Hey y’all,
I’m a few days late with the August recap, because the last days have been hectic: We’re going on holidays tomorrow, leaving Berlin for a bit, and there was a lot to wrap up work-wise and also I still haven’t packed. Weee! Living on the edge!

Also: All of August I’ve had varying degrees of wrist pain, presumably from typing on various keyboards for too long. So I’ve worn all kinds of splints and did what capitalism wants me to do: trying to consume myself out of my misery, buying two ergonomic mice and various gel pads to place around keyboard/mouse… but of course the only thing that really helped wasn’t throwing money at the situation, but, you know, taking a break. I felt very lucky that my colleagues at Village One had my back and I never felt any pressure to keep going, although many tasks took me longer than I would have hoped for. Turns out mostly written + asynchronous communication works great, until you can’t type. Anyhow, my wrists are a lot better now and I can manage normal work days again, which I’m very grateful for. Should hopefully go away entirely over the next weeks.

I got DALL-E access and it’s been fun playing around with it, but it’s also not as mighty as some of the hype commentary might make it seem from the outside. Painting-based styles work a lot better because they hide the various glitches and oddities in most of the compositions. Still fascinating, especially with the new outpainting feature.

We got a lot of good feedback on our Village One website and also brought aboard a new member just a few days ago: Zhuo-Fei Hui, who is a very experienced back-end engineer. So cool, I wrote more about it in the last V01 newsletter. As an aside we also revealed that buying a cooperative share and becoming an equal co-owner of Village One costs a mere 100€. When we drafted the legal framework pretty much everyone told us the price tag for a share should be a lot higher (like, say, 20-50k), so that new people would have to show financial commitment to becoming a co-owner, but we felt that to be too exclusive. We want the barrier to entry to be as low as possible, to build a more diverse team, including people who don’t have the financial means to buy their way into a company. We’ll see how it works out, but I’m so excited to see who else will join us over time!

More V01: We also did one co-located work day at a wework to plan upcoming project work and man, I could sit at wework all day just to watch the startup people hustling. Felt a bit unreal to be there (it was my first time), haha.

Speaking of new experiences: This may sound odd, but I grilled marshmallows for the first time ever and it was awesome! Why did I never do this before? Admittedly it was pretty hard to find good vegan marshmallows and we went with these after intensive research. Worked well, I was told.

My home-grown chilis are coming along nicely and I’ve harvested approx. 20 so far. They are all habaneros, which is nice, because they taste very fruity, but they are also so damn hot that your face melts off when eating them. Not sure what to do with them now… but they are very pretty. Photo at the end.

Deichkind dropped a new song and it’s… wow! Fun fact: They always post a list of videos that inspired them in the video description, so take a look!

Please bring back conversation pits!

CUGGL – I chuckled!

Been using BeReal every day in August and I love it, especially the discovery feed. So random, very delightful. Let’s be friends?

Had my first Club Mate Sugarfree and I don’t know, it tasted very flat. I wish they had just made a different product that doesn’t mimic the original, but is simply unsweetened mate tea. Interestingly, Charitea did exactly that, but their bottles are too damn small!

A fantastic article explaining how Gen Z updates past trends to be more inclusive (not just yearning for a simpler world).

same.energy, a visual search engine

I contributed a tiny section to the Dense Discovery newsletter #202!

Watched Thirteen Lives and holy shit, this movie was INTENSE. I kept thinking about it for days, which usually never happens.

Finished reading Sea of Tranquility – what a wonderful little novel. Follows the Cloud Atlas structure and I’d say it doesn’t work quite as well, but it’s also trying to do something else entirely and it’s so cool when you understand what’s happening. Not gonna spoil anything, but recommended, well done Emily St. John Mandel! Now I gotta read Station Eleven, I guess.

Speaking of books: Here’s our next book club meeting, with A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

Holidays! 🇧🇪 🇫🇷 🇬🇧

Just three photos this time:

Signing some V01 contracts with Christoph and Doro

🔥🔥🔥

No newsletter shall be complete without Freddy!

Alright, I’m off! Take care and talk soon,
Harry

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Harry Keller
harryfk@hey.com
@harryfk | .com