Vibes and energy have become shorthand terms in a world with way too much data and way too many opinions. Those two little words are used all over the mainstream now; back in the day, they were mostly reserved for the new age/neohippie crowd, but over the last half-decade or so, they have spread far and wide. It’s a kind of compression tool: that person has a weird energy, we are in for a vibe shift, matching energy, just vibing, and on it goes. Vibe coding is red hot; all of us non-coders can now use AI to create disposable apps in an hour or two (and then spend five hours trying to debug it!) I’m also not sure the AIs can fully grasp the meaning of vibes yet; perhaps that is still a human stronghold?. Content that is more vibe-based than plot-based is on the rise; Season 3 of ‘The White Lotus’ and Season 3 of ‘The Bear’ are more about vibes than about what is happening—in both cases, often bad vibes—but still. It would not take many sentences to describe what plays out over all those hours of TV, you will have to feel the vibes to get it. With that said, I did not really like any of those Seasons, but loved S1 and S2 of both shows.
And, also loving the fact that this photo of Rick Rubin has become the universal symbol of vibe coding..
I don’t think these concepts will go away any time soon, after all what is the universe other than vibrating energy?
August 1993: After a couple of hectic weeks in San Francisco, I decided to head down towards LA. It was late in the evening, pitch dark and raining like crazy and I was in a bad mood. Had missed the chance of a couple of interviews and appointments. But for some reason I suddenly regretted my decision to leave SF, so I turn around and head north again. I have no clue on where I am, but in need of a place to sleep, so I just take the first exit from the highway and drives to a quiet street and pull over. This is before the internet takes off, so I have a look in my physical Lonely Planet guidebook. Looks like I’m somewhere in Oakland and finds the name of some semi-seedy motel in the book. I remember thinking, “How am I going to find this place in the godforsaken weather at this late hour.?” and then looking out and up. Then I realize that I am parked just in front of a huge but dark road sign. The sign has the name of the motel, so I’m right next to the place. After that, I took a couple of extra days in San Francisco, met some good people there AND managed to get my interviews sorted as well.
January 2024: Just grabbing some goods at the supermarket. At the cashiers I remember I have a few curly receipts for recycled bottles and cans. There’s three in my purse and by chance I find a fourth one in the inner pocket of my jacket. The cashier assistant looks at me a bit funny and says “Well, that’s a bit strange – you don’t have to pay anything because the amounts adds up exactly!”. Of course this is probably bound to happen out of all the many times one has paid for stuff, but still felt strange in the moment.
January 2020: Out walking in my neighborhood. It’s cold and dark (January in Denmark can be grim), and I am listening to a podcast about the early years of Prince’s career. I pass by a house, and through a large window I can see a family sitting around the dinner table. The reason I am looking extra intently is that the room is lit up in a stark, nasty purple color, probably some kind of Philips Hue situation gone terribly wrong. At that very moment, the podcast voice in my ear says ‘.. he referred to them as his purplefamily’, while I’m looking straight in at this very purple family. I hope they’ve gotten the lighting situation under control.
March 2025: I sadly never got into the ‘Severance’ show, and in January, I wrote a quick post about that with a random GIF from the show included. A couple of months later, I tried watching it again (people hyping it again, still not a fan). As I wrote a follow-up post and pressed ‘publish’, I looked up, and realized I was at that exact moment in the show, with the GIF playing simultaneously on my phone. It felt really weird.
June 2019: Talking to a friend who is an experienced meditator. I mention that sometimes when I meditate, it feels like I am looking outside myself, even with my eyes closed. He reminds me that this look ‘out’ is also just a part of myself, which makes a lot of sense to me. After he leaves, I’m sitting outside on the porch thinking about this. I hear a blackbird singing and as I always do look over at the neighbor’s roof where the bird is often sitting at the ridge of the roof (I have a long tradition of taking Instagram photos showing this exactly). But there is no bird.. I’m puzzled, but then I realize that the bird is sitting on MY own ridge just above my head. This made me smile.
July 2025: Sending my youngest son a text regarding some soon-to-expire tickets to LEGO House. His response is a bit baffling as he noticed that the podcast he had just started came out almost three years ago, same date as the one on the tickets. But that’s not the weird(est) bit; the topic of the podcast is the (most excellent) 1955 movie ‘The Night of the Hunter’ which we watched together a while ago. The podcast opens by listing a some significant things as old as the movie; the seatbelt AND the LEGO system! (the brick itself is older, but the idea of the building system saw the light of day 1955. Strange!
August 2025; During a game of ‘Hint’ I was challenged to draw red things, and in one round illustrate “The Red Crescent” (aka Red Cross). So I drew a moon and split it in half (my game partner guessed it, easy). On my way home there was a beautiful red moon, and looking at the photo the next day I noticed the moon was spilt by a wire, just like on the drawing.
I am a volunteer at a wonderful local museum here, a job I enjoy a lot. Not too long ago, I lost my ID card. I had been on a shift at the museum and knew that I had the card on me when I went into the city to run some errands afterwards. When I came home, it was gone; I must have lost it somewhere in the city. So the next time I came to the museum, I thought, “Better borrow a card for this shift; I’ll just grab a random one with a male name on it for now.” All the ID cards for the volunteers are hanging from several bookcases in huge bundles, probably 150+ of them. So I reached out and grabbed a random badge. It had my name on it. I was rattled for a moment there.
Maybe just a few random occurrences from the ‘What are the odds’ department. Most of us get those, especially if we are a bit present and aware. But it’s fun and sometimes a bit spooky when it happens. And these are the small ones; later we can get into the bigger ones where help occurs just when needed. Perhaps you have a good synchronicity to share?
You meet a new person. Everything clicks, and sometimes it can happen quickly. I quite like the term fast friends; we don’t have that term in Danish (yet). For that to happen, both parties have probably put their most accessible side forward, the good side. And sometimes that is enough, and you can go back and forth for a while. But at some point, it will be clear that the motion can’t be sustained; you can only go so far. Depending on the speed, it can take anywhere between minutes to decades to see how far you can go. But even if the gears don’t fit perfectly together, it is still possible to keep moving; it might be a bit noisy and uneven, but still. This can be said for potential friends and/or partners. But probably shouldn’t be said. BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE NOT TWO DIMENSIONAL GEARS. Us humans have thousands of moving parts, and we can change and adapt over time. But sometimes it feels a bit like the illustration above, that’s why I made it and shared it here. Makes sense?
“All models are wrong, some are useful” as George E. P. Box famously put it.
I don’t meditate to calm a busy mind. I don’t take long walks to get good ideas or to get healthier. I don’t pay attention to my breath because I need to soothe my nervous system. Those things are enough in themselves. Why does everything have to have a purpose?
Those long walks having great, thoughtful conversations with smart people could be turned into a ‘product,’ some kind of long-form podcast or perhaps a commercial version as an extended coaching session? No thanks. Opportunism & instrumentalization—everything can be turned into means to an end. It’s a major disease in our culture that almost everything is done to achieve something else. Kids should play because playing is good, not to prepare them for something. Play is enough. Mindfulness should not be a bandaid on a hellish daily existence. That is also why I low-key hate ‘networking events’ where the only purpose is to meet people because it might be mutually beneficial. Note-taking and diaries are a big part of my daily routine, not because all those notes and recorded thoughts need a purpose, but because the act of thinking through writing feels good. And sometimes I do use a note for something else later, but even if I never did, it would still be worth it. But I want to try and share a bit more, for instance on this page.
Sure, there may be all kinds of benefits and all sorts of good side effects of doing the things mentioned above, but things can be what they are in themselves. It’s enough. Doing things without purpose can even feel a bit provocative, but so be it.
During Covid I was working full-time on LEGO projects, all of it from home (like many others). It went surprisingly well, and I believe it had a big impact on LEGO and many other companies’ attitudes towards remote work. A lot got done; even complex creative processes were possible using proper planning, training, and tools. Saved a lot of commuting. Having said that, there was also something dark and tiring associated with that way of working for extended periods of time. We probably all felt that bleak fatigue that comes with far too many awkward Teams-meetings (“Can you see my screen?” “You’re on mute” “Is that an old hand?”). To me, the Teams software became associated with that grim time period, and I have not had any particular wish to relive it. But on the other hand, there was something about with small groups of good people and the occasional positive one-on-one video dialogue that spoke to me.
So in 2024 I made a conscious effort to carry out a series of video conversations with people I hadn’t talked to in a long time, and in a few cases, never before. It was very, very enjoyable and something I would recommend doing more of.
Couple of points: Plan it well in advance and make it a ‘thing’ with a clear starting and ending time. An hour is fine, perhaps with an option to go another if things flow. As with many other activities, it helps a lot if you prep and plan a bit. This makes it much easier to be spontaneous once you’re actually doing it. Some quick notes with keywords on topics never hurt. But the conversation itself is key, no ‘outcomes’ or ‘conclusions/next steps’. That’s not the point!
If possible, I would also recommend using FaceTime; it just feels more natural than the other video chat platforms. The latency is a bit lower and the audio is a bit better, which makes a difference. One of the (many!) reasons that video meetings can feel tiring is that the poor frame rate and broken-up audio force your brain to work in overdrive, filling in the blanks, so to speak. So for those of us living in Apple-land, use FaceTime. And if you’ve ever had a long(ish) conversation with me, you know that often a mail with links relevant to our chat will arrive within a few days 🙂 And if you and I haven’t spoken for a long time, give me a shout and perhaps we can set something up..
One of the great things about the LEGO product is that there are always new surprising ways to build. And I’m still amazed on a regular basis when looking at AFOL accounts on Instagram. Here in rapid succession a few faves:
JK Brickworks – Amazing moving mechanisms with style and humor. Doubleking – One word: Seatron! Some deep cuts there. Tips & Bricks – Cool mini reviews and infographics.
JK BrickworksDoublekingTipsandbricks
Brothers Brick – Oldie but goldie. (the blog is still great) Brickleas – The models and the photography is outstanding. Cosmic Brick – Flawless recreation of alternate builds etc.
Brothers BrickBrickleasCosmic Brick
Brickstalgic – Outstanding builds, often smaller charming builds. Avanaut – Great photography and style, also non-LEGO models. legobuilds (sic) – Newish official AFOL account, solid retro content.
BrickstalgicAvanautlegobuilds
There are many other great ones for a future post. What are some of your favorite LEGO people on Instagram? Share in the comments.
The closest you get to doing nothing and still doing something is walking. I love taking walks, and I do it almost every day as part of my routine. It helps that I am very close to forests and the sea, but the main thing is that it boosts my thinking and my mental state. No one ever came back from a walk and said, “Damn, I should not have taken that walk” (from what I know). It may even be healthy. And one thinks differently when walking, compared to sitting, bicycling, running, commuting, and so on. There’s something about the natural pace of walking that does good things for the way I think.
In 2021, I walked 80 kilometers in a single day, from sunrise to sunset. That added up to 104,000 steps, or 50 miles. Why walk so far? Well, basically just to see if it was possible and because it offers a great opportunity to think a lot of thoughts and enjoy some beautiful nature. At least a couple of times a year, I go on a long walk of 50–60 km—it’s a form of meditation, and I highly recommend it. Just start with shorter distances and work your way up.
Everything clicked on that warm day in August: my legs felt good, I got only one small blister, and the weather was perfect. The key is just to maintain a pace of five km/h, including breaks, and to make time for lunch and a big ice cream at Østerstrand in Fredericia. The route was a mix of all the great hiking trails in the area around Lillebælt. I hadn’t planned it in advance, but I made sure to avoid too many hills and to keep a good balance between trails and asphalt. As you can see from the map, I did three loops, so there was an opportunity to quit if things didn’t work out. Never walking that far in one day again. Probably.
Here’s a couple of tips for walking that I have found useful.
I always keep a small backpack with basic supplies ready for a spontaneous long walk. Nothing fancy, just some extra socks, a water bottle ready for filling, napkins, band-aids, my antihistamine pills, a pen + paper. This makes it very easy to walk out the door when I feel like it, no friction.
Walking alone is very different from walking together. Both are great, and I am lucky enough to have two handfuls of good people who want to walk with me. It’s such a perfect combo: good conversations, light exercise, fresh air, and being in nature. Hard to beat that. A bit of route planning adds a lot to the enjoyment.
I am not a fan of walking boots, as I mostly do rather flat routes and surfaces. But I have two pairs of walking shoes, and on the really long trips, I switch a couple of times, including dry socks. And a pair of trainers is fine for walking as well, but good walking socks with dedicated left/right designations are definitely low-hanging fruit. Keep your feet dry at all costs.
Normally, I don’t listen to music or podcasts while walking. But I often take a lot of notes, always using voice dictation on my phone (just the Notes app + Siri, it works extremely well, perhaps 95% accurate). I also shoot quite a few photos en route; the only rule is that I never go out of my way to take a photo. You can see some of them here.
I believe most of us try to boil AI down to something we can handle mentally; “Well, it’s just advanced autocomplete, it’s just a stochastic parrot, it’s just another tool” etc. etc..”. Sorry to say, it’s much bigger than that. We don’t really know what it is, and people who claim to do so are often dumb or too smart for their own good. Sit down, be humble. AI is not another technology, it’s different. Consider this.
Intelligence may no longer need to be localized within individual minds. Knowledge, once thought to be stored and retrieved like files from memory, now appears capable of being dynamically assembled from vast latent structures. Reasoning, long assumed to be linear and stepwise, is increasingly replaced by parallel, probabilistic processing. And perhaps most provocatively, meaning itself may not require introspection. It can arise in context—without any internal monologue or conscious reflection.
I enjoy using LLMs every single day. For one thing, they completely replace the rather useless 2025 experience of Googling things. I often need to have things explained to me, and LLMs are great at doing so at any given length or complexity; how does this author compare to this one? Make a list of lesser-known movies based on these three unknown movies, give me the five main points from this book, explain this obscure meme. When ChatGPT was upgraded with memory, it was a real game-changer; suddenly, the answers could be based on earlier chats and things you explicitly wanted it to know about you and your way of thinking. And you can have some great conversations on philosophy, personal development, problem-solving, and any other ‘deep’ topics. Just treat it as a dialogue with a (very) smart friend; sometimes they are wrong, sometimes the thinking is flawed, but you will often be a bit smarter afterwards. I think I have some fairly smart friends, and they will quite often disagree on fundamental questions, which is sobering to observe. I also make an effort to use multiple LLMs as a matter of principle, switching between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Some may say it’s like going from Coke to Pepsi to Jolly Cola, and it may be so. But it often brings slightly different perspectives even if the frontier models feel rather similar. And one of the worst aspects of AI is the feeling that everything becomes average. Just like our physical spaces are evened out by global Internet culture (ever heard of ‘Airspace‘?), it seems like all writing, thinking, art, etc. converges towards some kind of collective global average. I am not a non-AI purist by any means, feels like there will be a solid future demand for people with strong personalities and original perspectives. So much AI slop out here. There is a big Danish AI Facebook group, and it is obvious that much of the writing there is done by machines, peppered with ghastly AI images. And it feels so bad; sometimes I have an actual physical reaction when looking at it. And don’t give me the old “Well, most people can’t tell the difference anyway” argument; I just don’t like machines acting like people, and people acting like machines. And if we are meeting the machines half way, then it’s a full win for the non-human side.
I’m not using much AI when writing posts here. It just feels off to do so. Full disclosure: the WordPress spell checker has AI built in. And I may use AI to brainstorm ideas and topics, but the actual writing is done 100% by me, flaws and all. Many of my notes are collected in NotebookLM now, it’s interesting to chat and enquire into one’s old thoughts. Oh, and I really, really hate 99% of the ‘art’ done by AI image generators, so there won’t be much of that on lovetobuild. And you can explore this site using an AI. Just so you know.
30 years since the first danish web agency Mondo saw the light of day. Thomas Madsen-Mygdal invited 100+ of the usual suspects, the original gangsters, the dreamers, the pioneers, the bizz people, designers, coders, visionaries. Less hair, more glasses than 30 years ago, clothing palette still mainly black and grey. Had a great time. It was quite touching seeing so many familiar and friendly faces in one place, several for the first time in decades.
I did a short talk based on a napkin drawing from 2003, done during the Reboot 6.0 conference in Copenhagen. The internet as ecosystem. It started as an open plain. The danish internet index Jubii had 200 links to danish sites when it launched in 1995. Things grew quickly, wild and uncontrolled. Some seeds need to be exposed to fire before they grow, so the big dot-com fire in 2000 destroyed a lot of value short-term, but also cleared the earth for new exciting things. And many of the trees in the internet forest were shallow cardboard cutouts.
The drawing took on its own life, I’ve seen it shared in a few places around the web; I found out Jeff Veen used it to explain Web 2.0 concept. I wrote him to ask where he got the drawing from, he replied;
“I honestly don’t know how I got your drawing — I think someone mailed it to me a couple years ago. I’ve been using it for a little while in my presentations, and it really resonates with people.”
Jeff was part of the early team at Hotwired, the place where the banner ad was invented (the Oppenheimer moment of the commercial internet :). As part of my prep, I asked ChatGPT to interpret my drawing, and it did so without any flaws. LLMs are good at getting metaphors and analogies, so I asked ChatGPT to elaborate on the net as ecosystem, this was the result (notice the fire here in 2025 is just as bad as the dot-com one..) What comes next? Hard to tell, but the vibe is shifting. Big time. Feels bigger and more profound and serious this time around.
Good conversations, a lot of laugning, and a fair bit of net nostalgia (you should also read my earlier post on this). It was always about the people and the culture. Something which Thomas saw with such clarity very early on. And not only that, he acted on that insight and engineered gatherings such as the Reboot conference, The Copenhagen Letter and the open space hub KLUB in Copenhagen.
MEGA- Make Europe Great Again. Take back the web. Do your own thing. Make stuff, it’s never been easier. Get to work.
Here’s to the next 30 years!
And in that spirit; perhaps you were there? Please share your perspectives and thoughts. Danish or english, your choice. Would love to hear from you ❤️
Thank God the internet is still around. Not just as a pool of data for training large language models, but for people. Including all the fine and slightly older people who built the net, one page and one site at a time. We wrote stuff, made links and connected. Found the others. Made friends and created communities, big and small, networks and meaning. And had so much fun doing so. We are still here, most of us. Some have gone elsewhere, a few have passed away, but I know for a fact that most of all the inspiring, crazy, smart, provocative folks are still around if you look. Good news!
The Enshittification of the net is very real. The ‘social’ platforms i 2025 are generally awful, hollow places and getting worse. Everyone knows, or more importantly, we all feel it while we keep using. Dopamine loops, bad AI ‘art’, fake news, trolls, dark patterns for a dark online time. It all feels off, and that feeling has been growing steadily, especially over the last 2-3 years.
One of my favorite authors Douglas Rushkoff has been with us for the whole ride, chronicling, championing and criticizing online culture for 30 years, following all the ups and downs (the last few years mostly downs). This has been slightly depressing to follow, but in one of his monologues on the highly recommended podcast Team Human, he talks about a vibe shift happening. No one is in charge of all the chaos, so might as well make some good stuff here and now. One can always do a personal vibe shift, and maybe others will follow? Will you?
Two non-connected things prompted me back onto the internet, both happened on Saturday (31st of August 24). I had a nice day-sized conversation with my friend Thomas (Mr Danish Internet number One) and as usual there was a wide range of topics, both looking backwards and forwards. We chatted about quirky online personalities from the 90s, but also about what AI might be like in five years time (sorry, we don’t have a clue). Our talk made me miss some of that energy, and left me with a feeling of loss, something valuable got lost along the way. And to be honest, I have not had very much creative energy for a while (more on this in a coming post). The other prompt came via Tina Roth Eisenberg aka Swiss Miss, and she wrote on X;
I miss the innocence of the early blogging days. No trying to monetize your audience. No algorithms. No funnel talk. It was fun and playful. People were genuinely excited to share their weird obsessions and interests. I will forever try to recreate that corner of the internet.
I used to visit Tina’s site quite often, but had forgotten about it. It’s still running along with a few of the other classics like https://kottke.org and https://daringfireball.net Tina featured my LEGO fail whale back in the day (thanks for all the traffic, it’s been freakin’ 15 years but the link still works!) Earlier in 24 I had a couple of delightful videochats with Yiying Lu, the woman behind the iconic twitter fail whale. She keeps the spirit alive doing great visual stuff like designing emojis and working with Adobe, Pantone and others. More good energy!
I used to love making things online. Had an early blog with oh so many hyperlinks. Did guest blog posts. Wrote a weekly satire website with my friend Martin Haubek. Hosted a collaborative magazine slash community on Google Wave of all places (look it up dummy, or look at this danish link). Wrote a lot of columns and articles on internet culture, dot-com mania and a ton about VR, computer graphics etc. Made a personal newsletter with a thousand subscribers and some commercial newsletters with 100.000 subscribers. I have hyperlinks in my blood. And I’ve written a ton of tweets/x posts over the past 17 years, a few of them rather good. No regrets. But Twitter/X is not the place it used to be, still pretty great for news on AI, art, music and culture, if you know how to filter aggressively.
This is my first site in English, hoping a few new readers will join. And sorry not sorry if my English is a bit broken here and there, some of that may even be on purpose; I remember a conference in NYC 1998 where an online magazine editor told us that they kept some of the slightly broken English in just to keep that an authentic human voice in the articles done by foreign writers. I always liked that idea. Even more so now that most of what we read online has been through the AI wordgrinder-machines like Grammarly or ChatGPT (not this post though).
I’m launching today with the most basic of basic WordPress website. It feels right and I think it would probably be good to start writing more and longer in public again. But it takes time, so it would be much appreciated if you want to support my site. Not quite ready for an open comment section at this point, but do send me a mail or DM if you have inputs, feedback or just to say hi. Thanks for reading all the way, good to be back.
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