Highlights From “The Psychology of Revolution” (Gustave Le Bon)

“Men judge with their intelligence, and are guided by their characters. To understand a man fully one must separate these two elements.”

Published on April 2, 2024, filed under Everything Else.

Sustainability Trap

On the need to take and at the same time reassign responsibility for consumption and pollution.

Published on March 31, 2024, filed under Everything Else.

Exploitation

What and who is easiest to take advantage of and exploit, how is that being justified, and what can be done about it? On one piece of the puzzle what the fewest things are that need changing, to change everything.

Published on March 30, 2024, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

Julia and Sybil

The early manuscript of a novel I started in 2015, and that will still take a few years to be finished.

Published on March 24, 2024, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

The Next Adventure

On leaving Germany again, and the next big chapter of my life.

Published on March 5, 2024, filed under Adventure and Everything Else.

How to Counter Provocation and Rumor

Are there effective responses to being provoked, picked on, blamed, attacked? Absolutely—but they’re not all being taught or shared a lot. A few quotes that I’ve found useful.

Published on February 25, 2024, filed under Everything Else.

On the Well Astonishing Verdicts on Social Media

We may speak anything from 470,000,000 to 860,000,000 words in our lifetime. The tiniest fraction may be too much.

Published on January 21, 2024, filed under Everything Else.

2023

My professional and personal highlights from the last year. (Happy 2024!)

Published on January 1, 2024, filed under Everything Else.

Something to Know About Defensiveness

“The first rule of effective debate, argument, or heated conversation is to never, ever, get defensive.” On what we label as defensiveness, and a story that appears more complete and empathetic.

Published on December 17, 2023, filed under Everything Else.

Why Online Communication Is So Not-Great

Why is online communication so, meh? An approach that considers context, training, and world views, for a much more complicated topic.

Published on November 26, 2023, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

14 Tips for Becoming an Indie Author

After a few books with a publisher and a few more as an independent author, some tips and thoughts on how to publish your own books (if that’s what you’re excited about doing, too). From starting with ebooks to not writing overly much to not using AI tools—all sorts of advice you would or wouldn’t expect to get.

Published on November 8, 2023, filed under Everything Else.

Valve, Counter-Strike, macOS, and How Not to Relaunch Software

Yesterday, on September 27, Valve released Counter-Strike 2, replacing the game’s predecessor, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) on Valve’s Steam platform. But.

Published on September 28, 2023, filed under Everything Else.

Website Optimization Measures, Part XX

Definition issues. Aging content. Debugging. Social graphics. CTAs. DNS entries. SVGs. Filler words. PHP. There’s always something worth tending to.

Published on September 20, 2023, filed under Development and Everything Else.

Give

On one-things and lack.

Published on July 9, 2023, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

On Working on Vacation

Working while on vacation can be a sign of extraordinary commitment and initiative. But—it can also be a sign of disorganization and poor prioritization. A few thoughts.

Published on June 15, 2023, filed under Everything Else and Management.

On Ageism

One may argue that the big “-isms” go back to speciesism, the idea that one was “better” than other living beings, or that others were inferior. With that idea warranting a post by itself, there are two things that make ageism particularly stupid.

Published on April 16, 2023, filed under Everything Else.

Highlights From “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (Max Weber)

“The modern rational organization of the capitalistic enterprise would not have been possible without two other important factors in its development: the separation of business from the household, which completely dominates modern economic life, and closely connected with it, rational book-keeping.”

Published on April 12, 2023, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

2022

Release of my next book, a new apartment in downtown Hamburg, good news from the football club, a political adjustment, some travels, and preparation for a professional change—some of my highlights in 2022.

Published on January 1, 2023, filed under Everything Else.

Website Optimization Measures, Part XVII

Encoding declarations. Conditionals. Ahrefs. ErrorDocument directives. Mastodon links. Mastodon citizenship. Bitbucket. Eleventy. Action.

Published on December 15, 2022, filed under Development and Everything Else.

The Reverse A-Hole Rule of Social Media

A delayed note about that point at which our defense against disagreeable viewpoints and people becomes an offense.

Published on December 15, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

10 Quick Tips for a Great Mastodon Experience

Mastodon is a great alternative to Twitter, feeling refreshingly healthy. Here are 10 things that can help you get off to a great start—from finding a suitable server and interesting people to follow, to useful tooling and mindsets.

Published on November 8, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

Vegan Web Developers

If you’re a vegan and a web developer, why not join us on a humble list of vegan web developers?

Published on October 24, 2022, filed under Development and Everything Else.

A Short Story of the Google Error Page

Why is the Google error page the way it is? Why is it so plain? What drove development and design decisions? Anecdotes and notes from the time when the page was built.

Published on October 6, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

11 Tips to Read More and Read Faster (After Reading 791 Books in 9 Years)

Are you content with your reading? Here’s a collection of tried and tested ideas to help you read more—from switching to ebooks to reading everywhere to establishing routines to embracing short books to varying your reading speed.

Published on August 17, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

The Machine-Illustrated Life of a Frontend Developer

You may know DALL·E, what you can do with it, what others do with it, and… be intrigued by that, too. And you may wonder, how would AI depict frontend developers?

Published on June 20, 2022, filed under Development and Everything Else.