It’s a thing we do when we succumb to new web2.0 services. The cool, the useless, the fun, the might-turn-out-to-become-interesting-at-some-point applications, tools, communities. The places where everyone says they don’t want to, don’t need go, but where in the end, everyone turns out to be. What we do is, we apologise. We look for excuses. We’re casual. Just checking. Because we kept receiving all those emails and invitations from friends. Because we got annoyed. Wanted to know what all the fuzz was about. Because we got tricked into it. And now we know. Actually, we forgot we already looked into it some time when it was still in private beta. Yes, it’s pretty cool, somehow, I guess. For some people. Not so much for me. With time, and all. I just stopped going there when the community grew too large, you know? God, if they haven’t deleted my account already, I wouldn’t remember my password if Rupert came and crawled up my arse to social network my intestins. My profile is so not up to date anyway, last time I checked them all was, what, 1999.
All I’m really trying to tell you here is that I’ve got a new one. I’m twittering now. I’ve submitted myself to what was called the most useless, time consuming {but somehow interesting} service yet invented on Mashable. I’ve tried it before and now I’m trying it again and I have to say: Twitter does fill a gap.
It’s the gap between blogging and chatting. It’s what you do when you want to say things that are not important or interesting enough to write a whole post about, but matter enough to be read by more than one person. All in all, it fullfills the need to express yourself to a lot of people, quickly, effortlessly. It’s the extension of mood updates, the better alternative to posting comments everywhere. One way or another, it’s an ego thing.
It’s interesting to see that many posts on Twitter can be categorised into either chatting or blogging. Many, many posts seem to be lines taken from a chat, incomprehensible to most other readers. Other writers truly become writers – each post is a quote, a micro blog entry, carefully composed, posted to be read.
Back to web2.0 services. The thing is, it never ends. Immediately after my first post, a digital tsunami of other needs welled up in my chest. I wanted a desktop Twitter feed and a widget for my blog, which wasn’t supported by bad, bad WordPress and I discovered Twittervision. I thought it would be nice to have Twittervision as an active desktop background, which turned out only to be supported by IE. Which in itself is unsettling on so many levels I can’t describe. At least not here. Maybe on Twitter.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Beatles, evolution, hobnox, hobnox evolution, Music, T-Rex
Just a regular day at the office…
Filed under: Uncategorized
Why is it that when I read the headline “Turkey Blocks YouTube for the Zillionth Time” on Mashable I think of this?
I somehow need to get back in business.
Filed under: Uncategorized
… dear WordPress, for increasing free space to 3GB (instead of 50MB). It is wildly appreciated.
Thanks for inspiration go to Google, I guess. The WordPress news item reads:
Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.
What you forgot, dear WordPress: if you’re talking rich media, loosen your video embedding restrictions, because nowadays, there’s more to embed than YouTube.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cologne, conference, david, Germany, invincibility, köln, lynch, meditation, transcendental, uni, university
“David Lynch here. I don’t want to have anything to do with Hitler. We all know he was not a good person who did terrible things.”
It sounds like a joke, yet it’s almost painfully real. David Lynch’s plans to build a network of “invincible universities” teaching the philosophy transcendental meditation never struck me as quite convincing or, for that matter, sane. Hearing Lynch and his three little elves explain their educational methods, which, ultimately, strive to engender world peace (uh-huh) during a press conference in Cologne only made it worse. Our editor Stephanie must have spoken for a larger part of the audience when she told Lynch afterwards she had just listened to his speech for three hours and still failed to understand what’s the purpose of the invincible universities. The answer she got was hardly more comprehensible than a Twin Peaks episode.
Lynch and his entourage of gurus started to sweat when they were asked what they meant by their concept of invincibility. They started to sweat more when the German audience got rather agitated in response to the all to familiar talk about an “invincible Germany”. David Lynch himself was sweating the most, because he doesn’t understand any German. Which is why he posted a response to his fury crowd on Nosedef afterwards.
Watch the best outtakes from the conference and Stephs’ interview with Lynch on 99stories.com.
And finally: do these guys know about all this?
Speaking of karaoke, I’ve dreamed of performing ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’ by Meat Loaf since I was 11 or 12. When I was about that age the videoclip still used to be played on MTV now and again. I had memorised the text completely and imagined I would sing it together with the boy I was secretely in love with . We would put on a brilliant and passionate act at the end of which we would realise our love for each other. That was before I could understand that the song is actually about a boy trying to get into his girls’ pants.
As we decided to throw out tons of money to artists who do awesome things, we were left with poor options for our Christmas party. But creative as we are, we managed to make something out of it. This was my first visit to a karaoke bar. The next time I’m there, I’m definitely going to have almost sung something. Possibly.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: culture, evolution, film, hobnox, Music, naked, urban
The downside of working in a start-up company: we haven’t earned those millions to throw at marketing campaigns just yet. That is why when it came to promoting our awesome Evolution contest, we had to get nekkid.
What is truly awesome about the Hobnox Evolution contest, obviously beside the fact that it has posters with naked people on it, is that you can win an artist support budget of 25k if you do something awesome in one of the three categories music, film and urban culture. What are you waiting for? Click the boobies, submit your project and win! Awe-some!
Filed under: Uncategorized
This is odd. I was going through some – OK, a huge pile of – papers, sorting them out, looking for unpaid bills or other things I could throw out. Then I found this piece of sheet music. It looked vaguely familiar yet I couldn’t place it, so I sat down at my keyboard and tried to play it. And somehow, I did. The partiture was still in my fingers, they started playing the partiture almost automatically. I recognized the melody only bit by bit as my fingers moved along – awkwardly smoothly by the way, without missing a key or beat.
The second time I played – and recorded – it, all smoothness was gone. I had to focus hard on reading the scores, and my fingers moved slightly uncoordinatedly. I still don’t remember practising nor playing it at some point in the past. What’s certain is that it must have been a long time ago. It’s the last sheet of a sonata, probably Mozart. It’s simple. And it’s really known, in an awful, cliched kind of way. And I know there is a story to it. I just can’t remember. But it’s thrilling. That I know.
This is some exhausting mystery. I’m going back to bed now. Who knows the piece wins the prize!
