You won’t find me at gamescom anymore, or at devcom, for that matter. Not going into the weeds here (maybe I’ll elaborate on it in a blog post some day), but I’d already stopped attending gamescom/devcom shortly before Corona hit. Over the years, I’d been wearing six different hats at the fair—guest/gamer, trade visitor/press, exhibitor, hired presenter, academic, and developer, and the gamescom organizers miraculously managed to terminally piss me off in all six categories. Enjoy the fair, but from me it’s good riddance. What I immensely enjoyed instead was our Game Fair at the Mediadesign Hochschule, week before last, where our students presented their term projects that were great fun to play, and the subsequent student-initiated end-of-term party at Düsseldorf Altstadt. Which started (traditionally) at Spaceburger’s and eventually ended with a nightcap at the Engelchen bar, after which I got home at 4:55 in the morning. Fun!
I was busy with too many things again, so I didn’t write any blog posts, only two linked-list items at my secret level just drafts on how pumping billions into large language models doesn’t equal innovation, and on Eric Schmidt’s infamous Stanford interview, respectively. Besides that, I wrote several new microreviews on Mastodon that I added to my collection post at between drafts: Ishii Sōgo’s 1984 Gyaku-funsha Kazoku (literally: Reverse-Thrust Family); Fede Álvarez’s 2024 Alien: Romulus; Osgood Perkins’s 2024 Longlegs; and Robert Altman’s 1970 M*A*S*H. This week, you can meet me if you want to at the Metropol movie theater forDon’t Look Now on Tuesday and [sorry, something came up] Christine on Friday (w/ German subs, alas). And earlier on Friday I will also attend the Lars Erdinger opening at the K21 (The line was two miles long already when I arrived a half-hour early, all waiting to get in already for a techno party right after the opening that I wouldn’t have attended anyway. Fuck it, really.) As for images, I wrapped up my Penang Island series with 22 shots from the Chew Jetty Stilt Village and 13 Odds & Ends shots over at Flickr. (I’m now sorting and editing the photographs I took after we crossed over to mainland Malaysia and then Kuala Lumpur, which will take a while.) Then, there are several new items in my Düsseldorf bucket, and there are my usual daily vintage travel squaries at Pixelfed.
As a follow-up from a few weeks ago, our balcony pigeon nest story is continually evolving. Only one of the two eggs did hatch, alas, but the baby pigeon from the egg that did hatch has already grown quite a bit! We’ve entered the phase now where the parents leave the baby alone for hours on end, or, like yesterday, even for an entire day. Which was pretty nerve-racking at first, but we have to learn it’s perfectly normal pigeon behavior! Now we’re trying to relax a bit for a change.
Enjoy the week!
I was busy with too many things again, so I didn’t write any blog posts, only two linked-list items at my secret level just drafts on how pumping billions into large language models doesn’t equal innovation, and on Eric Schmidt’s infamous Stanford interview, respectively. Besides that, I wrote several new microreviews on Mastodon that I added to my collection post at between drafts: Ishii Sōgo’s 1984 Gyaku-funsha Kazoku (literally: Reverse-Thrust Family); Fede Álvarez’s 2024 Alien: Romulus; Osgood Perkins’s 2024 Longlegs; and Robert Altman’s 1970 M*A*S*H. This week, you can meet me if you want to at the Metropol movie theater for
As a follow-up from a few weeks ago, our balcony pigeon nest story is continually evolving. Only one of the two eggs did hatch, alas, but the baby pigeon from the egg that did hatch has already grown quite a bit! We’ve entered the phase now where the parents leave the baby alone for hours on end, or, like yesterday, even for an entire day. Which was pretty nerve-racking at first, but we have to learn it’s perfectly normal pigeon behavior! Now we’re trying to relax a bit for a change.
Enjoy the week!