Dabitch.net - Everything is so random there must be a pattern

I've been meaning to post this, but I kept getting bogged down with other things. A while back I was interviewed by the Epica Awards for their "behind the bylines" project. It's a series of interviews with all the members of the Epica Press Club, which also happen to be all of the people who are on the Epica Jury. You can find them all under "interviews", if you are curious about who judges your ads.

I've judged in the Epica awards for several years, so I thought it was fun to do a little interview, and it wasn't until Julie Descamps asked that I suddenly remembered that I took media classes as an elective course in junior high. This had completely slipped my mind. I've also worked as a news photographer's assistant covering the football riots in Stockholm 1992. I guess I was always interested in media.

The image that I chose to send her shows me posing at the sign my father was always so amused by, it reads "This ends the public road", and is in Jukkasjärvi, outside of Kiruna, Sweden. My mom was born in the parish that is past that end road, and he thought it was funny that she was from "the edge of civilization" as he jokingly put it. Every 8mm film he ever shot when visiting back home, contained the sign, and it has appeared many times in our old family photo albums. So naturally, I had to pose by it at some point, to carry that tradition on. Which brings me to the question of 'where I'm from' - I get that one a lot.

We know you have a very rich background - could you tell us a little bit about your place of origin?

This has always been a question that stops me in my tracks. I always find this one difficult to explain, as my entire family and I are from Lapland. The family birthplaces stretch from Sweden to Norway and Finland, for many hundreds of years, and I know all the places very well. I grew up hearing stories about family members who moved around within the Sápmi borders, while simultaneously moving around the world for jobs in a very "nomadic" manner. So I have lived in Saudi, the United States, Germany, and so on, and when I decided to go to University it was in New York and London. But when I get bogged down by modernity, as I did right after I graduated college in London, the only thing that brings me back to life is the land in Sápmi. We all belong somewhere, and we all will feel our blood slow down and heartbeat settle when we are "home", as I have.

I'll never be offended if people ask me where I'm from, and in the United States people never do as my accent is quite good, but since my accent is "generic American", I got asked this question a lot when I lived in the UK. The funniest was once, at a party, a bloke introduced himself and asked "where are you from" as soon as I had said hello. I knew it was the accent that triggered to question, so I said: "man, I don't bloody know. I moved around a lot." Normally after this reveal you might get the question "diplomat-brat or army-brat?" but this fellar just laughed out loud and said: "Oh, I know exactly what you mean", and then proceeded to list all the places he had grown up in, which included Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and a small quaint town in south England that I'd never heard of. We became instant friends over that exchange.

Regarding "the edge of civilization", it's a reference to the Finnish word Lappu, as in the Swedish word "Lappland" which in John Scheffer's "Laponia" written in 1674 was described like this:

Others fancy that the name of the Country is deriv’d from Lappu, which in the Finnonick language is furthermost, because it lies in the farthest part of Scandinavia.

Like my father, I'm just amused and slightly fascinated at the history of my family which covers three countries, but only in the east to west direction. That is, the 'farthest part of Scandinavia.' It is like the edge of civilization, because nature will overshadow everything there. The skies go on forever, the forest can be so thick, the mountains are beckoning you to climb them to see more views, and the vast vast land of white nothing that seemingly goes on forever in the winter.

The best part is the aurora, when I was a child I was told this was a reflection of how much fish was in the rivers and lakes. I still believe it.

I have a friend who is currently touring Europe as he works remotely on projects, and attends various coding boot camps and summits along the way, who is the perfect target market for this idea. Globetrotting professionals are not a new thing, but with the help of the internet there are many more of us now, and this hotel is designed for us.

Zoku is a new kind of business hotel brand. A hotel where you have shared workspaces, and meeting rooms, and is suitable for extended stays. It's like a WeWork, where you also sleep.

Newly opened Zoku Paris is located in the Stream Building, opposite the Court of Justice in the 17th arrondissement. The top three floors has 109 lofts and walking into the Zoku is like entering a small neighborhood in itself. The hotel even has a Community Manager, who provides Check-in Chats, Community Dinners, and other social rituals for guests who stay 14 or more nights. They also host workshops, seminars, live podcast streams, and the Aperó Live Music Sessions every Thursday night.

The hotel boasts co-working areas which have work booths, long shared tables, breakout areas, and yes even a game room for taking a foosball break in.

In order to make the extended stay as pleasurable and "at home" as possible, the hotel has a laundry room, a pantry where one can borrow items one needs, there is a food pantry, and even an art swap area.

The hotel also has many social spaces, such as the rooftop area, to bring together guests and the local community. The concept is to create mixed-use buildings that encourage international living, remote working, and networking between guests and locals. Just pack your laptop and arrive.

The hotel rooms vary from small studio spaces, to more apartment-like larger layouts. These are images of the studio and the XL loft rooms. Unlike a regular hotel room, where the bed dominates, the layout here is more like an apartment with a couch, a dinner table and a kitchenette.

Many years ago, I would have been head over heels with this concept as I somehow managed to move around the world with a desktop computer (egads!) and ended up renting friends-of-friends-of-friends apartments while they were on vacation or similar, long before Airbnb, Soho House and now Zoku was invented. This is a nomadic expat living with a cheat code! Everything you need is here, you can borrow an ironing board from the pantry, and your hotel room can easily be your office on the days you want to meet collaborators in a more private space, or use as a podcast room when you're doing that.

To add to that, an event space is available where you can host your own conference, coding boot camp, or seminar, and easily turn the area into a dinner party at the end of the day.

There are also board rooms, called "not a board room", for important meetings and presentations, as well as a bustling café area for when you need a coffee break or an evening cocktail.

Paris isn't always the most welcoming city, in fact, last year it was ranked one of the worst cities in the world for expats, but this hotel may help nudge that reputation in another direction.

I can't help that I keep hearing the phrase "you will own nothing, and you will be happy" in my head.

But fair enough, if I am going to bounce around the world networking, I would want to do it in style. In my life stage, the concept of The Graduate Hotels may be more my speed. They are stylish hotels in University towns catering to parents who are visiting or bringing their kids to college. Each Graduate hotel is designed with a nod to the local culture in mind, creating a space where you'll quickly learn about local heroes, local art, and quirks of the city that it is in. Like Zoku, they also offer an in-house bar, café, space for working, meetings, and events as well as items to borrow such as bikes. For longer stays, there are suites with kitchenettes and even homes you can stay in.

I stayed at the Graduate in Cincinnati , where the elevator had a faint scent of pencil shavings and Bootsy Collins graced the wallpaper. It was a skip and a jump away from all of the downtown hotspots and the university, and full of eclectic patterns, colors and materials.

As more cities clamp down on AirbnB and Vrbo, and more people work globally directly from their laptop, expect to see more creative hotel concepts like this.

Nashville. A city in the middle of an American state which is deeply conservative, where "everyone" prays to Dolly Parton, drinks whiskey, and owns a cowboy hat, a few guns, as well as real cowboy boots. Right? Or?

Broadway in downtown Nashville is filled with bars playing country music every night. People make pilgrimages here for bachelorette parties and bachelor parties, they might hope to get to see Kid Rock in his bar. But beyond the cowboy hat stereotype and drunken tourists, something is happening here. People have moved here from all corners of the world, to work with music, creativity, production, media - and hockey.

Companies moving in are Mitsubishi, Nissan, Google, and the cult hamburger chain from Los Angeles In-N-Out. The airport has built more international gates and secured direct flights to Tokyo, and rumored soon also Lufthansa to Frankfurt.

How can this place, in the deepest American South, feed creativity that beats out New York and LA? In music history, Nashville has been one of the top three cities in the US, with New York and Los Angeles, from the very beginning. Here Bob Dylan wrote “Nashville Skyline”, and Ringo celebrated his 70th birthday with a concert at the Ryman.

This influx of new residents has forced the city to grow, and entire blocks are plowed down to be filled with brand-new housing. Huge apartment buildings rising from the ashes of the defunct factories. Natives call Nashville "Nash Angeles" in an irritated tone, but with the settler Californians came new jobs, new stores, new restaurants - and new entrepreneurial and creative blood.

Celebrity chefs are opening restaurants here and have brought new life to premises that once were cinemas or churches. Throughout history, we have seen cities assume the role of the creative north star. Vienna was the birthplace for art nouveau. The advertising revolution took place on Madison Avenue in New York. In the 90s Stockholm and Amsterdam were the international hot spots for advertising and creativity, with agencies such as Paradiset and KesselsKramer. Soon Montreal in Canada took over, with an explosion of new musicians and commercials from Sid Lee globally aired for a global brand, Adidas.

But now when New York feels crowded and the beach in Los Angeles is filled with tents of the unhoused, both of these places have lost that creative spark that drew people to them in the first place. Suddenly Nashville is a perfect petri dish to birth new creative collaborations. The city has space, and thanks to the music there has always been sound studios and talented printers here, but now we also see production companies, media houses, and advertising agencies opening shop here.

Brett Craig, former CCO at Deutsch LA, has moved to Nashville to start a company
which is somewhere between advertising, media, and production. Why just be an advertising agency, or production company when you can be all at once? Just like Humanaut in Chattanooga, he has one office where half the house is a stage to be able to make films in-house, quickly and efficiently. Unlike the city of New York and sprawling LA, there is no lack of space here, and getting from one part of the city to another rarely takes more than 15 minutes by car.
New apartment buildings offer state-of-the-art gyms, a pool, virtual golf, meeting rooms, and at least one podcast studio for everyone who is looking for accommodation.
Dan Ekbäck, formerly at Polar Music, has lived in Nashville since the early 90s. He has seen Elvis play live here at the height of his career and still believes that “things are happening here” because he has seen how quickly the city is developing. “The neighborhoods that people are buying expensive homes in now didn't even exist ten years ago,” he notes.

Next to the old prison, a whole new neighborhood has popped up, filled with transplants who may mistake it for a castle. The old cottages are torn down and replaced with "tall skinnies", houses that have the same area on the foundation, but are three stories high. The prison has been the star of movies such as "The green mile" and "Walk the Line”. Now the building is being renovated to be able to get a new life, not as a prison but something completely different.
Musicians like Justin Timberlake, Jack White, and Keb' Mo' have all moved to Nashville because from here it's not far to any other city where they might play a gig. Star Chef Sean Brock moved here to open the Husk restaurant in 2016. "Here in Nashville, the energy is amazing. What you see now is a bunch of young, enthusiastic, creative people.”
History is everywhere, from the old plantation in Belle Meade where they now manufacture wine, to the wooden floor in Ryman Auditorium that has housed everyone from Dolly Parton to Wu-Tang Clan. Now, the cigar-smoking conservatives of Daily Wire host shows here, between gigs of emerging stars.

When the world plunged into a recession in the 30s, Hollywood had its golden years producing classic films still loved today. When America was in a controversial war in Vietnam, counter-culture brought us some of the best music and musicians, peaking with Woodstock.

Nashville itself is a lovely mix of old and new, conservative and innovative, and it is in the differences and contrasts that new ideas thrive. This is what has drawn people here. A new creative era has begun.

Note, a Swedish version of this was published in Resumé Magazine, issue number 1 2023, and here on the web (for subscribers only).

Sometimes running Adland® gives fun perks. Friday before the Superbowl I was sent a local ad just as I was about to clock off and try to weekend a little before getting up and working all Sunday. I checked the ad out and was genuinely happy for the team who managed to write a script and shoot a spot in just a few days with everyone on the team taking on several job roles. Local ads are nowhere near the budget of the nationals, so I don't hold them to the same standards, but they can be super weird and quirky like Dan-O's Seasoning or just fun underdog ads showing off your product's best features like the ToughBuilt - All Pros Welcome / Super Bowl Prep ad.

So I posted the ad asap and emailed back that I was genuinely impressed with the plucky team to pull that ad off, and that I thought the product was cool - mentioning in the post that my toolbox is literally a wooden box built by my great-grandfather. It's not exactly easy to drag around when renovating homes and building stuff, which I do for fun.

I honestly hope the entire team do a re-enactment of this ad, using Toughbuilt bags and gear to drag all the Super Bowl fixings to the top boss' house. And perhaps they just expanded the market for these gear-holders, soon we'll spy these bags at tailgate parties everywhere. I actually want one now, that 16" Massive Mouth bag looks hella useful. My toolbox is an actual giant wooden box built by my great grandfather.

It doesn't hurt that the Toughbuilt 16" bag looks like a giant Duracell battery. Instantly I received an email back asking what my address was and if I was serious about wanting a toolbag. I said yes, and then this darling arrived at my house!

This gift is so appreciated too! I opened up my big box of tools that I have lying around here and managed to fit them all into this thing, everything was swallowed by the massive mouth, including my sander!

This is honestly really cool, now I can drag every tool I have around in one neat little bag! Easy access to all of my screwdrivers! Even the hammer fit in there no problemo! I promise I won't become a hardware influencer here, but as I actually use toolbags, I can honestly recommend this. The spot for the clip-on pouch is brilliant too, you can add a hammer holster, a bag for nails etc, a knife, or whatever it is you need to keep easy access to. It's bloody brilliant!

Good design shouldn't just be aesthetically pleasing, good design has to also be useful to the users of the object designed. This is a great example of good design.

Free and easy to use platforms are only fun while they are free, easy to use, and actually available. They pop up like mushrooms and their season ends just as abruptly.

I launched this 'newsletter' substack version of this website on a bit of a whim. It's a self-hosted Ghost.io. It was just to "pick it apart to see how it works" which is my preferred way of learning. Ghost is beautiful, sleek, they keep growing and adding new features. Plus, I discovered that handlebars is fun!

I spied that Revue and Ghost allowed me to connect my Twitter to signing up via Zapier, in this easy to click link that I could set up through the Twitter app & website. So naturally, I had to do that. I mean, why not, I had to see how this worked.

To my surprise (no, honestly!) people subscribed to my non-existent newsletter, so I chalk that down to ease of access via the apps and the Twitter website. Making things simple for people does make a difference. Isn't that how the whole bitcoin industry took off and nearly collapsed?

Soon I discovered issues with the Zapier connection. It works, but it constantly throws an error when someone subscribes to a Ghost newsletter via Revue. I spent a few emails talking to a helpful person at Zapier who really wanted to figure out what went wrong and asked for all my logs, even after I had sent several of them. I soon saw this as an "unpaid debugger" moment and stopped responding. No offense, helpful person at Zapier, but this is a Ghost.io, Zapier, and Revue owned by Twitter bug and I work for none of you. I managed to patch the bug so I would no longer get the error message emailed to me, as all the people who signed up were perfectly signed up anyway. Good enough of a fix for me.

Revue emailed me several times, both from automated emails and actual employees, asking me to "start my newsletter". But I didn't have to start a Revue newsletter, as I was just using Revue to funnel subscribers to my actual newsletter.

Now, Revue has announced that they are closing. We all received this message December 14th.

And that's the reason you should keep your things yours. Imagine if I had used Revue as my newsletter server, and imagine if I had paid subscribers. A frantic rush to host elsewhere would ensue, and importing things isn't always made easy.

I can see the temptation in using the big and popular things, for the advantages they might have - such as an easy subscribe link on Twitter. As for Substack vs Ghost newsletters - the two may have more in common than you might think!

The other week on Twitter, John O'Nolan from Ghost.io thought he had discovered that Ghost code powered Substack, and stated he took it as a big compliment that a bootstrapped nonprofit organization with only 6 product engineers created something that a for-profit Silicon Valley startup with $82.4million in funding would use.

Initially we were confused. Maybe this was a Ghost site after all? But no, signing up, logging in, comments, DNS… it’s all Substack. Huh. Weird.

So we clicked “view source” to look at what was going on — and that’s when we discovered Ghost code is now powering Substack. pic.twitter.com/0FSOk8I3nI

— John O'Nolan 🏴‍☠️ (@JohnONolan) December 12, 2022

But Substack hasn't ganked Ghost code wholesale, instead, they created an API that allows for Substack to use Ghost themes. Great news for me and anyone else who creates Ghost themes and might want to open them up for wider use (or sell them).

Substack is not "powered by Ghost". Rather, we built our own theming API that’s compatible with themes built for Ghost, including those built by third parties.

— Chris Best (@cjgbest) December 12, 2022

As for the choice between Substack and Ghost if you want to set up a newsletter, I would always choose Ghost. You can self-host a Ghost instance, even if they will make the case that it's cheaper to just pay them. If you don't already have servers set up, as I do, $8 a month is not a bad deal.

So yesterday was a fun day for me. I started the day ready to tackle a list of four annoying bugs that needed to be sorted out, and instead of ending the day with eleven bugs I actually managed to solve all four. How unusual!

Encouraged by this success I decided to tackle all of my inboxes today and to my delight found an email from Jamie K Sims of the Cosmopolitans updating me on their retrospective album which is now released on vinyl! You can get your copy at Beloved - I already did as soon as I finished reading her email, naturally.

You may never have heard of the Cosmopolitans, but I have been obsessed with the song "(How To Keep Your) Husband Happy" ever since my older brother put it on a tape for me when I was ten years old.

Decades later, I tracked Jamie K's email down, explained my obsession with that particular song and the whole album, and asked if I could please have permission to use a snippet as the intro to my Adland Podcast. I am a stickler for asking for permission, the worst that can happen is that you get a no or no reply. A bit ironic that I, who is so picky about permissions, was taken down by a “Nuisance DMCA” request sent to our host by an ambulance-chasing lawyer at Holland & Hart LLP. Both Reclaimthenet and Techdirt noted that this request was a load of claptrap. Adland was resurrected but with data loss and now I'm on safer, but much slower, servers as I no longer trust the majority of hosts or any cloud out there. Good thing I know how run my own machines, still.

But wait! There's more! See the vinyl album also has two previously unreleased recordings, and a 32-page zine! The fanzine is very likely the labor of love by Jamie K Sims herself, as she shared with me that she was digging up data from old hard drives, photos, flyers, and press clippings. So the 32-page zine promises historic visuals and information, as well as photos suitable for framing. How fun! Like the album itself which is all about having fun and dancing and a 10/10 workout soundtrack, to be honest, as you'll just bounce around naturally when you hear it.

Right, so now that I've come out as a superfan I'll end on this time capsule video that'll take you back to the height of the punk/New Wave era scene in New York in 1980. They even played CBGBs, just like Blondie, The Ramones, and all the other greats.

I wish I had a time machine - and this is why I collect vinyl. Unlike the music you have stored in someone else's cloud, nobody can change or alter the songs that you have on physical media. So whenever I want to I can hear that version of the Cure's "Close to heaven" with the jaunty saxophone (1990 release) that is nowhere to be found on Apple music these days.

Being outspoken means you're canceled - but it won't last.

I was invited on Isaac Simpson's podcast The Carousel, because I am outspoken and Tired of Explaining Reality to Fuckwits, and we spoke at length about good ads, bad ads, having stalkers, taking back control of your privacy and data, and how you can protect yourself in a world gone a tad mad. Direct link to the episode here.
Now, I obviously know what people think about my opinions, and I am aware that people in the advertising industry both avoid me and secretly reach out to me for these because there are a lot more women who share this opinion than you might currently be aware of. I didn't expect to become the poster child of radical feminism in advertising and privacy-protecting tech, but here we are. I suppose it was destined to happen as my mother wrote for Ms. Magazine in the 1970s and worked at companies like Memorex, Ericsson, and CompuFocus in the 80s so becoming a feminist nerd-child was sort of in my mother's milk.

I do take privacy very seriously after the many different instances, some of which I explained on this podcast, of being stalked and threatened, which is still an ongoing issue. The issue with the Chinese being upset about some ads on Adland is well known and has been written up in the trade press, but that incident also taught me how completely powerless a Swedish citizen, living (and registered as living in) Sweden is about keeping their home address and other information from public view. I have since then encountered worse situations and people which I won't detail further, but suffice it to say they made me radically change how I share on social media. A harmless image share may leak your GPS information in the Exif data, and simple things like mirrors, reflections in your glasses, and windows can reveal more than you would like. Always have your phone settings clear Exif data before sharing an image, and consider sharing a lot less. Every app that you have and use, and probably have to have, and have to use because you work in advertising, has the ability to spy on your every word and move even when your phone is off. This is why I like tools like the Säkra purse, which allows me to keep meetings only between the parties as I can slide everyone's phones into the Faraday cage inside it and it doesn't look like the Faraday cage bags that a prepper like Mel Gibson's character in conspiracy theory would have. His whole apartment was a Faraday cage with a bonus built-in killswitch in case the police arrived.

This is also why I have my "cloud" in my own house, as I like to be able to share photos and music and whatnot with my entire family but I don't trust Google, or anyone else, and I really don't like the monthly bills for those services.

So, on the topic of home cloud systems, here are a few you might want to look at.

If you're a content creator and need to share raw edits in a secure fashion Synology has several alternatives.
If you just want to have photos on your phone and share them with your family and friends, Nextcloud has an open-source app, Lychee is a mature self-hosted photo management tool that works a lot like Flickr, and Piwigo is another self-hosted tool that has batch management and multi-user features so this can be useful for work teams as well. Ownphotos is a self-hosted alternative to Google photos which may require a little bit more technical skill to install, but it has the interesting features of object detection, face training and event-based album generation. All you need is to set up your own machine at home, you don't want to risk all of your data in some server co-lo just because an automatic bill wasn't paid. It's time to normalize NAS over external drives or the public cloud. For the budget conscious, look at QNAP TS-233, for people with a lot of data to back up and share there are options like Synology DiskStation DS920 or the Synology 5-bay DiskStation DS1522+ which can grow with you. I also quite like the Linkstation 220 as it has built-in Torrent, the QNap TS-251 A for the sleek look and remote control, dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Celeron CPU and 4GB of RAM for hardware transcoding media files as well as the ability to run many apps including the Plex media server. The world is your oyster full of NAS alternatives in all price ranges now, so isn't it time that you make the switch?

Here is the Youtube link too.