It’s done. A few weeks ago — so many, that one should probably speak of months instead — I visited my RSS reader for the first time in years. I was faced with 1000 unread items.

So I read them all. Some I skimmed. Some were short comics. Some were duplicates. But over many weeks, I reduced that „unread“ number more and more to, well, as of today: zero.

One of my main motivations: To not let chance and a social media algorithm decide if I know about new stuff from my favourite thinkers and collectors.

Maybe my second biggest motivation: To switch my RSS reader. I used The Old Reader since the death of Google Reader (RIP), but will use Feedbin from now on.

Yay. And all of that just in time for the new year.

Rarely have I felt so proud of consuming something.

I was lucky enough to get a graphic novel called “Drome” by Jesse Lonergan for Christmas.

5/5.

Extremely creative. Feels super duper epic. I want to hang every third page of this book on my wall. Pretty brutal, but I just skimmed the fight scenes and still got a lot out of book. It’s intelligent. And it even tries to be funny sometimes (not sure it 100% succeeds). Highly recommend.

Coming back from our Christmas trip. A train ride I thought would be utterly stressful turned out to be beautiful and relaxed. Definitely the best surprise today.

Eight more days until Christmas. It’s getting a bit stressful, as always, because presents want to be bought and travel arrangements want to be made.

Let’s talk about presents. This year I’m a gift cynic. I feel like I don’t want stuff. Quite the opposite, much stuff feels like a burden to my life. It needs space and it’s the reason decisions need to be made — not just „where should it go?“, but also, days or years later, „should I get rid of it? But I got it from mom!“ And decisions are a burden.

It’s not hard for me to imagine a culture where gifting anything else but flowers and chocolate is considered an unwelcome intrusion into one’s home. (By flowers and chocolate I mean all things that you consume, or experience, like events…or are gone naturally eventually.)

That said, or course I love a nice or beautiful or thoughtful gift. When gifts land, they’re a great joy in life. And I like good stuff, too: Graphic novels, for example. Almost all I read, I get from our library. But if I read one I really like, I sometimes (rarely) buy it for my own collection. It feels nice to walk by my book shelf and get reminded of these pieces of art and what I felt when I read them.

Sometimes I miss having little money. I’m not 10 anymore. Buying these books — a lot of them! — is possible from my pocket money these days. Back then, it wasn’t. I needed Santa. Which means I wished, I yearned, I waited…and on Christmas Eve, I experienced some great happiness. Just by getting exactly what I wanted.

These days, I and most others I know can get exactly what we want easily — too easily, maybe. So for Christmas presents to make us happy, they need to be a surprise. Something we didn’t know we wanted or needed. Or something that brings us joy, but that we considered just a little bit too expensive to buy it for ourselves.

Yeah, gifting is hard.

I’ve never had a talent for it anyway.

I’ll just get everyone flowers. Flowers and chocolate.

Datawrapper has a new website! Very, very exciting. It’s shiny and new and interactive; there are videos showing how Datawrapper works and toggles to click to change the appearance of charts. There are nice entryways to the blog, the Datawrapper knowledge base, and much more. I especially like the overview of all the ways to learn Datawrapper and data visualization.

Here’s how the website looked liked yesterday morning:

Day and night.

A big thanks to Jonathan, David W, Alicia, Jona, David K, Elana, Rose, and Veronika; it turned out beautiful.