Hello internet friends,

this might sound cheesy but I sincerely hope you’re all doing well. It’s cold outside, so wear your warm boots. (I know it’s not cold for at least one of you, but I think everybody else is in the northern part of the northern hemisphere. If now – why don’t you let me know? Always glad to hear from you.)

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I’ve been online for a long time – not one of the first wave of internet people, but I can firmly say there’s at least two decades of internetting being me – and there was always one platform that I tried and never managed to get quite into. And now it seems that finally everybody left: “The Linux of social media”—How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging
If you’re into this kind of stories, why not have a look at the excellent newsletter-website-book The History of the Web? I’m sure I mentioned it before but it really an evergreen recommendation.

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Once in a while people just do crazy things. Like this Russian dude who took a coal train across the Sahara desert. (YouTube link. In Russian with English subtitles.)

While we’re talking YouTube videos, here is probably the video that managed to be both the most fascinating and the most boring I have seen in a long while: Earth-Moon-Mars distances to scale, at LIGHT SPEED!
Good god, Mars is far away.

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If you ever learned any second language, you’ve probably noticed one thing: there are basically only two words for tea. It’s either tea or cha: Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea
Cheerio.

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Have you seen the two Fyre Festival documentaries? If not, what are you still doing here? Get watching!
When you’re done, let’s have a little look at how those documentaries happened and how they are obviously problematic, too: Fyre Fight: The Inside Story of How We Got Two Warring Fyre Festival Documentaries in the Same Week and Comparing Fyre Fest Docs: Netflix’s ‘FYRE’ Vs. Hulu’s ‘Fyre Fraud’
For what it’s worth: I enjoyed (using the word “enjoy” very liberal here) the Netflix one more. Or maybe the one by the Internet Historian.

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Sorry.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

the good thing about this newsletter is that I know for sure that all 69 of you are nice but not bought. Not something everyone can say about their readers: The Follower Factory

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OpSec 🤡

For some people it seems to be fun to run. Many of these people use an exercise tracking app called Strava – and some of these people are soldier. Who might be somewhere where they’re not too happy about their location being shared with the world. Weeeell:
Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases

Camel News

I don’t even know what to add to this article:
12 camels disqualified from Saudi beauty contest in ‘Botox’ row

Skill Hubs

You’d think that the camel story is the height of absurdity for this week’s email? Well, it gets a lot worse: Facebook Wants to Open Special ‘Community Skills Hubs’ in Europe and Train a Million People

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I can’t even anymore. Community Skills Hubs.
Good god.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

first things first: happy Year of the Fire Rooster!
Onwards!

On Friday the dumpster fire on the other side of the Atlantic has escalated even more. The Verge is looking at how the CEOs auf Silicon Valley companies are responding. Meanwhile this is how things look like from the Middle East. At least the reaction of the American public is somewhat encouraging with protests all over the country and a record sum of donations to the ACLU.
idk people, all of this really scares me and I doubt that things will get any better soon.

Well, let’s forget about the future that will be for a while and remember the future that could have been. It’s always weirdly soothing to look at drawings by Syd Mead.

Another way to calm our nerves might be reading the works of one of the many self-help gurus out there. Turns out – and this is the real surprise here – these people are usually not what they seem to be.

We all liked Jurassic Park, right? Well, just imagine how adorable (and probably even more terrifying) it would have been with huge otters. I mean – huge otters are scarier than huge chicken, right?

One of those cheesy authors that keeps getting reposted into my Tumblr dashboard once said we’re all made of stardust. :unamused:
But do you want to know what is really made of stardust? The dirt and grime on our roofs. Turns out, eh?

Stay safe out there. Stay sane.
Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

I am quite a big fan of looking at screens, but the scenario how the couple in this article consumes media/uses their devices scares even me.

Even though it is still absolutely inscrutable to me, the last two weeks peer pressured me into looking at Snapchat again. My post-snake-person[1] cousin, #oldguyonsnapchat, and the good people at one of the many[2] Slack chats all together managed what poor Teymur alone didn’t manage to do.
So, here we are. If you are a snap person, add me and please – and now you have to excuse me for using the same old joke that all the old people who have only a vague understanding of these new things have, use – don’t send me your genitals.

What would you do with your last day of internet?
Now that’s a fun thought experiment. The answers given in the article tend to be pretty boring, so here is mine, also pretty boring: Probably exactly what I do just now, trying to reach out to people. The internet is – and has been for almost two decades now – a way for me to connect to my friends and peers and if it just went away, I’d have to re-learn all the ways that people use to connect offline.
I might even have to use the phone to make calls, ugh.

Tempting: Every 3 Months, I Unfollow Everyone on Twitter
But probably: no. That article is via Lara who used it to justify following everyone I follow with her secondary account. It is a very special kind of hell to have a friend go through one’s Twitter follows and live-slack that experience.

Now for something completely different:

Think about an enormously muscled 1,500 to 2,000-pound animal, with horns the size of a full-grown man, which hangs out in herds of bored and testosterone-driven bachelor males, and has no fear of humans and no qualms about charging.

Lovely!

Have a good week – and don’t call Justin Bieber.