was bloss ist mit das magazin geschehen (erm, deutsse spragg swere spragg)? in der heutigen ausgabe geht es um werbung - wir sind ihr überdrüssig, unmöglich sie interessant zu reden, oliver kahn - dem blonden kamikaze-torwart und kotzbrocken, berühmt bloss wegen seiner nie geahndeten killer-attacken auf die stürmer dieser welt, und ausserdem unterstellt slavoj zizek allen westlern, die sich mit dem tibet solidarisieren, sie tun dies primär wegen der hedonistischen new-age-spiritualität, die in letzter (?) zeit so ungemein populär werde.

vor einer weile habe ich mich auf diesem blog “beklagt,” das magazin sei immer so verdammt gut, und fragte verzweifelt, woher die zeit stehlen es jedesmal zu lesen. inzwischen ist eh egal ob man das magazin, die weltwoche oder den neuen blick liest, politische liegen sie eh auf einer linie. und der blick geht am schnellsten.

Tags: swiss, media, magazin, lang:de

[teh glorious interweb what got stuck in my camino tabs this past week]

money redecoration

understand the real value of money - “On Dollar, Euro and Yen notes, some of the most important events of the last century.”

Refacing Government Tender - Flickr set of one guys scribbles on american banknotes. [via bb]

online video killed the …

Bill O’Reilly’s Producer (Unseen Footage) - the much awaited peek behind the curtain.

Bill O’Reilly Flips Out — DANCE REMIX - “Here’s a great dance mix version of the Bill O’Reilly freak-out video that made the rounds this week” [via bb]

Lawrence Weiner :: - the latest hillman curtis movie is on lawrence weiner, conceptual artist from brooklyn.

10 optical illusions in 2 minutes - “Samsung presents 10 optical illusions in 2 minutes to promote the new SOUL mobile phone.” anotehr one of those too-bad-its-a-commercial…

BART SIMPSONS VOICE IS A LADIE!!!! - yeh, duh. but its actually cool to see her in person.

The Day There Was No News - “Today there was no news. And here is the proof.” done before, but this one is well done, eerie, strong, moving.

schmooze and abuse

Google Friend Connect - “Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.” the fight for the social layer in browsers has entered the next phase.

Bicyclists on LA freeways - “Last Friday, around 30 bicycle riders (and a few inline skaters) took to the freeways during rush hour, racing past cars stuck in traffic. … the aim was “to raise questions about the transportation infrastructure. In a city ruled by cars, why is it that you can get places faster on bikes?” [via bb]

Picasso’s Guernica in 3D - somehow stunning.

And now, live from Wimbledon, the interactive Pong championships 2008 - “this will happen, mark my words” agreed!

Sightseeing in Liberty City - Flickr set: “A side by side comparison of a photo tour in New York City and Liberty City…crazy details! More coming soon!”

DAD? - blog of photoshopped images with the dad and child heads swapped. [via bb]

ECB_LA_28k.png - eboy LA poster. [via bb]

The Passively Multiplayer Online Game, PMOG - “This game allows you to leave traps or gifts on any web page. You can also take missions across the internet, discovering new content while leveling up.”

riots | green | floor | grass | germany - shall we call this lawnmover art. or sumink [via rebel:art]

Googling My Keyboard - another could be meme.

swiss/german focus

Bruno Spoerri - “iischalte” Bodeschtändige… elektronisch (Switched-on Switzerland) [1974] - “Bruno Spoerri plays the EMS Synthi 100. Great and rare swiss album, and still no CD release yet!”

Street-Art-Sellout - mal wieder - “Ich bin enttäuscht. Der Grund: Der Kanadier Dan Bergeron (aka fauxreel), der einige Billboards in schöner Détournement-Manier verfremdet hatte, z.b. “Quick Lobotomy” oder “Donald Trump“, hat sich kaufen lassen! Für eine Guerilla-Street-Art-Aktion! Gleich in fünf kanadischen Städten kleisterte er seine Vespa-Motive.” so wahr!

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Tags: linkdump, money, gta, streeart

[teh glorious interweb what got stuck in my camino tabs this past week]

online video killed the …

The Bittorrent Song - “The famous bittorrent song! Dude plays keyboards while singing about torrents, ISO’s, cracks, hacks, and more.” [via b3ta]

Amazing Young Guitar Player - another incredible asian kid this time playing the guitar.

The 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of All Time - “In today’s irony-saturated comedy landscape, it’s difficult to find a sketch show that doesn’t do fake ads in one form or another. In this feature, we’ve assembled fifty of the best. Unfortunately, many of SNL’s most infamous are no longer available online, due to NBC’s copyright-enforcing blitz a while back. But we did manage to unearth a surprising number of classics still lurking in the corners of the internet”

A More Friendly Tamer Grand Theft Auto Conan O’brien - GTA with lawabiding and nice people? funny.

ROCK BAND - ….hates me. [via ze frank]

banned commercial for glasses - “banned commercial for glasses, plz visit a doctor every now and then”

me likee

Little Brother » Download for Free - “Below you’ll find links to downloadable editions of the text of Little Brother. These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons” cory doctorow’s latest book now available for free download, but for the first time i dont feel like reading it on a screen …

GUSTAV - VERLASS DIE STADT - 90 sec streams of the upcoming Gustav album. sounds awesome.

Freedent White - chewing gum advert, lets you create a wofty, a very cute white fantasy animal, i wish they existed for real, and take care of him tamagochi style…

schmooze and abuse

Boom times for virtual playgrounds - “158 online games and virtual worlds in development or up and running designed specifically for children. While some of that total are recognisable games, most should be classified as virtual worlds.” … “For kids, though, when they don’t have as many options in real life to decide what their house looks like, what type of clothes to wear, or where they go, virtual worlds must seem like a whole new land of opportunity.”

Gold Farmers - regine has a short interview with Ge Jin, director of the documentary Gold Farmers.

tun3r.com: your mood. your station - the radio interface now with city dials: “each City Dial shows all local webcasting AM/FM stations on the left (sorted by frequency), and popular international stations on the right (sorted by genre).”

Steampunk by Richard Morgan - “In the summer of 2007, I suggested to the New York Times that they should run a story on steampunk culture — how it had broken beyond mere tinkerers into domestic life. They gave it a green light and then killed the story for reasons unknown.” [via bb]

Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds - “It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.”

The Big Word Project - Your websites define our words - “The Big Word Project is redefining words. Search for your word and link it to your website. Your website is then the new definition. Simple.” pay for the word link via paypal.

Hackers’ posts on epilepsy forum cause migraines, seizures - “Hackers who probably also think that torturing small animals is funny bombed an epilepsy foundation’s site with animations and link forwards to sites that serve up pulsating kaleidoscopic images.”

Old Man And The GTA: A 70-year-old’s Take on GTA IV - this guy describes, how he watched his 70 year old dad get into GTA, way into it ^^.

Addictomatic - “Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up and what’s now.” [via de-bug]

Henk Hofstra’s “Art-Eggcident” in Leeuwarden - “Dutch artist Henk Hofstra (who’s Blue Road we featured in April of last year) is back with a new environmental art project called ‘Art Eggcident’ in Leeuwarden, a city in the north of the Netherlands. Yesterday, several large eggs (each 100 feet wide) were spread on th Zaailand, one of the largest city squares in the Netherlands.”

Green Porno Star Isabella Rossellini Takes on Insect Sex - “In Green Porno, Sundance Channel’s new series of cellphone-friendly short films, Rossellini singlehandedly re-enacts mating rituals of the dragonfly, spider, bee, praying mantis, worm, snail and housefly by getting it on with cardboard cut-outs.”

PIG BLASTER - pig fart driven game …

follow-up from last weeks links

Banksy - The Cans Festival. - “Show of the Year. Show of the Decade. Possibly Show of the Century.” if graffiti is your thing …

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Tags: linkdump, banksy, gta, search

[teh glorious interweb what got stuck in my camino tabs this past week]

GTA IV ofc

Submit Your Grand Theft Auto IV Easter Egg Finds - “If previous games in the series are any indication, Grand Theft Auto IV is packed with hidden Easter eggs. Found any yet? Share them with us.”

Daily Show on GTA IV - “Apparently, even Robert Downey JR dressed in a tin can isn’t going to tempt American gamers out of their gaming lairs.”

Rockstar Support: No GTA Freeze Fix in Sight - “A very friendly, and obviously unhappy, fellow answered the phone who, after thanking me for not yelling at him and apologizing profusely for the problem, spilled quite a bit of beans on the issue.” kinda cute.

Nega-review: Grand Theft Auto IV - “it was actually relatively hard to pull negative quotes from most of the reviews of GTAIV. The praise about the game was absolutely overflowing, with many if not most reviews calling it the best game of the generation or, indeed, of all time.”

Grand Theft Auto IV Hustles Songs Through Amazon MP3 - “Players of Grand Theft Auto IV can buy songs they hear within the game from the Amazon MP3 store.” USA only atm …

online video killed the …

Blowing the Tetris Theme - “These kids are wasting their time, they could be playing the game.”

How To Check Your Testicles - “Just text BALLS to 83188″ file under: unintentionally hilarious. [via al4ie]

Tresling: Tetris + Arm Wrestling - “They said it couldn’t be done. Mixing Tetris and arm wrestling… not possible. But just like Stallone in “Over the Top,” the impossible happened, dreams came true, tears were shed.”

Staff Benda Bilili - “a really raw and excellent performance by a group of polio disabled musicians” [via ze frank]

schmooze and abuse

The Daily WTF - lovely broken image icon, check the last entry on the page. [thx michael, but i aint really collecting those anymore]

The Cans Festival - a street party of stencil art.

Location Of This Weekend’s Cans Festival in London - “the location of the The Cans Festival, A street party of Stencil Art that kicks off tomorrow in London… LEAKE STREET, LONDON SE1 7NN It’s a three minute walk from the London Eye, with the nearest tube being Waterloo.”

ICED - “ICED puts you in the shoes of an immigrant to illustrate how unfair immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights. These laws affect all immigrants: legal residents, those fleeing persecution, students and undocumented people.” it’s probably not tye best idea to release games with a message the same week GTA IV is released … but hey. [via bb]

Earth is losing dirt at an alarming rate - “We’re losing more and more of it every day,” said David Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington. “The estimate is that we are now losing about 1 percent of our topsoil every year to erosion, most of this caused by agriculture.” someone like myself, who has been digging in the dirt for the last 3 weeks, never would have thought losing dirt could be an issue.

Ars Electronica FESTIVAL - joi ito will be curating it. “Computers and the Internet has lowered the cost of communication and the creation and distribution of information so much that many fundamental notions of organizations, economics and property have completely changed or require major upgrades.”

Radiohead ‘Nude’ Contest Generates More Than 2,200 Remixes - “In the single month that Radiohead has been selling individual tracks for remixing its song “Nude” on through the iTunes store, no fewer than 2,239 remixes have been uploaded to the band’s website.”

Free game hopes to save gorillas - “Campaigners hoping to preserve Rwanda’s endangered mountain gorilla are attempting to raise awareness of its plight by making a game simulating the lives of the animals free to mobile phone users.” noble intention, but tbh i’d rather go on a rampage in liberty city.

Ghost Bike - “A Ghostbike is a junker bike that has been painted stark white and afixed to the site where a cyclist has been hit or killed by a car driver.”

Searchme Visual Search - this search engine provides screenshots of the results that can be navigated iTunes/iPhone style.

Web in infancy, says Berners-Lee - “The world wide web is “still in its infancy”, the web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told BBC News. He was speaking ahead of the 15th anniversary of the day the web’s code was put into the public domain by Cern, the lab where the web was developed.”

Albert Hofmann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - R.I.P. Mr. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

‘Free Tibet’ flags made in China - “Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.” quite ironic.

Art of the videoblog - “This article initiates a poetics of Web video by considering the central features of one kind of video on the Web, the amateur videoblog, in terms of its functions, which include various affordances of use, and constraints, which include economics, technology, and viewing conditions. It takes as its central example an American videoblog called The Show With Ze Frank, which ran from 2006–2007, and which drew a passionate community of fans into collaborating in its creation. This article considers amateur Web video as a potentially democratic space for media production, offering an alternative to commercial media that involves ordinary citizens as participants and champions their creativity.”

Ten golden rules of videogame fanboyism. - “Ah, fanboys. What industry can truly call itself an industry without them? Those who prove themselves obsessively loyal to any product or corporation can be found among many communities.” and here are the golden rules to be a fanboy.

Grothendieck Circle - i read an article about this radical mathematician in last weeks sunday papers, i think … “The long-term goal of the Grothendieck Circle is to make publicly available (and in some cases translate) the material written by and about Alexandre Grothendieck as well as to provide biographical material on Grothendieck’s life and his origins.”

swiss focus

MUSEUM SANKELLER - eröffnung 8.5. 18:30 Blinzernfeldweg 4 in Köniz

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Tags: linkdump, GTA, streetart, LSD

1. of may, international workers day, seems like a good date to publish this. in my heads i wrote and re-wrote the following text many times over, so please excuse if it now sounds clumsy.

i’ve been quiet on this blog these past few months. it’s because i have run out of steam. i received a horrible blow to my career plans and i have no idea what to do next with my life.

i am depressed - there, i said it.

a few months ago i was fired from my day job, a job, that i had been very happy about. i had worked as a web publisher for the web portal of a local newspaper with its three blogs. this job was ideal for me in so many ways; the work was interesting, it represented a good challenge, i saw it as an opportunity to learn many things, the pay was decent, it was a small and manageable commitment, 40%, that left me enough time to do my stuff on the side, yet secured a steady income to pay a big portion of my bills and - most important this - it seemed like the logical continuation of what i had been doing these past years.

there are not a whole lot of jobs like it around here. bern is a small city with two newspapers owned by the same media conglomerate.

i had never gotten any propper journalistic training and this was gonna be my entry point. this job was exactly what i had hoped to find these past few years, positioned exactly right where the so-called new and old media converge. i thought, it would be a way to get into what i wanted to do all along and actually get paid for doing so. i had very high hopes. i saw and still see this job as my big lucky break. and i failed …

to make things worse, they fired me in a really hard to understand and unfair manner. i got sacked without a warning, without being given a second chance. if this was football, i received the direct red card. no yellow card was ever shown. i did not receive a fair chance to change.

my boss was not very clear when giving his explanation of why he wanted to sack me, mumbling something about “interpersonal differences”. unfortunatly i never knew such interpersonal differences even existed. to this day i fail to really understand, what he was talking about. we did have a few differences, if under a stretch you could even call them conflicts, but these were regarding topical issues, more specifically the website we were working on, and they were never interpersonal.

during the first months, i had taken time to analyze the website regarding usability and organization as well as our workflow. and naturally i thought it was my duty to communicate the shortcomings i discovered. it is true, i can be edgy. and yes, i tend to have strong opinions and to speak my mind about them. but i usually do so in a direct, but, in my opinion, polite and respectful way. my boss, he must have seen this differently.

it is small consolation, that i understand that my boss is really struggling with his role as a superior. he is the type of boss who pretends to be your buddy until he turns into a total dictator within seconds flat. when he was in buddy mode, he would say stuff like “conflicts have their place in a work team”. and then the dictator turns around and sacks me.

at any rate, it feels to me like, i have been fired for being myself. these past months i have played and replayed all the scenes in my head and i simply don’t see a way how i could have been or acted any different. i was just the way i am. so i don’t get it. all i can think off is, my boss must have somehow hated me. or something.

was this the clash of new media with old media as one of my friends suggested? maybe. here was this classically trained journalist, who had somehow ended up responsible for his newspaper web-presence. and along comes some blogger and points out all that is wrong with the website he built? well, the truth hurts. the website is pretty awful and it was gonna take alot of work to make it more logical and useable. i had asked all the people i knew, what they thought about the website, if they found what they were looking for, if things were logically organized. i had asked people like my mum, my sister as well as some friends with various degree of techsavviness, and no one i asked understood the logic of the website. and these statements confirmed my own findings. is it not natural that i express these thoughts? but i guess i should have just shut up and webpublished click click click … oh well, i can’t.

so here it is: i give up. i retire. i don’t ever want to find another job, because the possibility of getting fired is simply too horrible. so what am i doing theses days? i am just numbing the pain, playing way too many video games, yeh those two, i actually played WoW so much, i got bored with it - that’s when GTA IV came along ^^. and i am working on our new vegetable garden. so today, for the first time in many years, i won’t go to the may 1. celebrations. since i am no longer a worker. since i am retired from the productive workforce.

what’s next?

Tags: work, unemployment