Innovation in blog design rarely happens, but I had something of an epiphany and gave this blog a fresh coat of paint. My primary impetus was that I didn't like how giving something a headline makes it feel far too official. So I removed them. Now every post feels like a quick, throwaway thing on social media.
Less pressure, more posts? We'll find out!
Watching people work at Disney Animation is my happy place. It makes me surprisingly emotional to see how much care and love goes into these movies. It’s perfectionism brought to its absolute zenith, and I’m so glad it exists.
These two videos made me very happy recently:
Here is my prediction for the name of Apple’s foldable iPhone.
We are (roughly) in the 20th year of the iPhone. At year ten, Apple introduced the iPhone X, a real break from the past with a new design and a new way of interacting with the device.
Now it has been another ten years. (Not really, but they skipped the iPhone 9 to call it X, so they obviously don't care about precision.)
X is the Roman numeral for ten. XX is twenty. A foldable iPhone has two displays.
iPhone 2X
Twenty years (XX). Two screens (2x).
You heard it here first.
Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.
What this means in practical terms is daring to trust your own curiosity. In creative work, that might mean abandoning the effort to “remember everything you read”, or conducting exhaustive research so as to ensure you’ve considered all the factors other people think you ought to consider, and instead using what naturally interests you as a filter.
Whenever I ignore this and dive into something I’m not interested in, I have a miserable time. Video content is a perfect example. I’m convinced there’s a way for me to actually enjoy making it, but I haven’t found it yet, and it becomes a headache almost immediately.
Trusting my curiosity, on the other hand, always leads me to a good time and makes me feel like I’m spending my days on something that’s actually worth doing.
I love handwritten notes. I don't love writing notes on paper. It's just too messy. Even though I romanticize filling notebooks with ideas, scribbles, and everything that goes through my mind, I always arrive at the unfortunate conclusion that it's just too much of a mess to be useful to me.
So I went down the rabbit hole of e-ink tablets.
My goal was to find a perfect digital notepad with:
A couple of months ago, I wondered if micro-blogging and journaling could be combined. Something about sending off small posts feels different from crafting a whole journal entry. I’ve been journaling the classic way for years, but I often felt like I was just going through the motions because I had to. It wasn’t fun, just another task.
So I built myself a complicated solution using Apple Shortcuts and Obsidian to prototype my vision of a short-form journaling experience. Tap an icon, a text field opens, and I can quickly jot down what I’m doing or thinking about. The result was a Markdown file with timestamps and those entries. That felt surprisingly good. It was fun to open the app and quickly note what I was doing whenever I had a few seconds of downtime. Far better than doomscrolling.
Not to be contrarian, but I don’t think Donkey Kong Bananza, Nintendo’s second Switch 2 exclusive, is very fun. The first level intrigued me. The sheer chaos of punching and breaking everything had me spending a couple of hours in a vortex of dopamine hits.
This got old very quickly, though. It’s the same thing in every level of the game: run around, smash stuff, collect gold, run around some more, repeat.
I haven’t finished it yet, but I’d say I’m more than halfway through the game, and it hasn’t surprised me as often as I expected based on the very positive reviews floating around. It hasn’t surprised me at all, to be honest, come to think of it. I watched the Nintendo Direct presentation showing what the game is all about, and that seems to have been it.
Not even the art style impresses me much. Coming off my second playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom, Donkey Kong Bananza only looks nice. Nothing made me stop and take in the vistas. Not to mention the character design, which feels a bit like something a 13-year-old in the 90s would have liked.
The story is basic and can be understood without reading anything, and its difficulty is easy enough to just run from quest marker to quest marker without having trouble progressing.
Sorry, DK, this Bananza is just a tad too boring for my taste.
Hello friends, here's a bit of blog housekeeping. Something of a public service announcement. I'm German, and sometimes the urge to write without having to do so in a language that isn't my native one bubbles up.
Since I don't want to start a second blog or newsletter to do so, I added a new feature to this blog that allows you to filter posts by language. It can be found in the footer and lets you switch between all posts, only posts in English, or only posts in German.
If you prefer to follow along via RSS, you can use the default feed that contains all posts, or choose to use the English or German feeds.
There are no German posts yet, but I figured I'd let you know about this in advance.
Exactly one year ago I moved back to Hamburg. This past year has been one of the best of my life. No regrets. I can‘t wait for all the years to come.
Do you think anyone, anywhere, is actually happy with how they take notes? I doubt it.
The moment you start thinking about your system, you stop being content with it.
What’s the right approach?
A carbon-based notebook that gives you all the fuzzy, tactile feelings? A digital setup that lets you search everything in seconds? Which notebook? Which app?
Every few months, I come up with a new “best system.” The result: my notes are scattered everywhere.
I’m torn. I love the idea of a romantic, analog notebook. But I also want everything searchable, connected, and in one place. Luhmann built a system that was both tactile and interconnected. But at what cost?
I tried a Zettelkasten in Obsidian, based on Bob Doto’s A System for Writing. It felt slow and convoluted. Tried index cards like Luhmann. Felt like I was losing my mind.
Maybe I’ll never find the perfect system. Maybe I need to accept: my method is just lots of notes, in lots of places.
There’s some beauty in that chaos, I guess.
