Another week, another round of news, thoughts and random stuff!

News #

Microsoft Loop - a new Notion clone #

About a week ago Microsoft announced Loop, which is basically a Notion clone. For those not familiar, Notion is a very powerful text editor/journal/database/kanban board/etc that can be your one-stop-shop for getting organized. You can learn a bit about Notion it by watching Microsoft's announcement below.

Jokes aside, I really like Notion, and it's FREE, so you should check it out here. I will share my Notion board here sometime soon, but anyway, let's see why I will stick with it for the time being instead of migration over to Microsoft:

1. They are the original service, and I already have everything there: hard to beat this one;
2. Microsoft might make a this sound like an important announcement, but not have further updates coming later. They are not exactly Google, but still, they killed Wunderlist, and Microsoft To-Do still has improvements to be usable to me.
3. If tools like Teams and other are any indication, it might be SLOW;
4. A new addition that I LOVE about Notion: the API. I have scripts to import and update data from Trakt, Anilist, Goodreads and more into Notion. I don't think Loop is ever going to have an actual easy-to-use API. At least not for free.

Twitter Blue is available, but who wants it? #

Twitter Blue is now available in the US and NZ. But really, is it any good? Let's see:

1. The "undo" is actually just a delay to send the Tweet. Bad 3G already does that;
2. It removes ads for some free news sites, but it's what adblockers already do. It doesn't remove any paywall on articles;
3. You actually still have ads and promoted Tweets on Twitter;
4. You'll still see the obnoxious 'liked by' tweet, and your likes are still going to be announced to everybody.

In short, it doesn't do much to actually improve your Twitter experience. Not that people tweeting more would be a good goal anyway.

Manga #

Daniel Greene has a great video with some critiques on One Piece. I feel like I should iterate a quote from the end of the video:

Manga is not a genre, it's a medium so it's totally fine to bring up mangas in a conversation about fantasy.

Books #

Merphy Napier reacts and has cool comments about book memes!

Other #

A bit late to share maybe, but still useful: November is the National Novel Writing Month, but you can use it for focusing on any goal that you have. And if it's too late for November, you can still prepare to have a good focus on whatever your goal is during December!

I discovered Hypnogram, a site where you type what you want to see in a picture, and it creates a nice image that might make you think you are on magic shrooms. It takes a while to generate it, but it is fun to try.

Random #

pic.twitter.com/BRy84I10j9

— Rinvi Norway (@Rinvi11) September 14, 2021

Another week, another round of news, thoughts and random stuff! #geekosaurNews