Beer, bad opinions, and the great blog money question

Walking between places—cities, airports, the long anonymous stretches in between—I need something in my ears or I’ll start narrating my own commute out loud. Podcasts are the solution. Even in Berlin, talking to yourself in public is still mostly a red flag.

At some point the question of whether blogs should run advertising became the defining controversy of the German internet, which tells you something about the scale of that particular ecosystem. Nerdcore kicked it off—whether blogs with ads could claim any integrity, and if so, what kinds, and who decides—and it spread with the enthusiasm of people who had been waiting for something to argue about.

The Biernerdliga collective—a loose alliance of bloggers whose commitment to beer clearly exceeds their commitment to audio quality—put out a podcast on the subject alongside a designer named Paul. Their conclusion was apparently monumental, paradigm-shifting, the sort of insight that would make tomorrow categorically different from yesterday. I may be overselling it. The actual conclusion was probably sensible and fine and forgotten within a week.

They also spent some time on this journal, specifically on the fact that I’m terrible at taking photographs in Tokyo. Which is accurate. I stand by my terrible Tokyo photos. There’s something almost principled about being in one of the most visually dense cities on earth and coming back with seventeen blurry shots of vending machines and a convenience store receipt.