Tuesday TEA Time Newsletter

Yo,

This is the first Tuesday TEA Time newsletter. Thanks for subscribing and I hope this brings some delight to your week. If you have any feedback then just hit reply and let me know.

I’ve been trying to start a new habit where I do some writing every morning. I’ve been pretty successful and it’s been a really satisfying experiment: I recommend it. I don’t post everything I write online, sometimes it just gets archived in Bear. When I do post online I post to Medium. 

Design a Minimal Product Roadmap instead of building an MVP is by far my most popular post I’ve written during this experiment. If you are building a product then it’s definitely worth a read.

The most recent trip I’ve been on was to Gothenburg and it was fantastic. We (the wife and I) stayed at the Hotel Pigalle which is a strange mix of old and new. We saw tons of flowers at the different gardens: it’s a much more manicured city than Berlin. I have been slacking on posting to Instagram, but I have some images queued up to go out soon with some of the flowers and parks and stuff.

We also visited a couple of the islands in the southern archipelago and I really enjoyed the quiet, the lack of cars, and the general peacefulness there. I have a hard time imagining what living on an island with a population of 600 people would be like. The ferry comes every 20 minutes, so I guess it’s really not that far from the city in the end.

$31M worth of Etherium was stolen because of a programming error inside the currency. (Yes the currency itself is a program.) The most amazing part of the story is that the “good peeps” had to steal the rest of the affected currency, reprogram it, then transfer it back to the original account holders. If the goodies hadn’t been faster than the baddies, all affected currency would have been stolen. If you need a place to start learning about digital currencies, then try this Gentle Introduction. If you think BitCoin, etc are just a fad, then I would point you to the mere existence of this Goldman Sachs page about it.

In Urban China, Cash Is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete because peeps are using their phones. WeChat increasingly provides more and more features which allow users to do pretty much anything: speak to a doctor, get a taxi, and now pay for restaurants or anything else. The amazing part isn’t that in a just few years people have stopped using cash; it’s the jump straight from cash to phones, skipping over cards. Berlin is still a pretty cash heavy place and I wonder if a similar transition could happen here. (I hope so.)

Unrelated to money, here is a video flyover of Pluto:

And finally: How HBO’s Silicon Valley built “Not Hotdog” with mobile TensorFlow, Keras & React Native. This article shows how serious the show was wanting to build a real app that could determine if something was a hotdog or a “not hotdog.” It’s a long read, but it’s really worth it.

Tyler, The Creator has released a new album: Flower Boy. (Apple • Spotify) Tyler is a prolific musician and designer. He is also a controversial person in general. He founded Odd Future from which Earl Sweatshirt and The Internet started. (Syd, the lead singer of The Internet, recently released a solo album.) A great introduction to The Internet is their Tiny Desk Concert video.

Another video that is worth spending 7 minutes with is Pursuit. The creator, Mike, also has a Storm Blog which is just incredible. (I’ll never forget an experience we had in Montana, one time years ago, sitting and watching a huge thunderstorm pass over a mountain for over an hour. I’ve always been fascinated by weather.)

The Ravensburger Krypt Puzzle is the most difficult puzzle I’ve ever seen:

And finally, bookmark this 31 episode visual explanation of quantum mechanics for later.

First, some reading recommendations from novelists who also own bookstores. I try to read at least a chapter of something a day. Right now I’m reading Barbarian Days and loving it. We recently finished City of Thieves and it was out of control and great. (The wife and I read that one together.)

Second, take a look at these photos from the 2017 World Bonsai Convention. There is a visual appeal to these trees that I don’t fully understand.

Google produced a great slideshow of the history of Tokyo street fashion and it’s fascinating to see the evolution through the photos.

Horror Vacui is a German fashion brand that was listed by the NY Times as a “Brand to Know.” The slideshow of photos are super vibrant, but not overly so. Sometimes it feels pretty great to be colorful.

There is a great video on Vox explaining the origins of the 80’s aesthetic:

I absolutely love these posters with distorted type:

And finally, Signo Malhela by Stephan Günter from Mainz, Germany. (Found via Booooooom.) I am in love with the brush strokes, the animated lines, and the overall aesthetic Stephan uses to create these mythical figures. 

You can see more on Stephan’s Behance profile.