September 2019 Favorites

Objective judgment, now, at this very moment. Unselfish action, now, at this very moment. Willing acceptance — now, at this very moment — of all external events.

Videos

• Everyday Virtue | Paterson & David Foster Wallace – Analysis of Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson through the lens of David Foster Wallace’s philosophy.
• Houseplant 101: Back to Basics – After I read an interview with Summer Rayne Oakes, a Brooklyn-based model and environmentalist who has more than 500 plants in her apartment, I found her YouTube channel with this interesting series to learn the basics about houseplants.
• Kingdom of Heaven | A Kingdom of Conscience, or Nothing - Kant’s Moral Philosophy – Kants’ Moral philosophy explained with Kingdom of Heaven.
• Stoicism in The Shawshank Redemption – Meditations I. – The Stoic philosophy of The Shawshank Redemption, presented in a few brief meditations based on the writings by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus and Chrysippus.
• Stoicism in Gladiator – Meditations II. – Video essay on the Stoic philosophy of Gladiator, presented in a few brief meditations based on the writings by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus.
• Calm Down the Amazon is not on Fire! – A calm and source-supported video about the exaggerated news by alarmists about Amazon fires in the news.
• 7 Stoic Lessons That Will Immediately Change Your Life - Ryan Holiday – Ryan Holiday on Stoicism.
• The Daily Stoic – I found through the previous video the YouTube Channel of Ryan Holiday which has a huge amount of short videos about Stoicism.
• Why Sergio Leone Played Music On Set – Video essay about how Sergio Leones played music score live on set in his movies to tell a story lead by the music.
• Identity politics and the Marxist lie of “white privilege” – An interesting talk about human nature, morality, Marxism, Post-Modernism and identity politics. I’m fascinated with how Jordan B Peterson presents one coherent thought for 2 ½ hours.
• Wes Anderson Explains How to Write & Direct Movies – The secrets of Wes Anderson filmmaking style.
• I counted every calorie for 30 days – Another habit month challenge by Matt D’Avella.
• React Hooks: useReducer – Introduction into useReducer hook by Leigh Halliday.
• React Hooks: useContext – Introduction into useContext hook by Leigh Halliday.
• React & Infinite Scroll - IntersectionObserver – The third video by Leigh Halliday, building on top of the other two creating an infinite scrolling.
• Composing Behavior in React or Why React Hooks are Awesome – Michael Jackson shows why how to do composition with React hooks.
• Silence the Doubters – Motivational video using quotes from the interview Why You’ll Never Be Able to Silence Your Haters with Patrick Bet David.
• Deichkind - Dinge (Official Video) – The music video to the new consumption critical song by the Hamburg Hip-Hop band Deichkind.
• Mind the gap, user centered design in large organizations with Luke Wroblewski

TV Shows

• The Boys [1] [P] – A dark and very funny TV show about a group of vigilantes set out to take down corrupt superheroes.
• The Terror [1] [P] – A disturbing and terrifying horror story, based on a historical ship travel without return to the north-west passage near the north pole.
• The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance [1] [N] – A beautiful fantasy story, completely made with puppets.
• UNDONE [1] [P] – Probably the best TV show I’ve seen in 2019. It’s a fantastic and poetic animation series about time travel.
• Carnival Row [1] [P] – An entertaining crime story in a Victorian fantasy world. It’s definitely inspired by H. P. Lovecrafts’ horror stories.

Movies

• Colin Quinn: Red State Blue State [N] – A really thoughtful standup comedy special, deconstructing the current political problems of the left and right in USA.
• Bill Burr: Paper Tiger [N] – Bill Burr’s new comedy special is very funny and political incorrect.
• The Crystal Calls Making the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance [N] – A fascinating insight into the production of the Netflix TV show The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. Unbelievable the amount of art, craft, and dedication put into this TV show.
• Fantastic Mr. Fox [P] – Finally I watched another great movie from Wes Anderson based on Roald Dahl’s novel. The whole movie is a stop motion animated.

Music

• Once Upon a Time in the West - Main Theme – Probably one of the first songs I remember to hear on the record player of my parents.
• The Good, The Bad And The Ugly - Main Title – Classic masterpiece by Ennio Morricone.
• The Ecstasy Of Gold – Another classic masterpiece by Ennio Morricone, so good even Metallica covered it.
• The HU: The Gereg – The first album from the Mongolian band that blends Heavy Metal with traditional throat singing. They also have some music videos on their YouTube channel, which went viral at the beginning of 2019.
• The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 – The fantastic soundtrack for the Netflix TV show.
• Deichkind: Dinge – A new consumption critical song by the Hamburg Hip-Hop band Deichkind. The music video has a lot of synchronized destruction and crazy costumes.

Books

• The Laws of Human Nature (Amazon) – Robert Greene on understanding people’s drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves.
• The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (Amazon) – I’m interested in story-telling for a long time now. John Truby shares his secrets for writing a compelling script.
• Daytripper (Amazon) – I re-read this fantastic graphic novel by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá about life and death. Each story follows Bras de Olivias Dominguez during different periods in his life, each with the same ending: his death.

Articles

• Inspired Design Decisions: Avaunt Magazine, Pressing Matters, Ernest Journal, Alexey Brodovitch – Inspiring series of articles by Andy Clarke on Smashing Magazine. He shows how Editorial Design can inspire layouts to build with CSS Grid Layout.
• Automatically compress images on Pull Requests – Calibre’s new free GitHub Action allows you to compress raster images with minimal setup automatically.
• The Wes Anderson Style Explained – Detailed article about the secrets of Wes Anderson filmmaking style.
• Everything I Know About Style Guides, Design Systems, and Component Libraries
• A love letter to my website – A moving article by Tobias van Schneider why you should have your website.
• A Dark Mode Toggle with React and ThemeProvider – In-depths tutorial by Maks Akymenko on CSS-Tricks.

Inspiration

• Revølve – Inspiring website of a design agency from San Francisco and Portland. Some nice WebGL, AR Interactions, and music.
• CSS Grid: Magazine Layouts – Fantastic Codepen demo by Olivia Ng showing magazine layouts build with modern CSS techniques.
• Laney LA – Inspiring website of a design and architecture studio with a nice layout, and beautiful typography.

Stuff & Things

• Feedly – The relaunch of my favorite RSS/Atom newsreader comes with a white and dark design.
• Adidas Originals, Pharrell Williams Hu NMD Proud – I already missed the Adidas NMD CS1 Ankoku Toshi Jutsu a few years ago and tried to buy this shoe just a few hours after the official release, but it was already completely sold out. Still a beautiful shoe.
• Ankerkraut Rührei Gewürz – A really tasty spice mix for my scrambled eggs.
• DEVONthink 3.0 – The new version of my favorite document management tool looks nice and has not just dark mode, a completely redesigned user interface, but also a lot of new features.
• Image Shrinker – A cool MacOS app to minify SVG, JPG, or PNG images.
• Leguano go: mixed black – I bought my first barefoot shoe after my co-workers and sister advertised the benefits to me.

Places

• AutoStadt (Google Maps) – I guided a co-worker and her husband around this Volkswagen brand park with multiple pavilions, museums, and restaurants for a full day.
• Bokel-Mühle am See (Google Maps) – I could stay in this fantastic hotel and restaurant at the shore of a lake during a 3-day company excursion. The food is excellent and I liked walking around the lake.

Quotes

Jordan B Peterson in an interview with Dave Rubin talking about speech police around the world as a disconcerting trend. He explains that we as a society need to be able to transcend the hardship of life with comedy. Comedians are people who push the edge of what’s acceptable. And if we start to prosecute comedians for jokes it’s a warning that our society goes in a dangerous direction:

If the king is such a tyrant that he kills his jester, then you know that the evil king is in charge.

Ernest Hemingway writing in a letter to Dorothy Connable, as he was warning her about Charles Fenton, who spread misinformation about Hemingway’s life:

The way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.

The quote above is immediately followed by, But this man is not a person that works with that system.