No More People

February 11, 2019

Hello internet friends,

did you know that Currywurst is 70 years old this year? Well, me neither. Luckily there’s a coin to celebrate this anniversary and oh boy… just look at it.

Just like a plague of locusts, humans are everywhere and the worst. And it is common knowledge that this is just going to get worse and worse and worse until every cm on earth is covered in human.
Now some people say: not so fast, common knowledge. The World Might Actually Run Out of People.

“This might be something for your newsletter.” Indeed it is, thanks Ben.
A 25-Year-Old Dinosaur Jr. Song Is a Hit in Japan. Nobody Knows Why. – there are some hints in the article, but maybe it’s just a sudden attack of 90s nostalgia. Either this or the rent-an-uncles play the music of their youth to the children of today.

Hey, if you’re still using Twitter – why not clean out your follow list with this fun app? Tokimeki Unfollow
KonMari all the things, I guess.

Here is the Immigrant Song, performed by Transformers. Enjoy.

Toodles!

Spooling

February 12, 2018

Hello internet friends,

did you ever wonder Why Do We Need to Sleep? Turns out – nobody knows. (Of all the things we need to do, it is one of the best ones, though. Ah, sleep. That’s where I’m a viking!)

Hard

This post by Frank Chimero has been making the rounds and for a good reason: Everything Easy Is Hard Again Web development is constantly moving forward and evolving, which gets us to the weird point where people with twenty years of experience and people who just start at the profession have to learn the same new things.

Downhill

Probably seemed like a good idea at some point: Racing Wood-Carved Scooters at Breakneck Speed in the Philippines – pretty fascinating and given the complete lack of breaks on these things and the fact that the race course goes through villages with a big group of spectators, I’m not too sure about their safety record.

Electric Bogaloo

As much as everybody tries to have a paperless office – well, everybody but let’s not go there – there’s a printer somewhere tucked into a corner and for sure it jammed at least once before. Turns out – the reason why paper jams persist is quite a complicated one that a lot of very smart people keep trying to solve.

Office Space

Talking about offices – these are just wonderful: Your Favorite TV Shows Brought To Life With Amazing 3D Floor Plans (Even though I do have an opinion of calling your own work “amazing.” Oh well.)

Free Stuff!

Amazon is “trying” to clean up their review section – by showing which reviewer actually bought the item. Which leads to a weird phenomenon: people actually buy the stuff and have it sent to random people, just to have that flag on their fake review account: Fake reviews on Amazon means you get free stuff

That’s all I have for you this week, see you next time!
Toodles!

Garnguur Shrugged

February 13, 2017

Hello internet friends,

I hope you’re all doing reasonably well in these troubled times. And if you don’t, maybe it cheers you up to watch Jason Statham punch people for over four minutes? Or seven minutes of him kicking things and people?
(Or maybe it’s your thing to watch him dance oiled-up in tiny leopard print underwear?)

Now that we’re firmly on the topic of dancing and maybe fired from the more conservative work places, let’s talk Batman and his dancing. Or lack of dancing. Erik Adams over at the AV Club is pondering the light side of the dark knight.

We did talk about the way I was taught history before – very centered on Europe (the only continent named after a case of bestiality) – so if someone had asked me where I thought the oldest stories about geographic events happened, I’d have probably pointed to Greece or Egypt and shrugged. Turns out the Australians have stories about things that happened 20,000 years ago.

Imagine being a little girl and some Hindu priest decides that you’re a living goddess. That might happen in Nepal, in fact it does pretty regularly. Now imagine being a young teenage girl and retiring from that job. As one might imagine it’s not that easy.

Toodles!

Clubbing

February 15, 2016

Hello internet friends,

my usual writing tool – Byword – is crashing on me today, so I have to write this email in a normal text editor. Like an animal!
Quite a minor incovenience, just imagine instead I had a G(r)eek Chorus that kept telling me how I should be better all the time. I mean, seriously.
Onwards.

Runkeeper – which I personally use as a Walkkeeper and Sleepkeeper – is part of Asics now. This is pretty amazing, let’s see what they do with it.

Perhaps spending a night or two with a Neanderthal was a relatively small price to pay for getting thousands of years of adaptations.

How about I put this in my OKCupid profile?

Do you know about the Sleng Teng Riddim? Me neither, but here you go, the unlikely story how a Japanese lady over at Casio influenced reggae.

Take care, everybody, thanks for reading.

Brutalist Content

February 9, 2015

Hello, internet friends!

Remember when we all[1] thought that Google Glass would be the future and that we’ll all walk around as glassholes in a Google-controller world, happily searching the web while driving out driverless cars around?
Well.
Google Glass is gone and the story behind it is pretty amazing.
It is also rather amazing that this article ended up in the “Style” section of The New York Times and not in the teechnology one. I guess that’s another sign that we are clearly living in the future. Or at least a future.

~

T.J. Miller, who you probably all know from the cineastic masterpiece “Yogi Bear” bombed at some tech award show. Awkward. But hardly surprising.

~

I’ll just leave this here. Thinking too deeply about it will just make me angry. And yes:

If in five years I’m just watching NFL-endorsed ESPN clips through a syndication deal with a messaging app, and Vice is just an age-skewed Viacom with better audience data, and I’m looking up the same trivia on Genius instead of Wikipedia, and “publications” are just content agencies that solve temporary optimization issues for much larger platforms, what will have been point of the last twenty years of creating things for the web?

Well. Let’s hope there will always be a place (and the infrastructure) for [tw: douche speak] independent content creators.

Because what if not? Well: guns.

~

Looking for truely independent content creators[2] with a punk credibility that nobody ever could question? How about heavy metal musicians in Burma?

~

How about some brutalist building models on your desk?

~

A little bit too on-the-nose, but hey: Management theories from Roman slave-owners.

~

Remember Sega? Well, I think I have only ever played on a Mega Drive/Genesis once, but this interview with the product designer behind it is still very fascinating.

Probably related: How Japan became a pop culture superpower

~

Be safe.

  1. Heh.  ↩
  2. Seriously, Dominik? Seriously?  ↩