Terrifying German Culture Hour — Shows!

TV Shows, what a grande theme. The thing you have to realize at this point, is that when germans hear „show“, they don’t think of Law and Order or Baywatch — those are Serials in our lingo. A show is a grandiose affair, usually reserved for saturday evenings.

On top of that, there is a very german variant of the talk show, which invariably has a group of at least 5 to 6 people sitting around a table and, well, talk.

So, shows. If you’re american, you now probably think of either Rat-Pack-style entertainment or at the very least Larry King or David Letterman. Well, no. We instead got a guy licking pencils but more on that later.

So, to give you an idea how these talk shows looked, and to confirm all your suspicions on how perverse sexually liberated germans are, here’s Nina Hagen demonstrating how women can masturbate. During prime time TV.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YxJ5UShIDg

There were also small-scale talk shows for the regional programming. Things were a bit rougher there:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3AxGp5k-Qo#t=1m50s

(no, this was not staged. Yes, the guy with the axe is a musician)

But the big saturday evening shows reigned supreme. You could safely expect a large live audience, some well-known band or musician performing and, this is inevitable, a small band of text running at the bottom at some point, informing you that they are already over their allotted time-slot, meaning that the news that were scheduled for 10pm will now be shown at 10:30pm or even later. and most of the time, the entertainment involved ordinary citizens being either skilled, talented or at least clever. They were the precursor to todays game shows, but apart from five minutes of fame, there wasn’t much to win. Still, the intros got imprinted into the brains of those who grew up at that time:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9EqP-hZ-vM

(You might want to hold on to the image of the cartoon at the beginning. Those two were made by Loriot, and he will figure in a later installment!) Still, if a german suddenly makes a spooky voice at you, intoning „Risiiikooo“(Riiiisk) at you, then that’s where it’s from.

Another thing in terms of intros was that some shows were deemed to be big enough that they were aired via Eurovision, meaning that they were broadcast to not only germany, but also into the neighbour countries! Such a momentous affair usually got announced with an extra fanfare:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W07iCuZQIZw

And now we’re finally at Wetten Dass — the german game show that Will Arnett waxed forth about mightily in US TV already. This is a show where ordinary people made claims about being able to do extraordinary things. Pull a truck by pure muscle mass. Have all lottery numbers from the past 20 years memorized. Have a dog that can destroy 100 balloons in under 60 seconds. Then celebrities were invited to bet on the outcome of the attempt. Wetten Dass was the holy mountain of all saturday evening shows, and the cases where the host was switched out were subject to a major national crisis and debate.

Wetten Dass was such an important show that the premier german pop duo used it to announce it’s reunion (in a fake Blind Date format):

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHbwFcjmGFs

Anyway: Here’s a guy who can tell you the colour of a pencil by licking it:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDBBuB8L2oY

The Great Saturday Evening Show died somewhere around the turn of the century, got briefly revived by a former butcher and is now consigned to the graveyard of memory.

Terrifying German Culture Hou- wat?

There’ve been a few „this was terrifying, why?!“ comments in the side channels to the last blogpost. Let me explain a bit, why Terrifying German Culture Hour exists:

Click 4 Big

I’m a nerd. And so is the girlfriend. Being nerds, our interests are often… eclectic. And cynical — as anyone who ever worked with computers, we sometimes want to retire to a farm, so, when the conversation shown at the left side happened, there was only one possible answer:

One-up her and assert dominance! So, I posted this:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c1hhWhhTbA

Which is, despite what you might think, actually sung in german. And as I did that on her Facebook timeline, innocent bystanders got blindsided, and demanded an explanation. I finally found the relevant Facebook post again, so I can make you suffer reconstruct this explanation here:

Have you seen „A most wanted Man“? You should, it’s a great movie. If you’ve seen it, there’s a german bureaucrat in there, who is played by Herbert Grönemeyer. You can briefly see him in this YouTube clip. He’s the chap on the left:

https://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​x​I​4​f​8​w​q​y​-​v​A​&​f​e​a​t​u​r​e​=​y​o​u​t​u​.​b​e​&​t​=29

Kinda unimpressive, right? But the fact that the video headline mentions his name and the word „comeback“ should tell you that he might be a bit of a thing here. And yes, he is. Maybe you do remember Das Boot? He was in there too, as a reminder, here he is:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Z763gIE7k&feature=youtu.be&t=108

So. Grönemeyer, actor, that’s it, right?

OF COURSE NOT!

Grönemeyer is a german national treasure, and not because of his acting (which is top notch), but for his music, dummy! Us germans, we love Herbert for his music, here’s his hit:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZsxfo8ITw

And no, this is not something weird and one-hit wonder by some random actor-trying-musician. Herbert fills stadiums! 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpGIDOBZqgM

And he stayed active as a musician quite a while, making videos that put Werner Herzog to shame:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SG5A3PYaUs

If there is any doubt in your mind, he is so beloved, he got to sing the official soccer world cup song!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrdaErlKngs

Should you still be unconvinced, rest assured, he is so famous, there are cover songs of his work:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfhmKZsQvSY

And next time, I’ll do the Die Ärzte thing, promise.

I am on Mastodon now

Those who know me, are aware that I am some sort of Hipster. As such, I of course have to be ahead of all the latest trends and topics de jour. In social media, that means that I of course need to have a Mastodon handle. In case you haven’t heard of Mastodon, here’s a short summary:

  • Mastodon is a microblogging service based on GNU-Social
  • Everyone can set up their own instance and then federate with other instances to create a global network
  • Identities are only unique within their instance. Same as email really, where you can have the same name on several domains.

So, what makes this different than, say Identi​.ca, Diaspora and similar things? For once, it already looks much more polished than Diaspora. And then it also manages to overcome quite a lot of the shortcomings that are inherent to the Twitter-clones:

  • There is an expanded limit of 500 characters for each „toot“. That is wordy enough for me.
  • There are two extra timelines that you can see — everyone on the same Instance and everyone else who is somehow connected to the people in your instance. That ensures that you see things happening and get connected to folks right from the start.
  • The federation system gets rid of the pesky free-speech vs moderation clash. More on that later.

So, what is it with the three timelines and the federation system? The basic setup is this: You have a home timeline, which shows everything from those folks you actively follow. You can follow users on your own instance, as well as those who are on any instance that is federated with the one you’re on. That basically means everyone, unless their instance is viewed as so toxic and bad that your admin has decided to get rid of them altogether. In effect, the Home timeline is what you’re used from all the other social networks. 

On top of that, you have a „Local“ timeline. That list shows all the activity from everyone who is a user on the same instance as you. This immediately shows one reason why it is important to choose the correct instance to have your account in: If the instance you join is full of gaming nerds, you will have a very different experience than if it would be full of artists or political activists.

The third timeline is the Federated one. Here you basically see everyone who isn’t local or in your home stream, but somehow connected to one of those people. Friends of a friend so to speak. The exact rules are a bit more complicated, but that is the gist of it.

I really cannot stress how useful I found these extra two timelines. While I have no idea how many people are on the same instance as I am (octodon.local, chosen because the about page is simply spot on to my worldview.),  it apparently is exactly the right size: The local stream is busy, but not too busy. And as a result, people take the time to chime into conversations there and answer open questions. On other social networks, those questions would probably either not be seen, or drowned in the sea of everything else.

Now, with every new tech project, there are of course immediate philosophical differences: One of them is the use of FollowerBots. Those are bits of software that simply follow every person on a different instance that they learn of, making sure that the activity of those people becomes visible in the instance of that bot. As an end result, the bots aim to change the behaviour of that Federated timeline from showing friends-of-friends only to showing everyone. Personally, I am not yet sure if I like this. The upside is that if this bothers you, you can for example join an instance that blocks those bots.

The other issue seems to revolve around censorship and free speech. My own stance is that you can say what you want, but not everyone is required to listen to you. And the federation system of Mastodon allows for exactly this: Everyone can set up their own instance, and everyone can give being heard a good shot. But if you spout stuff that upsets people, they can make sure that you don’t show up in their timeline.

(You should be aware though, that the whole Mastodon concept is not very privacy-oriented. There are lots of loopholes and pitfalls, and server admins can usually read everything on their instance if they absolutely want to.)

Still, the whole Federation system allows for a wide variety of needs on the whole free-speech-vs-censorship spectrum. And that allowance in turn fosters a discussion about these very things, with the results of that discussion ending up in the code and settings of the various instances. (keep in mind that the whole thing is open source after all!)

I think I’ll use Mastodon for most of my daily status update needs for a week or so now, to see where I end up with this. See the results here: https://octodon.social/@JollyOrc

Why I don’t identify as sysadmin anymore

I used to be a sysadmin. And I like to think that I was pretty good at my job. These days, my work is much more managerial with a strong emphasis on communication. The command line and I only meet occasionally, and I have to get help whenever I do something more complicated with regular expressions. Still, I apparently have retained enough skills that the Head of Cloud Operations at my current workplace occasionally says things like „oh, you can do that?“ in a positively surprised tone. But I usually do know my limits and what not to touch.

This is the story of when I failed to recognize my limits.

Knowing that I’m not an admin, this webpage resides on a server that is run by a webhosting company. They worry over security patches, uptime, sensible database configuration and so on, because I know that I’ll probably screw this up. I am allowing myself to change database tables, tinker with some of the htaccess settings and… DNS. That is one of those things that I don’t touch a lot, as there is no need for this on a daily basis.

And thus, I completely forgot about the SPF record when changing the MX entries to support my G Suite setup when I switched hosting last year. As a quick recap, let me quote Google what it’s about:

The purpose of an SPF record is to prevent spammers from sending messages with forged From addresses at your domain. Recipients can refer to the SPF record to determine whether a message purporting to be from your domain comes from an authorized mail server.

Quite the important and nifty functionality. I actually knew of it already, but didn’t realize that the new webhoster had this implemented as a standard. So while I successfully switched all the MX entries, I overlooked the SPF setting.

Alas, there are a lot of email servers that happily ignore a faulty SPF setting, even Google kept receiving emails despite the wrong setting. And you don’t really get an error message on the senders part, because no one talks back to (even only suspected) spammers. So nearly everything seemed fine: I was sending and receiving mails on a daily basis and this configuration error wasn’t discovered for nearly half a year. Only when I started to worry that one email recipient didn’t answer at all and a friend who actually is an admin looked into the matter for me.

So, the lesson here is: The Dunning Kruger effect is sometimes closer to home than you think. Whenever you do something only occasionally, maybe talk to someone who does it regularly, to make sure that technology hasn’t advanced past your own experience in the meantime. And if you use G Suite, here's how to set the SPF correctly.