I wasn’t expecting it to be the first thing to write after quite some muted time. But Today is the day Steve Jobs died and I feel the need to participate in the collective mourning of one of the brightest, disruptive minds in recent history. He, and Larry and Sergey, will be known as the three holy fathers, and today is the 56th year after Steve Jobs.
Welcome to 56 AS. Rest in peace.
It’s like almost finishing your first glass of a really really expensive bottle.
If you think you are funny, the real world still beats you.
A beautiful collection, presented how I like it.
9-eyes.com
Brands talking to you is a lot like nurses talking to you when you’re in the hospital. You might be a nobel prize winner, a nuclear scientist or the CEO of NASA, they’ll treat you like if you’re a fifth grader with or without a mental handicap, depending on the nurse. It can terribly annoy me. But I have a lot of respect for nurses. They deal with shit, quite literally if they work in the gastroentology.
Brands on the other side, they’re not trying to help me. They’re trying to sell me stuff. Often they do help me with their products, but let’s be honest, at the end of the day it’s just about getting my money. There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s how the world goes round.
But, dear brands, that does not buy you a ticket to talk to me like I have the intellectual capacities of a kid. I would appreciate it if you could treat me like a grown up human being that makes or has made a conscious decision to purchase your product.
Today I got an email from Netflix with this message:
That’s cool! I can give a free month of Netflix to my friends! It would require them to fill in their credit card so they can be charged at the beginning of the 2nd month without any notice, but that’s also cool ’cause Netflix is actually a great and useful product. But. If you go to Netflix.com, you can by default sign up for your one month free trial. So wait, this fake promotion, even with a bogus expiration date (wtf?), is actually asking me to make free advertising to my peers, without giving ME anything in return? (What about, like, a month for free for me? Or even a week?)
Dear Netflix, I don’t even need anything in return. But it annoys me that you try to make me believe I’m giving my friends something special, while I’m just forwarding them to your website. It’s one of the many tricks from the Email Marketing Tricks for Hustla’s handbook and the sad thing is, they work. Someone even sent it around to the whole office while I was writing this.
Great job, Netflix. But you could have just asked. I left 5th grade a long time ago.
Hulu’s AWESOME april fool’s day homepage.
Designers have the most underrated job in the world. Even though in the context of an agency they are the rockstars who can sleep with all the girls, come late and be over paid, in the outside world they’re still seen as less important than, say, dentists, lawyers or astronauts. But, while you are scratching your butt and eating cornflakes, we work around the clock to make the world wide web a better (looking) place. Thank us later.
It’s spring. Theoretically. New Yorkers are still collectively freezing their balls off while major Bloomberg is late with the summer again. But after months of freezing cold, snow, hail, sludge, mud, ice and missed phone calls ’cause you can’t take off your gloves fast enough to pick up a call on your touch screen phone, I can tell you EVERYONE will be happy when the winter is over. We don’t really have a spring, it’s rather the summer that sneaks up from behind, hits the winter with a sledge hammer and screams SURPRIIIISE while throwing confetti in its face. Some day in the coming weeks it will happen. One sunny morning suddenly half female Manhattan will walk in hotpants, Central park will fill up with picnic’ing people like a Patagonian beach with elephant seals, people will sit outside their buildings on benches and chairs and talk to their neighbors again, there will be lots of fried chicken and fixed gears and sun screen and airconditioning, non-stop barbecue bacchanals on the east side promenade while on the west sides their will be unlimited gym rats making out with each other in the grass.I tell you, spring in New York is a phenomenon and everyone from every descent and color loves it and will celebrate every single day of it.
But then there is the ice cream car with its ridiculous jingle to lure children and sell them cones filled with disgusting gunk dipped in ‘chocolate’ or fluorescent sprinkles of high fructose corn syrup. That shit is SO gross. I don’t care, seriously, children, eat your ice cream and get your diabetes before your 16th birthday, but mr. ice cream car driver, every time I hear you coming around my block with your ridiculous happy-happy melody, I have fantasies of buying a sniper gun just to take down your speakers (I won’t hurt you, but I will shoot your tires too to learn you a lesson). I’d buy all your icecream for a whole week if you can just stfu and gtfo.
I set up my computer, got my wacom, calibrated my screen, arranged my Photoshop palettes, customized my presets and went to the bathroom. I’m ready, aw yeah.
www.akqa.com
I grew up between two languages, Dutch and French. Both languages represent a completely different stream of European migration, one being the Germanic people in Northern Europe and on the other side the Latin People in the south. So right where those two cultures meet, they created this little Disneyland called Belgium. Instead of just being happy with what they have, 180 years after the creation of the country, people are still fighting over the power division between both cultures. Over the years government reforms have tried addressing these struggles, which resulted in a Belgian political structure that is so absurd and complicated that most Belgians don’t even know themselves how exactly everything works. If you watch the video below you get an idea, or to summarize it: we have a federal government, 3 regional governments for Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels (each with parliaments and ministers), and another 3 governments for each language (because we also have a corner where they speak German). So in total we have 7 governments with over 50 ministers for a population of about 10 million people (NYC is 9 million people). We vote a lot, you figured that out.
Right now we are in a complete impasse for the creation of the federal government, because the parties from both sides keep on fighting about power related issues. In about 20 min from writing this – at 12:00 am Belgian time – we will take over the world record from Iraq, which took 249 days to form its government.
As we speak there’s a delegation of Iraq in Antwerp that will transfer the award during the spontaneous festivities (this is no joke).
Go Belgium!
I saw him for the first time 10 or 15 years ago, on Belgian tv. It’s too long ago to remember if it was a documentary about hawks, New York City or something completely different, but I remember he was a predator bird living in the urban jungle, nesting on a building next to Central Park. Though it’s definitely not part of the daily scenery, there are more hawks living in and around the parks and watersides in New York. But this one is special. Because he was one of the first hawks to nest on a building rather than in a three, and because that building happened to be a coop on Fifth Avenue, Central Park East, one of the most expensive strips for real estate in New York if not the whole world.
Not only has the bird the most expensive nest (and the sickest view) in the world, he’s also known for having developed a signature hunting tactic. Where other hawks survive on rats and squirrels they pluck from the groud, mister Pale Male’s diet mainly consists of pigeons, which he spectacularly catches mid-flight.
Little did I know that this bird meanwhile became a huge star, having his own website with daily photos, a wikipedia page and two documentaries made about him, one a feature film that won multiple awards. I dug deeper and found out that the two documentaries were made by the same guy, who started following the bird after an unusual encounter in Central Park in the nineties and who became a film maker because of that bird. The guy is Belgian, which might explain how I got exposed to pale male so long ago.
His nest got destroyed in 2004 by an ignorant decision of the coop board of 927 Fifth Avenue. After a wave of protest by hundreds of New Yorkers who got to appreciate the bird over the years, they re-installed the pigeon spikes that formed the cradle for the nest and soon after Pale Male started bringing on new twigs. Because of circumstances (some of the pigeon spikes protruding the nest and then the disappearing of his wife) no new baby hawks hatched since then. But this year New York ornithologists are living their heydays as the celebrity bird started messing around with a new, young female nicknamed Ginger.
I saw her yesterday, sitting on a roof a few block down from the Metropolitan. Then she flew around the nest for a bit and landed on the balcony of a near apartment, after which Pale Male showed up and majestically circled around the buildings for a few minutes in the afternoon winter sun. The couple is expected to lay two or three eggs that would hatch by the end of March. Yay! Hawks are way more awesome than pigeons. Their poo is also more impactful when it hits your shoulder.
The photos below are taken with my phone through the telescope of a friendly ornithologist.
Pale Male
Ginger
It’s not that I usually mind the extra attention, but this year I didn’t feel like celebrarting my birthday very much. Slightly disgruntled with some recent unfortunate developments I took down the date from Facebook in order to avoid the obligatory birthday singing-and-cake at work. As much as I love my co-workers, the whole singing thing… I never got it (probably for the same reason I never got karaoke), and I definitely was not gonna put up with it this time. The worst part is where everyone starts screaming ‘speech speech’ even though no one ever actually gave a speech. Alas, there are still people keeping birthdays in their real calendar so my evil plan was unmasked and right when it seemed like 26 people were gonna miss free cake because I was grumpy, the amazing K came to the rescue and arranged Belgian waffles as breakfast for everyone. No singing. Mission accomplished.
Two months later recent fortunate developments have brought me to a new point of excitement which I actually do want to celebrate. I signed as Senior Interactive Designer with one of the best and most innovative digital agencies in the world. I will reveal the name in two weeks when I actually start. I ended up interviewing there after a very odd evening that involved me meeting the chief creative officer, a roulette table, swapped karma and a $50 iTunes gift certificate. Needless to say I am extremely enthusiastic about this opportunity.
To make up for the lack of celebration in November, I decided to retro-jubilate my anniversary on Facebook, every day until people would stop wishing me a happy birthday – which took 8 days and 135 messages. Social Networking and superficiality go hand in hand, and you can blame me for smearing this superficiality in my own friends’ face. But let this be a lesson people, don’t always trust the internets and, definitely, don’t ever trust me.
You got birthday-trolled, but that doesn’t change my gratefulness for all the many wishes. You are all awesome. Thank you.
The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that it’s all learned.
These are the days I pity myself for being an atheist. Birds are falling out of the sky all over the world, while fish are dying with millions at a time. Scientists and biologists try to find an explanation, but what they come up with sounds pretty half ass. Ok it’s sad for the birds and the fish, but THIS IS SO EXCITING! It’s probably the end of the world and we’re gonna be on the first row! I can’t wait until humans start dying off with the thousands at a time.
This is a very handy map if you want to keep track of Armageddon.
It’s the first week of January, and I haven’t posted much the past couple of months, so I feel this imagined pressure to publish my new years resolutions. Well, I’m not gonna do that. Because it’s lame.
Except for the Delta food on my plane back to New York (the only place serving worse is Beth Israel Hospital), I had a great and satisfying home visit. For reasons I won’t bore you with now, I had other travel priorities the past two years so it had been a while since I saw my friends and family. Nothing substantially changed, though I had to update my spreadsheet with who is in a relationship and who bought a house and who got a kid. Damn yeah it begins, and this year I will fully dedicate to keeping on ignoring my fainting youth.
Climax of my visit to Belgium was a two day hike with two of my brothers and their other halves. If you live abroad for a while you learn to appreciate your family, and my brothers are the closest people I have in my life. I don’t care too much about the other halves, but my brothers are the shit. If I would be banished to a deserted island, the first person I would bring would be the waitress at Mono+Mono, but if she would fatally get hit by a car the day before I get banished, then I would pick one of my brothers for sure. Or maybe a part of each one, and then stitch those together. Oh and also my a bit of my sister and my parents of course, and a box of CĂ´te d’Or trufflĂ©.
So, 2011. It’s so exciting I can’t wait for 2012. Some heads up – there’s a new Dez Mona album coming out in the late summer, for which yours truly will do the design again, and then there is a personal project I’ve been working on myself for over a year in between the soup and the potatoes (we say that so plastic in Flemish!). It’s no design project but it’s related, though I still have a lot of work to do before I can share a sneak peak in (hopefully) a few months.
I’d like to finish with this vague note. Because, ladies and gentlemen, life IS vague.
Happy new year!
