This week was mainly structured by ourselves in Janne‘s dramaturgy class- which is great! Spending a week with dramaturgy and thinking about the concepts, we would like to realize during our masters or at the very end of our studies, was pretty nice. Introducing our different concepts to one another was a real wow-moment to me. I realized again, that we are quite a cool gang of students. So: High five to us.

I spend my week mostly reading about work and what one could to avoid it. So, i read a few anarchists from the 80ies, most popular this essay by Bob Black, which already starts with a BOOM!:

No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

After reading that, I stumbled over discussions about slackers and idleness, that led me to the funny Idler magazine and to this great article by Tim Wu about the the impossibility of being mediocre in some things and the permanent demand for perfection.

But there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our “hobbies,” if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.

Maybe I was also looking for an excuse why it’s okay that I am often struggling with coding, who knows.
Then, it got much colder in the last few days, then it got wormer again, but now colder again. Boring information. But: I realized that mostly because my phone‘s battery lasts way shorter, when its cold outside. So i thought about buying a new phone, looked at some models and their pricing and then I didn’t think about buying a new phone anymore. Just like a lot of other people, who don’t like to spend a month income or more on a phone every two years, as the improvement of those phones is not as fast anymore.

“The number-one purchase trigger is ‘My last device was broken,’ and this has increased year on year,” says Chan. “Triggers like ‘I just wanted a newer model’ and ‘I had the option to upgrade early’ have declined or remained flat.” As the market reaches maturity, smartphones are verging on becoming a commodity — a fate the major smartphone manufacturers like Samsung and Apple desperately want to avoid.

Three more things:
AI got pretty good at generating human faces— and is still bad at generating hair. So, I guess, you still may have to rely on humans for your Christmas haircut.
And: The weekly facebook hate. Cambridge Analytica, reading out your last calls, starting smear campaigns against NGOs. It all happened in the last few weeks. Is this company is just too big to fail?
Yet a cheerful thing to end this post: my yearly spotify report came in. I listened to music for 36.551 minutes in the last year.Those were my most heard songs this year and this song apparently was my most heard one. Have a nice Sunday!