Meh

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?


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


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.


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


Toodles!

Re: Girl Stuff

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.


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


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


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


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?


Toodles!

Human Interaction

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)

Brands!


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.


Well… toodles!

Juicy!

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.

Fingers in Food

1.0 Tiny, Tiny Letters

Hello, new readers! I don’t know many of you and that’s okay. I am sure you are here because Mr @darth sent you, thank you very much. I’m not going to pretend I have a lot to offer. (FYI: That sentences works about as well as a pick-up line as you might expect.)
I am pretty sure that all those personal (or not so personal) newsletters turning up lately are a bit of a fad, but so far I quite enjoy it. Both as a reader and as a (TW: douche language) content producer.
So, when are you starting one? I’d be happy to hear from you.

2.0 Monument Valley

I am probably preaching to the choir, but yes: Monument Valley is really that good.

I don’t have more for you today.
Have a nice weekend!
Dominik

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2

1.0 Become A Fan

1.1 Venn

Myke Hurley asks the guests on his brilliant podcast CMD+Space the same question every time:

What would you like to be known for?

It’s a genius question.

Someone once told me that human beings have three dimensions: how you see yourself, how others see you, and how you want others to see you. The closer the distance between the three dimensions, the more at peace you are and the more stable you become.

And here is Marwa Rakha explaining in her novel The Poison Tree why it is so good: the guests are asked to disclose that third point, while knowing fully well that the listeners have their own point(s) of view and that those two things tend to by wildly different than how they see themselves. Plus, the answer is probably almost never really how they want to be seen. It is almost impossible to answer that question without admitting to a certain insecurity while not sounding like an idiot.
As I said: genius.

1.2 Huge Fan! H u g e Fan!

Become A Fan
(Remember when this was still a thing? Kids these days probably don’t even get that joke anymore!)
Given that I won’t ever appear on that show, here is my answer to that question: (Or at least one possible answer. It’s fluctuation so wildly.)
Currently on the internet, I’d like to be known for being a fan. A fan of the internet and of the people on it and of the stuff they are doing with it.
There is so much cool stuff online. So many smart, creative people. So many hilarious gifs of animals.
Hallo, Dominik!

2.0 How I Met Your Season Finale

Just like probably everybody else I have seen the season finale of How I Met Your Mother and just like seemingly everybody else I have capital-O Opinions about it. (If you have not seen the episode, yet, and managed to avoid any spoilers, here we go: it was all a booze-fueled dream, Ted doesn’t have any children, he never found his true love, so he became a crack addict and told two creepy dolls he found in the garbage how he wanted to find someone.)
Anyway: Opinion! (Notice how that suddenly become singular? It used to be plural, just a couple of words ago.)
In my Opinion it was basically an okay How I Met Your Mother episode. It was pretty neat how they managed to bind it together with the pilot and that they knew all along where they were going.

Anything else? Anything?
Have a good day.
Dominik

Mergers and Acquisitions

1.0 A good story

It must have been the fall of ’96 when I first got “the internet” – pretty late, all things considered. The web was already important enough that Microsoft used Internet Explorer to kick Netscape around, and yet HoTMaiL was still it’s own service and not owned by them. (Btw: my first email address was, yes, at HotMaiL (please notice the spelling!) and yes, before they became part of Microsoft. And the address still works: dominikschwind@hotmail.com – it’s pretty amazing. Hardly anything from way back then still works. My websites on various free webspace providers – gone. (Remember GeoCities? Tripod? Angelsomething? There were so many around.))
But I don’t want to do this about how ephemeral the web is – while “the internet never forgets” might be true when one wants to forget or be forgotten, it usually forgets a lot. Again: a topic for some other time, if I don’t forget about it.
What really made me fall in love with “the internet” right away was the fact that it is basically a wide open window to the whole world. A place where people can just create something great and put it online, for almost free of charge. (See also above, the free webspace providers. And my own blindness to the fact that my parents paid a crapload of money for the highspeed internet, delivered to my bedroom by a 14.400 modem. So, yeah: free!) And because it was still quite early in the history of the web and the whole highspeed thing was not very fast, those great creations were usually text and even more usually in the form of stories.
And that is still the number one thing that I feel the web excels at and that still fascinates me so much, even after more than 17 (ugh? really? that many?) years: telling stories. Basically everything we create on the web tells a story. Or more precise: fragments of a story. That Instagram picture of Les Rambles – a fragment of a travel story, maybe. A romantic getaway to Barcelona (One might hope.) or the story of a self-centered social media addict who thought: “That looks great with the Hefe filter, I am sure I will get many likes for it.” (More likely. Still a story. Certainly a more familiar one.)
And what are these emails other than short stories about some dude who is trying to entertain the great self-selected group of people who are willing to listen?
So, yes – story telling. It’s the web’s greatest feature and for me personally companies or projects that realise that fact and build around it, are the most exciting things online. Flickr, WordPress, Twitter, Tumblr – even gauche websites like Yelp or Quora – can be used for story telling.

2.0 April Fools

Don’t believe anything on the internet today.
Dominik

Stupid Flanders

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