Posts

The week before last was filled with theater, a full 9 hours of it which should last me for the rest of the year. I wrote the one negative review you will find of ‘Krieg und Frieden’ as a result of it.

So that cat is out of the bag: I’ve taken up residency at KANT, the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering. Peter who you may have read before on The Waving Cat just wrote the inaugural post on our freshly pressed Tumblr (tweets are still forthcoming).

The week before last started out with me still in Paris sampling the local coffee scene which has been improving massively over the past year or so.

This week was the week where we were in full sprint for the pilot launch of KAIGARA. Besides that we had a dinner off NEXT with some people involved and some speakers. What I managed to catch from NEXT’s program while working was nothing short of splendid. Bruce Sterling’s talk has been shared widely and I’m eagerly awaiting Anab Jain’s to be published as a video (the slides are already there).

I’ve learned my lessons: I will not go to traditional German theater anymore and I will never again book a play without first checking its duration.

Unbelievable how many weeks behind I am on these. That’s not wholly intended, but the last couple of weeks have been a bit busier than usual. This was the week of April 15th which I spent mostly in Amsterdam.

Something that we noticed during my recent study of the German language is the tremendous promiscuity of Dutch with English which goes even further than I had previously noticed. We all know the usage of many English words in Dutch as if they were our own, but I wanted to pay attention here to a special case: the fully imported verb.

The week before this on Monday (almost two weeks ago), I went to a lecture by Graham Harman. Notes on that were blogged in a timely fashion.

I played a bunch of Ultratron over the past couple of weeks. It’s beautiful pulsing dance of bullets that lost its charm somewhere past level 100 where I thought I had the game beat, but everything keeps on repeating ever faster. That was eleven hours of obsessive pleasure (according to Steam) followed by emptiness.

The week before this is getting a bit boring, but as soon as the current project is over I promise that adventures will resume again.

Last Monday I heard Graham Harman give the International Flusser Lecture in Berlin. The lecture was in German and for me as a non-native speaker somewhat hard to follow, but the present Germans loved it. ‘The English dominated academia’ seems to be problematic for them 1.

I had penned some notes about bitcoin before the entire thing exploded last week. So it seems that everybody is blogging pretty much everything about bitcoin there is to blog. So trying to see if I have some points that are still worth publishing.

We’re in the middle of a big project, so pretty much everything is that right now. In between some small things happen, but we’re rather busy shipping right now.

This was an interesting read and only strengthens my resolve to read most of the things Houellebecq has written.

Two week notes in one because last week seems to have been too busy to write any.

Dear Niels and Kars,

In Conversation: Jaron Lanier and James Bridle On Who Owns the Future? from The School of Life on Vimeo.

There are some interesting similarities between a recent proposal commissioned by the French government and the book out by Jaron Lanier just now “Who Owns The Future?”

Last week we were on something of a tear continuously shipping things (it beats continuous integration). As Kars mentioned in the Hubbub weeknotes I was featured in the rather shiny TNW magazine about the subject of gamification. Much to my surprise this issue was filled with blabbering by Gabe Zichermann. It’s not only that we take issue with the way he approaches games, it looks like everything about the man is shameful. You can read unparalleled levels of douchebaggery over at Kevin Slavin and to my dismay even GigaOM 1 is complicit.

It seems to be not completely obvious how to host a website on heroku while at the same time also maintaining e-mail delivery. You would think that this is a very common situation and it would be well documented but unfortunately it is not.

Hier mijn recensie van Proteus voor de nrc.next een paar weken geleden geplaatst (dit is een fractie van wat Bogost heeft gedaan op Gamasutra maar in Nederland is er geen plek, tijd of geld voor games):

Hi Niels & Kars,

http://twitter.com/thornet/status/303586923719557122

A bunch of stuff I did last week is summarized nicely at the Hubbub weeknotes. This is going to happen more and more often, so these weeknotes may become at risk. We’ll see what happens.

I swore to myself never to go to the theater again 1 which took a lot of the pressure off. But yesterday I did go to see V. in Ballhaus Ost. The posters hanging around town piqued my interest that a group in Berlin would stage a text by Thomas Pynchon. And if anyone should break my rules, it should be me.

My small project during Swhack was to create a django version of a delegated voting system partially inspired by Liquid Feedback and the manyfold problems that system has 1. In particular that it is written on such an esoteric stack 2 that it is near impossible to get running without root on a Linux machine and let’s not even discuss the maintenance. What is even worse is that it makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to join the project and contribute to it significantly.

Besides the immense amount of things we did over at Hubbub last week, I also spent a lot of time doing various other things which sort of amazed me to be honest.

Last Monday Uber had drinks here in Berlin and took a complimentary Uber there to chat with their Berlin team. The experience was extremely comfortable but given big city traffic it wasn’t very fast 1. In cities where the cab market is unreliable and corrupt I can definitely imagine the appeal of Uber. People working on transit apps should take note, this is the way it should work.

Recess! is a correspondence series with personal ruminations on games.

Here in the Berlin office we grind by hand:

So this Saturday Jan Lehnardt and I are having a small hackathon here in Berlin in remembrance of Aaron Swartz and to in one small way continue doing the work that needs to be done on the internet, in government and especially where those two meet.

All of the books I read are to be found on Goodreads but here is my year’s overview because it is customary to do these things. I count 23 which is not too shabby but should be improved upon (always).

Recovering from flu meant a week of mostly broken days, but still got a lot done and more importantly: got better.

German friends some things need to be written but don’t take them personally. If anything, as I write below, this presents a very large opportunity for who will take it.

With most of my work focusing at Hubbub these days, the weeknotes over there (the past week) are going to form the meat of my work in the foreseeable future 1. I may need to use these weeknotes as an excuse for long form writing again and blog more here in general on loose ideas.

I got things back running again. Did a bunch of work on TORREON. Most Hubbub stuff is in a weeknote over there now that I am writing now alternating with Kars Alfrink.

Recensie verschenen in de nrc.next ergens in oktober 2011:

I followed the last CCC from a distance reading the Twitter fallout and keeping track of the live streams while getting work done in an empty Berlin. Besides the various controversies playing out, there were some good talks. What I found to be the best of the event was “Long live the protocoletariat” by Eleanor Saitta (@dymaxion) and Smári McCarthy (@smarimc) about a topic that is very near to the things I am thinking about: institutions and networks and all of the opportunities and problems associated with them. The presentation in the first thirty minutes of this video is well worth watching. Pull quotes below are paraphrases.

A couple of weeks ago I and judging from Twitter almost everybody I knew read Quinn Norton’s Eulogy for #Occupy. Her coverage for Wired and her twitter stream had already broadcast an almost minute to minute beat of events in the movement. That account finally culminated in this retelling of the camps and the evictions crowned with a tally of the movements hopes and achievements. It is one of the journalistic highlights of 2012.

Nothing much happened during the Christmas week before, so I decided to skip that note. Most of Berlin shut down into a deep hibernation normally only witnessed in student towns.

Recensie verschenen in de nrc.next ergens in december 2011:

Recensie verschenen in de nrc.next van 20 juni 2012:

One recap of 2012 which was an odd year what with the international move and all. Still in the second half I managed to get a lot of travel in leaving aside the almost monthly trips to Amsterdam by train. Dopplr unfortunately does not give me a total amount of kilometers travelled for 2012 anymore.

Last Monday was the last day in Berlin before the holidays so something of a push here and there to get things to go through. That night we had a vvvv workshop at the studio hosted by Joreg to teach somewhere around eight people the basics of node based graphical environments (the only other one I had used extensively before was Open DX and of course there’s Quartz Composer and Impure Quadrigram).

Ik ben even in de e-mail archieven gedoken om mijn recensie-arbeid voor de nrc.next te verzamelen. Naast wat er al op het ter-ziele-gegane Bashers staat, zal ik de rest hier posten.

I’m sitting in the train and get passed a link to a piece from Süddeutsche Zeitung about the internet and its sharing culture. This being my more-or-less favorite German newspaper, I dig into it expecting it to yield a solid piece of thought that will cause me to reflect on my online behaviour.