I have news

First of all, my agency is now known as Hedengren Agency. My partner (and wife) Helena and I thought that it was time to rebrand from Divide & Conquer, despite the fun backstory (which I’ll tell in a bit). We have no intentions of growing in terms of employees, to the chagrin of all those Linkedin job hunters. Hedengren Agency is a small digital agency, and you get to work with us, as well as our dear freelancing friends. That’s it. If you want something big, if you’re dying for big teams, then we’re not your partner.

As part of this, we’ve redecorated the office. It’s been ongoing all summer, and it’s finally done, or as done as it can be for the time being. We still need to get artwork on the walls (I better get painting), and the inner sanctum will get a new kitchen area sometime next year or so, but it’s done for now. We think it looks great. The site will have photos later.

This space is separate from the studio that I’ve mentioned before. I’ll talk more about that at another time, as we’re still getting things set up in there. That work has halted to an almost standstill at the moment, as the agency is gearing up for a couple of big launches, the first on Monday next week.

Which brings me to the second thing I wanted to talk about, something that also happens on Monday, but it’s not industry related. You see, I’ve had this idea of a daily (well, weekdays) short little … thing … that ends up in your inbox. It’s not exactly advice, nor is it tips and tricks, and it’s not philosophy or productivity hacks either. I’m not talking big life lessons, nor would I ever presume to know how you should live your life. The idea is to give you something short to get your mind going, maybe trigger a new thought, or dare you to change a habit.

I call it Considering today, and you can sign up for free. I’m going to let it roll for a while and see how it feels, as well as hear what you think about it. This is as much an exercise in challenging myself, and my mind, as it is something I publish for others to read.

It’s Wednesday evening as I’m writing this, and I still haven’t figured everything out for Considering today, but I feel confident that it’ll be ready by Monday, hitting inboxes. So I’ll schedule this email, not counting the linkage section, in a little bit and use it as a carrot and stick at the same time.

Just to be clear, you won’t get Considering today without signing up. It’s not a new feature or part of Bored Horse, so make sure you don’t miss out. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Okay. Back to Divide & Conquer and why me and Helena decided to name our digital agency that.

We met for the first time (well, probably not, but that’s a different story) at the Stockholm office of a large web agency. They had bought my previous web agency (called Odd Alice, which WordPress folks might recall), and the idea was for me to assist the Stockholm office during the transition. Things turned out to get messy however, and it ended up with me stepping in as interim CEO of the Stockholm branch. That wasn’t something I was particularly keen to do, but Helena, who worked there at the time, proved to be a great partner in running the show. We had fun, so I figured why not do this for a while. And see where we are now, married and all, but I digress.

As I mentioned, everything was a mess. The company was mismanaged and in dire need of structure. We needed a system of our own to break down everything, and we decided on Todoist, a great to-do list service that I used a lot in the past. There were an enormous amount of things to figure out, so we created a list called “Divide & Conquer”, and threw everything in there just to get started. Bit by bit, we divided and conquered, sorting things out, and making the Stockholm office improve.

Fast forward a year or so, and we decided that we worked so good together, we should have our own little agency. Naming it wasn’t easy, but the only thing that stuck was Divide & Conquer, from that to-do list. That was the name we put on the papers, and up until last week, that was the name we’ve been doing business as.

There you have it. Now we’re Hedengren Agency, and it feels right. When we started the agency, we had a slightly different approach, and the things we do has evolved over the years, as they’re wont to do. It makes sense to rebrand to something that’s a little more personal. That’s what we give our clients, a personal connection and touch. If you can bare with the Swedish (or use a translation service), do check out our testimonials. They speak for themselves.

And don’t forget to sign up for Considering today!

Linkage

📱 Apple will announce new iPhones as well as Apple Watches, and possibly more, on September 12th. I doubt I’ll pick one up, I’m happy with my iPhone 13 mini and don’t want a larger phone, but we’ll see. Buy less stuff!

📹 YouTube partners with music industry on AI, and it gets not one but two blog posts on the official blog. The whole things feels a bit nasty to me, YouTube doesn't want to miss out on the next viral hit, and the music industry people wants to make money and control it. No thank you.

🃏 Interesting piece on hackers rigging card-shuffling machines.

🤡 Hey, it's Elon Musk demoing self-driving in an illegal (but non-fined because Musk is above the law, apparently) livestream, almost running a red light, and doxxing Mark Zuckerberg. All is normal in Clown Land.

🎮 Beautiful controllers with Sonic and Pikmin dioramas inside.

💣 World of Tanks, the mobile version, is big on the Ukrainian front. I don't really agree with the "how can you play that when you're at war" vibe that this piece has going at times, unwinding can be done in many ways.

📧 Silly, but still: How Buttondown uses your content to power generative AI.

🎞️ Finally, a piece of internet history has gone offline with the iTunes Movie Trailers website.

Got something I should read? Send it to me, either by replying to this letter, tweeting to @tdh, or hitting up bored.horse on Bluesky. Thanks!

Currently

📚 Been a slow reading week so I’m still on Tad William’s The Dragonbone Chair. I don’t want to call it yet, but I feel like this is a book that would’ve done well being a wee bit shorter.

🎵 Jimmy Bufffett passed away. I never listened to him much, but I've been letting Apple Music suggest tunes, and its old school catchy, and not too demanding. Fits this week.

📺 The new Futurama season is a bit tired, but it's more of the same, and that's just fine.

🎮 Restarted Baldur’s Gate 3 after losing a couple of hours to a save sync failure. It seems to be fixed after the latest patch, unless I just jinxed it. Just as well, I wanted different stats, it turns out.

Work is in full gear after the summer break, so it’ll be busy weeks ahead. That said, we did manage to get things under control this week, as planned, so I hope I can get some writing underway again. I’ve got some small things to do on a (Swedish) manuscript before shopping it around, and then I’m looking forward to starting the next one. Writing regularly is important, something I’ll talk more about in a future issue.

For now, take care, and remember to breathe. It’s healthy, they say.

— Thord D. Hedengren ⚡