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January 24 2012
Oscar Nominations
The Oscar nominations are out and I’m utterly underwhelmed. Here’s a link, these are the nominees for best picture:
The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse
I can’t believe they’ve actually nominated Tree of Life. As much as I sang praise for this film before seeing it, after seeing it I can’t believe how this convoluted, messy and evangelical piece of nonsense could get nominated. Well, maybe it’s time to admit that the Oscars are finally beyond relevant.
My choice for – at least – best picture and directing? Drive. Too bad it’s not nominated.
January 22 2012
January 17 2012
What happened before The Scream
Ever wondered what came before Munch’s iconic Scream? Well, wonder no more:
“Fuck you Stephen Joyce”
Beginning of this year, James Joyce’s main body of work was released into the public domain. Most people are happy about it but the good fight against Joyce’s sole heir Stephen Joyce is not yet over, writes The New Yorker:
Sam Slote, one of the academics D. T. Max interviewed, now teaches English literature at Trinity College Dublin, and is a prominent figure in Joyce studies. When I spoke to him, he was careful to disabuse me of any impression that the estate might now be out of Joyce scholars’ lives for good. He pointed out that the status of the posthumous publications—the letter and manuscripts, for instance, as well as “Stephen Hero” (an unfinished autobiographical novel which Joyce radically revised as “A Portrait”) and “Giacomo Joyce” (a fragmentary, poetic account of Joyce’s relationship with a female student)—is still unclear.
Read the whole thing here.
January 15 2012
January 08 2012
January 05 2012
January 01 2012
December 31 2011
That time of the year
It’s that time of the year again. You know, that time where lists of what was great, what was awful, what was insignificant, what was most pressing during the last year are published.
I’m not a fan of this, as I’m generally not a fan of compartmentalizing what we here on earth call our existence. For the simple reason that what we enjoy here, on earth, is too much of an arbitrary thing. We have years, which help us create some sort of order when it comes to ending, say, a fiscal year, but these years don’t really say anything about the way we live and the way we are.
Sure, the last year saw catastrophic things, but it also saw great things. It saw hundreds of thousands of people dying, but it also saw hundreds of thousands of people surviving. It was a year – strictly speaking – like any other.
For most people, it’ll be the end of a bunch of months which culminate in one that sees Christmas and ultimately a bunch of fireworks, champagne and some resolutions which will fade as quickly as they have come into existence.
In the end, it all boils down to this: You should worry about the very small and the very big stuff. The small stuff, like what you’re going to have for dinner, is what keeps you happy. The big stuff, like whether we’re really the only planet with life in the whole of the vastness of the universe, is what keeps your mind open. Everything in between is really quite irrelevant.
So if, during the course of that next year, you feel like you’re having a bad day, think about dinner or the vastness of the universe and it’ll all be alright. I promise.
December 25 2011
December 18 2011
December 17 2011
My top services of 2011
It’s the end of the year and for everyone who is publishing something, either for fame, fortune or simply as a pastime (much like knitting only with words and less needles), that’s a welcome time to fill those publishing slots with “best of” lists. It’s an easy way out of a total lack of inspiration, and since I’m as hard to inspire as the next guy, I find this practice quite agreeable.
Anyway, I was asked to contribute my top five Interweb services by the fine people at German tech blog netzwertig.com for one of their end-of-year surveys (the result of which can be seen here, in German). So I decided to let you know what I chose and why, mainly because I think it’s information so pressing, I shouldn’t withhold it from you, and also because I haven’t posted anything here for ages and that simply kills my Google ranking. So, without further ado, here’s my choices, in no particular order:
- Google Music: You heard that right. It’s Google’s Music service, which in its current iteration is basically an online repository for the music you own, allowing you to stream it to your computer or onto your Android device. It’s something I’ve used pretty much every day for the last couple of months and even with the advent of much-hyped Spotify, I will keep doing just that. Mainly because I don’t like Spotify for the obvious reason of more or less coercing people into sharing EVERY SINGLE SONG to Facebook. What a bore! Facebook sharing is so 2010.
- Remember the Milk: 2011 saw me return to Remember the Milk as my number 1 todo-list app. I’d used it for a while a couple of years back, but soon came to hate its lack of simplicity. Fast forward a couple of years and scores of simple todo-list apps and there I am: my life has become sufficiently complex to warrant a complex todo-list app. And I also quite liked the introduction of their very polished Android app. To make sure I keep using it, I decided to become a paying customer. It’s what I call the lazyman’s tax.
- Evernote: Ah yes, Evernote. The good old Evernote, which I came to hate for a while back in 2010, mainly because they so steadfastly refused (and still do) to create a Linux version of their desktop app. In the meantime, Nevernote, an open source version available for Linux, has been released and I realized that I don’t in fact need a desktop version after all. Today, Evernote is where I unload all the stories, recipes, articles, notes and whatever busy and important people like me need to unload into a second brain on a daily basis (speaking of second brain, there used to be a rather interesting service named Second Brain, which covered a lot of Evernote’s ground. Unfortunately, 2011 also saw the shuttering of that service, due to lack of funds).
- Dropbox: There’s no real way around Dropbox. It’s just too good and soon it will be so ubiquitous, people will hate it but still use it, mainly because everyone does (in case you’re not into subtleties, I’m referring to Facebook here). They introduced Dropbox for Teams this year, which is a great way to share space for a rather reasonable price. I received 20TB of free storage for writing that last sentence (disclaimer: that was a joke, I did not receive 20TB of space for writing this sentence – in fact, I rarely accept anything besides cash).
- Angry Birds: It’s a game, it’s addictive, it helps my understanding of physics. And that is all I will say in this matter.
And that is it. You can now return to your reading of the Top-100-HuffPo-Link-Bait-Articles of 2011. Or some such thing. Lady Gaga. Naked. Bieber. Twilight.
December 16 2011
RIP Christopher Hitchens
So the inevitable happened and Christopher Hitchens succumbed to pneumonia yesterday. Vanity Fair, for which he wrote – tirelessly even while cancer ate away at him – announced his death:
“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.
For everyone who is not familiar with his ways, I recommend watching this fine video:
And then go and read his bestseller “God is not great” and his biography “Hitch-22″.
It’s sad to see, as we’re constantly moving towards an age of un-enlightenment, an eloquent, unrelenting and witty voice like Hitchens’ silenced forever. RIP Christopher Hitchens.
December 15 2011
Gasthaus Sittl - (5/5)
Maschu Maschu 2 - (3/5)
December 11 2011
December 06 2011
Taken with picplz.
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