Björn Jeffery

Clue, an app that enables women to track their menstrual cycles, has brought on three new investors to its latest seed round bringing its total investment to €1 million thus far. Clue received €500,000 from a previous seed investment round in February 2014. The angel investors joining are Björn Jeffery, CEO of Toca Boca, and previous Spotify executives Andreas Ehn and Sriram Krishnan.

“Confident, scientific and not pink” is Clue’s style.

There are no grown-ups. We suspect this when we are younger, but can confirm it only once we are the ones writing books and attending parent-teacher conferences. Everyone is winging it, some just do it more confidently.

I’ve become strangely fascinated by The Bling Ring. It’s not a new story, but it’s one that illustrates how celebrity culture can get the best of people – even the ones in the periphery. And how meta it quickly becomes when the people admiring and trying to imitate the celebs, become just this through the process. 

If you haven’t heard about it, this is a very brief summary:

A bunch of teenagers want to live the Young Hollywood lifestyle, but can’t quite afford it. They get the idea that they should start burgling celebrities while they are out of town, and steal their clothes and jewelry. Astonishingly the manage to pull this off and end up stealing $3 million worth of goods from people like Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and Orlando Bloom. They eventually get caught on surveillance cameras and the whole story starts to unfold.

In the middle of this, the TV-network E! strikes gold. Originally intending to produce a show called “Home Schooled With the Arlington’s”, they find themselves documenting a family with one of the aforementioned teens in it. The show is renamed “Pretty Wild” instead. It is later revealed that two of the girls in the show are smoking OxyContin between takes, amongst other things.

Recently, Sofia Coppola made a film based on the Vanity Fair article that describes all of this. Watching it, and the reality show along with it, creates a remarkably ironic and somehow very contemporary take on where we stand in the early 2010s. The reality show format is surreal in it’s own right, as is the content of it. The teens are homeschooled by their mother, a former Playboy model, who has created a curriculum based on the book/film The Secret.

You can’t make these kind of things up – it’s stranger than fiction. And that sums up the whole story very well.

• The original article in Vanity Fair – “The Suspects wore Louboutins”

• The film – “The Bling Ring” by Sofia Coppola (available on Netflix)

• The E! reality show – “Pretty Wild” (available on Netflix)

• VICE TV profile of Alexis Neiers talking about her former drug use

What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites.
(…)
And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.

“About a year and a half ago, Haig began working on an ingenious device called the Mineblock. A physical object powered by the credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computer and not much larger than your hand, the Mineblock does just one thing: run a private Minecraft server.”

(via Mineblock envisions a troll-free Minecraft universe – Kill Screen – Videogame Arts & Culture.)

My newborn daughter, Miranda Vox Elisabeth Jeffery.

This production manager Arno I mentioned,” Freeman says, “he was the second barista I ever hired and he was a German literature major, and Goethe was a big thing for him. And I remember reading some of Doctor Faustus a while ago—you know, to get to know Arno better—and there is a great, great metaphor in it that I’ve been thinking about so much. It’s the prevailing metaphor of my last 18 months. In the book, Mephistopheles appears first in the guise of a poodle. Who could resist a poodle? So lovable, so cute.

The appeal of Maier’s designs is similarly aided by clubbiness and artificial scarcity. With the Cabat, small production runs insure that it is not seen everywhere and thus retains what Steele calls its “stealth luxury” appeal. “One of the most interesting aspects of fashion in the past ten years has been how much of it has been like a secret Masonic handshake,” she told me. “Only people in the know will recognize what you have, and it’s really just not relevant to other people.”

oh-totoro:

STUDIO GHIBLI ANNOUNCES CLOSURE

Toshio Suzuki has announced the closure of Studio Ghibli. Here’s a translated version of the news article:

“Just moments ago, Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli producer, announced on the TV show of the MBS Jounetsu Tairiku chain effectively as announced as sources close to the studio, Studio Ghibli will close and production studio anime, leaving himself only as a company that will manage its trademarks. As stated in the program’s producer, “the production department of anime will be dismantled,” which coincides with the data that we gave in our previous post on this decision had been taken from spring after the poor reception at the box office of Kaguya-hime no Monogatari.

In the interview, Suzuki has also admitted that it was a major setback for the study progress Hayao Miyazaki, one of the reasons already unveiled the portal Rakuten Woman. Once we have access to the full TV interview, adding more data. No doubt that this is a very sad news for Japanese animation, of which we are all fans, because it is undeniable everything Studio Ghibli has given the anime. Please remember that what will be his last film, Omoide no Marnie, premiered at the Japanese box office on 19 July.”

Such a shame.

So how should advertisers be re-looking at their relationships with media houses?

– I think it’s pretty tough, because the media houses are clueless. The average media company in the world is in pretty poor shape. A few will survive. A few newspapers will make the transition from a print product to an electronic product as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have done. And the Financial Times, which is perhaps the most successful example. In South Africa, you might have a few electronic news services – News24 and a couple of others – making it. But most media houses are as clueless as ad agencies.

Your own included – Naspers?

– That would be perhaps a little harsh but it’s approximately correct.