Yesterday, I wrote over at Mastodon: “Sitting on the balcony after a good run, enjoying a home-made turkey & egg double cheeseburger and an espresso-tonic, looking forward to watching The Equalizer 3 in a late-night screening. That’s how summer should be like!” And yes, it felt like that the whole week, more so than during my entire Au...

Today, for the first time since I received knee surgery back in January, I tackled one of my formerly regular 10km dirttrack/hill runs. Not at my usual speed, mostly—I’m still too scared, and I’m also not exactly in top shape. But it sure felt great! What also resumed as of last Friday is work; my watching-the-balcony-being-flooded-by-...

Weather’s been mixed; temperatures rose again last week but it rained about every other day. I did and do a lot of running, writing, playing, editing photos, and watching movies, and I enjoy the latest advances in refreshment engineering. However, academia’s gravity field caught up with me again. I attended my university’s term project...

Not much has changed, weather-wise, except for one beautiful summer day the day before yesterday that felt just like the vacation weather I feel acutely entitled to! And while so far it hasn’t been raining today, it looks like it’s fixing to all the time, and temperatures snapped back into the low 70s. You can do better, summer! On my ...

The week before last, when I was critically preoccupied with wrapping up loose ends before summer vacation, the newsletter completely slipped my mind. It’s been a staycation so far, only without the balcony I redecorated around this time last year because it’s raining all the time. No floodwaters yet or anything, thank goodness. But it...

Now that we’re about halfway through the year, which happens to coincide with the first moon landing’s anniversary and also my birthday, it’s a good time to take stock. 2023 didn’t start out promising here, with that common cold from hell in January, Covid in February, and the lengthy break I had to take from running thanks to meniscus...

My memory of the past week primarily revolves around cleaning my desk, drawers, devices, and various keyboards in particular, the latter at length reflected upon in four overlong Instagram posts. But I also attended the CGL’s annual Open Lab event Wednesday night—to chat with graduates, students, and friends, check out the graduation p...

Someone recently wrote, I can’t remember where, that the internet itself is the “town square” everybody’s been going on about, not any one social media network. And that people usually want to go and sit in bars and restaurants or go shopping, not hang around in the “town square” the entire day. Well, you had the shopping malls and the...

Fediverse admins are not amused. They don’t mind if Lord Elno intermittently sprinkles some extra pixie dust over his daily dose of birdie powder and fucks up Twitter in new and exciting ways, so that fresh waves of exiles hit the shores of the most prominent instances, including mastodon.social. What they do mind, however, is that thi...

It was already Tuesday when I realized I’d skipped last Sunday’s newsletter. Not that I was stressed-out or anything—I was just terribly busy! All weekend last week, I consolidated various backups to a new and fast hard disk I’d bought earlier, which was complicated. The Mac I’m temporarily working with (courtesy of my university’s IT ...

Not that I’d ever complain personally about a good hot summer arriving early—from 85 °F onward and climbing, I begin to feel like myself. I get a lot more things done, get better at making decisions, and enjoy life in general. This weekend, for example, I attended four concerts, three classical at Tonhalle Düsseldorf and one rock conce...

As the last sixteen or so days were pretty insane, I had to skip last week’s newsletter and social media activities in general. What I’d originally thought I’d be terribly busy with were my upcoming book’s page proofs. But CRC-Press did a terrific job, so that turned out to be a cinch. Only one major issue needed fixing, involving thre...

My book’s page proofs arrived last week, and I will be exceptionally busy for the next ten days. Every mistake not caught by me during this time will find its way into the finished product, and I can already say—after speed-scrolling through the document—that not all illustrations have been placed where they should have been placed. As...

Yesterday, after a busy Saturday that included spending a lot of time at the local Japan Day and preparing and enjoying dinner, I finally sat down with a glass of 1776 57.3% Barrel Proof Straight Rye on the rocks and thought, hey, why not have a look at Facebook, which I hadn’t opened for ages! Well, turns out its enshittification has ...

On several occasions, I mentioned that I’d love to go back to analog photography, which has gotten a distinct “be careful what you wish for” vibe lately. Not only did I sort of inherit a Nikon FA with an intimidating array of lenses a while ago; last week I also sort of inherited a Toptron Microcam TC-505 toy camera for 110 film, a Rol...

For the first time in ages, not counting travel squaries at Pixelfed and a few shots at betweendrafts and voidpunkverse, I neither published any blog posts nor uploaded anything to Flickr. Not only was that week packed with 18 hours worth of lectures plus preparations and follow-up handouts, a belated bachelor exam, an important meetin...

Last week up until today, besides lectures and everything else, I had to go through my publisher’s copyedits, a fun package of ~600 pages distributed over 30 documents, 100 text-intensive illustrations, and a brutal 180 items “Works Quoted” section. Which—besides books and papers and articles—references everything from Aristotle to the...

Not counting Panjiayuan Antique Market in Beijing, I hadn’t visited a flea/antique market in ages; thus, I went to Aachener Platz Flea Market in Düsseldorf yesterday, motivated by my current you-need-to-get-out-more policy. While I was glad I went, it turned out to be underwhelming. Apparently, flea markets lose much of their appeal if...

Don’t mind the title if you don’t happen to find yourself at the center of a Venn diagram of markedly distinct pieces of cultural knowledge; it’s a seasonal joke I made on Twitter long ago, and it makes me miss the time when my beloved social network wasn’t run by a Nazi Child King. Anyways, I keep being surprised by holidays, even if ...

Last Friday was graduation day! At an excellent venue, the Wacom Experience Center at Düsseldorf Medienhafen, our game design Class of 2019 received their freshly minted B.Sc. diplomas in the course of an acutely enjoyable ceremony. While this class had started out in October 2019, my first lecture fell into their second term, and by t...

While I mentioned my New Year’s resolutions to no longer take on every project, accept every challenge, and work every weekend, I left out my other resolve to get out more. During the pandemic, we’d gone on trips, met friends, and similar, but taking part in cultural events had come to an utter standstill. No concerts, exhibitions, pla...

Last week was a busy week. First, it was filled with oral exams, where our bachelor’s degree candidates presented their research and answered our questions. Traditionally, as a peculiarity of our university’s game design department, these exam sessions are attended not only by the examining committee, i.e., the students’ thesis advisor...

»Schnelltest« is what the at-home COVID-19 test kit is called in Germany. I burned through an entire stack last week, only to find that the T-line became asymptotically thinner without ever vanishing completely. Thus, for the weekend, I decided to no longer check, which means I’m both positive and negative right now! I do feel a lot be...

Last week, two days after I wrote that “it felt as if the tiniest amount of balance had returned to the world,” I tested positive for COVID-19. Thank you, World. Today, I might have finally entered the home stretch, but I’m still testing positive and feel like it. Also, my throat keeps being on fire for large parts of the day. (Plus, m...

While most lectures and seminars have shifted back onsite since October, our game design students’ end-term project presentations last Friday were conducted online for several good reasons. Later that day, however, we did go out and physically celebrated—for the first time since Covid-19 hit Germany around February 2020! From well-earn...

It was quite calm last week, but it was the calm before the storm. Beginning tomorrow, our students’ exam theses will roll in. Not all at once, however—again this year, many fell sick, and their individual deadlines are scattered all over the place. It’s so hard to keep track, I hope I won’t forget anyone! (Just kidding.) Last week, I ...

Last week was filled with university tasks, from staff meetings to exam organization to planning next term’s course schedule. True to my new year’s resolution, however, I managed to keep things in perspective and, well, manageable for a change. Another and hopefully final round of editing concluded last week for my book contribution, a...

Another week that just flew by. Apart from the end-of-term & self-initiated projects presentations at the CLG last Wednesday, which were awesome and exciting, not a lot has happened. Which is a good thing! Usually, I never make any new year’s resolutions—beyond the default one not to do anything I don’t really love to do for long. But ...

No, I didn’t plan on pausing my newsletter for a whole damn month. Just last week, I recovered from what felt like a half-dozen common colds, who’d visited me all at once for an enormous house party that lasted from December 30 to about January 25. Time didn’t stand still, of course, as I had to do some touch-up editing, both for my bo...

After Reichsmarschall Elno’s carpet bombing run two days ago, banning journalists and critics left and right, nuking Twitter Journal and Spaces, banning outgoing links to Mastodon and other Fediverse instances not only in bios and tweets, but even DMs, I decided to put my primary handle too on ice and call it a day. (As mentioned in la...