Alexander Kucera logo Alexander Kucera

Most people are dead. Did you know that? It’s true, out of all the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are wayyyy more dead people, and you’re all going to die. And then you’re going to be dead for WAY longer than you’re alive, like, that’s mostly what you’re ever going to be… You’re just dead people that didn’t die yet.

Link: Louis C.K. Via: Nerd Fitness

What is going on right now that hasn’t happened ever since the beginning of time, but is soon guaranteed to never ever happen again?

Today.

Link: Nerd Fitness

Tell me again how physically accurate your shader is. I’m a compositor you know.

  • A Compositor Via: The Internet

Writing a Novel with Ulysses

I’m actually in the middle of reading Mike Montero’s Design is a Job—which is recommended reading as well, by the way—but I couldn’t pass this one without at least peeking in. And it didn’t stay at peeking. I read through the whole book in one sitting. It reads very well, is entertaining and maybe, just maybe, it’ll motivate me to start writing more again. Which is the goal of this whole new blog thing after all.
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New Site

You. Yes, you, the one person that has visited this site in the last year. You will likely not have noticed, but this site is once again looking 100% different again. I got bit by the CSS bug again a couple of weeks ago, got myself some new books on web design and content strategy and a new writing app and here we are. The new look is the barest minimum of chrome.
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My iPhone App Playlist

In the spirit of app recommendation lists that keep popping up everywhere I decided to make my own. I do have a lot of iOS apps. In fact, I went a little overboard in 2012 and the first half of 2013. So much so that after I added up the amount of money I spent on app purchases, I went on a very strict app feast for the rest of 2013.
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Domain for sale

Dear Spinning Beachball readers, the few of you that are still reading this RSS feed. I’m about to shut down the site for good. In fact, the last few entries you have been reading came from my personal blog. If you like to keep reading my highly irregular output, I advise you to subscribe to my RSS feed there. Also, since I’m shutting that site down, the URL http://thespinningbeachball.com/ is available for immediate sale.
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Editorial & Drafts Workflow for Quick Capture of Story Ideas

Inspired by Federico Viticci’s Open Tabs Editorial workflow, I created this little workflow to quickly capture and act on story ideas for blog posts or other text documents. It all starts in Drafts, which I can fire up wherever I go from my iPhone. I enter an idea, or a short title or a link with a comment. This then gets appended to a Markdown file on Dropbox called Story Ideas.
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The Creative Cringe

I’m reading Shawn Blanc’s wonderful book Delight is in the Details and this one chapter rings especially true with me. It’s about what I like to call the creative cringe, the feeling everyone of us gets when we see our work and are not satisfied with it or where we see all the little and not so little flaws that make us cringe. Shawn is quoting Ira Glass: „All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
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