about short attention spans: Chipmunks!

You might want to have a good laugh at Juicero, the Nespresso of juices, but then remember: they managed to get themselves $70m and articles not only in the tech press, but also The New York Times and Vogue.
But hey, it is ~Food Tech~

Talking about collecting a lot of investment for something ridiculous and/or non-working: Electronic Gills!
Unlike the juicer this might kill somebody, so it’s not quite as funny. On the other hand, that articles from the New York Times mentions some dangers of the ~smart juicer~:

Working with freelance welders and machinists, he built prototypes in his Brooklyn kitchen. By 2013, he had a working model, albeit one that occasionally blew apart, sending pieces of metal and food scraps flying across the room.

Boom.

Have you taken a selfie of a hoverboard lately?
Words have meanings. The only smart person in the whole Egyptair story mentions that, too. It’s an exercise for the reader to find out who she is.

Life hacks!

Be obscure.
Sleep naked.
Watch Friends.

I think we have reached peak Vice.

Have a good week.

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