Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly — Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
Dear reader,
Here in Copenhagen, it is summer. My left ear is sunburned after a week of endless sunshine. I know I am to blame for the incident, but I don’t have any theory of why I only damaged my left ear during the 132,279 steps I took this week.
Yesterday we walked by my dad to celebrate father’s day. I brought him a set of slippers where Ana had embroidered ‘far’ on each of the slippers. ‘Far’ is Danish for ‘dad’. So when he is wearing both slippers it says ‘farfar’, meaning ‘grandfather’, because yesterday was also my first day as a father. It is sublime.
With care,
Kristoffer
EYE CANDY
READER INTERVIEW
Mikkel Malmberg is the 21st century version of Leonardo da Vinci. Full-time software engineer, public radio host, aspiring gamer, and maker of a handful of internet side-projects. And funny.
K: How do you archive your thoughts?
Mikkel: Mostly in my mind. I admire people with good notes but I’m bad at keeping them. The best system I ever had was when I didn’t have a system and just threw everything in a big pile. I want to get back to that.
My mind is usually a better filter. Some ideas just stick in there and others go away as fast as they appear. If I had put the fleeing ones down, they would’ve just haunted me forever. I’m not so afraid of “losing” ideas as I once was. I like to follow my attention. The more I can just work on the thing that’s already on my mind, the better. I think. That’s at least how I feel right now.
K: How would you like to be remembered online?
Mikkel: Collected and all over the place. I recently rebuilt my personal website with the intention of making it a permanent place for my persona on the internet. I’ve posted on just about any platform that allowed me to. But putting it on other people’s platforms is sort of just working for them. I get likes and attention, maybe, but they get all the long-term benefit. Putting it there seems like it’s giving me a quick reward, like the warmth of peeing your pants, and putting it on my own website feels like an investment, like buying a warmer pair of pants instead.
Then again, I also enjoy how I’ve been on the internet for, what, 20 plus years now. Making accounts on all sorts of weird-ass websites. So if someone wanted to go all archeologist on my internet persona, and I sometimes do myself, they would have to spend days, weeks to gather it all.
K: What was your first internet handle? Where did you use it?
Mikkel: I love how you get to define yourself by handles on the internet. How it allows you to try on different personas. Pick a name, start playing or posting or whatever. No requirements of being true to the person your friends think you are. No expectations. If you want to start over, just pick another name.
My oldest son is 6 and he loves playing Minecraft and Roblox and even Call of Duty. Any game he can get his hands on. And so he recently had to come up with an internet name for the first time in his life. I told him that, on the internet, you get to pick your own name and he just needed to come up with something that sounded cool that maybe didn’t include his actual name – and he’s so good at it. His first suggestion was “ooquaid”. That is the awesomest name I ever heard. How does a non-English speaking 6-year-old come up with that? Proud dad. It’s not what he went with in the end though and I’ll respect his privacy to not mention it, even though it is just as cool as ooquaid.
K: What do you have open in your tabs?
Mikkel: There’s a type of person, and I’m afraid it might be most, who always has a million tabs open. They have a sort of guilty relationship with their browser and are always terrified that their Chrome instance (it’s always the Chrome people) will crash and they’ll lose their pet tabs. That’s not me. I’m always trying to beat down my tab count. They might spring up while reading Twitter, RSS feeds or e-mails but afterwards I actually go through them, close them, and hopefully end up with just the one tab holding what I’m currently working on. Tabs in that way are just an inbox and as with all inboxes they need to be processed.
ROADSIDE FLOWERS
FIELD NOTES
Synthetic Messenger
The mad genius team of Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne is back. Maybe you remember The New York Apartment? This time the duo trained 100 bots to discover climate news and click on every ad they find. In this way, media organisations will think there is more money to be made on stories covering the climate crisis.
The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly: 21 Seconds
Imagine living in the same world where someone figured out how to win a game of Monopoly in 21 seconds. Welcome to Planet Earth. I believe the internet is to celebrate for this piece of information to exist. Thank you, Internet Monopoly. Speaking of Monopoly, did you know that it was originally made to demonstrate the evils of capitalism?
INTERNETMEZZO
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly — Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
Last week this letter was sent to 766 people. Thirtytwo are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write. Logo by Studio Hollywood. Print by Luka. Photograph by Ana Santl.