Hello,

Regular readers will know that this newsletter was a meld of different things before and I'm in the process of splitting it up.

This is the first Procrastilearning newsletter proper, although I haven't done the technical split yet. The Translating Marek newsletter will appear next week. If you're new here, just ignore all this rambling, it's what I do.

I'm in love with Olio

I should have time next week to make two landing pages and email sequences, but at the moment I am doing a huge clear-out of nearly 40 years of furniture, papers, bric-a-brac, CDs and other junk. I'm trying to be conscientious and recycle and donate what I can, which takes a bit of extra time, but progress is being made.

During this process, I started using the free sharing app Olio. It's amazing. Although it's mostly known as an app to get free food, which I haven't taken advantage of, I have made its non-food section my home.

Olio has so far found me new homes for all sorts of things that I didn't think would have any takers. Do you still have a CD tower? Just put it on Olio like I did.

The most remarkable thing no longer in my life is this huge cathode-ray tube (CRT) TV. This grey beast weighs maybe 30 kilograms. After posting it on Olio, I didn't think anybody would want it and I'd have to heave it to a proper recycling centre.

Lo and behold, less than 30 minutes later I was arranging a pickup for that very evening.

A friend suggested they probably wanted to throw it off a cliff for a music video. But no.

When this mystery man appeared, he was a friendly but tired looking man in his early 50s. He had driven across half of London for this television, so I did allow him to use the toilet. He deserved it.

Relieved, he revealed he wanted the TV so that he could play Time Crisis on his old Playstation 2. It turns out that modern flatscreen TVs are terrible for light gun games. That's why you never hear about them anymore. Even the 1980s had Duck Hunt, but there is no real equivalent now. If you want to shoot a gun at your LCD telly, it's probably easier getting hold of an actual firearm.

Our Olio man had foolishly thrown out his old CRT telly about 6 years ago and had regretted it ever since, pining for the days he could viscerally shoot some pixelated soldiers.

It turns out he's not alone either. This is a big geeky niche. You can find plenty of Youtube videos of people finding old CRT TVs and getting excited about being able to relive the early 2000s.

Isn't it interesting how so many people use their spare time for weird pastimes that seem pointless to others... which brings us neatly to our next section.

The Doomer Self-Help experiment

As mentioned last week, I've now started writing mini-essays on Twitter in a new niche I'm calling Doomer Self-Help.

I started out thinking I would be writing deadpan ironic pieces, but I seem to actually be writing things that are more useful than mocking. I do start each one in the mood to write something cheeky, but then I start to feel bad for doomers and that maybe they do want some actual self-help advice. Of course, I will probably change my mind and write like the swine I really am soon enough.

Here is one closest to what I originally had in mind:

Here are some more if you're curious:

• 5 Big Problems for Doomers & 1 Nobody Is Talking About
• 3 Cognitive Biases that Doomers Need to Be Aware of
• 3 Cognitive Biases That Will Help Doomers Just Chill Out
• Doomers Might Not Want Kids But Here's Why They Should

Podcast / AI recommendation of the week

Last week podcast.ai got everybody excited on Twitter. Ever wanted to hear famed podcaster bro Joe Rogan interview long dead Apple founder Steve Jobs? Well, now you can. The show is apparently promo for an AI audio company called play.ht.

If you don't want to listen to the whole 19 minutes, just listen to this short 25-second clip, which is definitely the best part.

The excitement is mostly about recreating Steve Jobs (although I think a lot just reusing old interviews with him), but I'm mostly weirded out that the intro appears to be spoken by the writer Alan Moore of V for Vendetta fame.

I have no idea if that's actually Alan Moore or an AI version of Alan Moore... 🤔

Thanks for reading. See you next week for something more Polish-related, possibly more sensible, probably not.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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