Coming Sunday, if you live in Germany and are eligible to vote in the federal elections and Berlin state elections, you have to make the most important political decision in your lifetime. And you have to do that particularly for the future of younger generations. In four years, it will be too late. It’s almost already too late. You’ve...

For the upcoming federal elections in Germany and the Berlin state election, there’s the Wahl-O-Mat to pair voters with political parties. But there are so many questions and it’s all so confusing! Thus, as a free service to my readers, I devised a simple three-strike-questionnaire to help you find the party or candidate that’s right f...

On Twitter, I’m usually way more engaged in political matters in the U.S., Israel, and East Asia. But with the upcoming federal election in Germany, that has shifted a bit. First of all, there’s one thing that is both true for the U.S. and for Germany: trying to barge into Congress or Bundestag with a small party that advocates radical...

Yesterday, the two pigeon babies we’ve watched grow up for weeks, right in front of our window on the fifth floor, had their first flying exercises, and today the tree nest was empty. They both pulled through, which is great, but they will be missed. Also, the weather is sad, with all that rain chipping away at the final days of my sum...

Still in vacation land even though last week didn’t feel like vacation at all. I attended the end-of-term presentations—term projects, level design, and music/sound/video—which were great, and had a number of appointments like going to the dentist or getting a haircut, which were necessary. The strongest counter-vacation vibes came fro...

Still in vacation mode, so I’ll again keep it brief. I’m back now in this festering hellhole called NRW, where the state legislature has just casually scrapped the incidence rate of 50 as a key measure to trigger more restrictive public health policies; decreed that schools will reopen this week just as planned despite rising infection...

Since Friday, my protection against COVID-19 is as effective as it can be at this point in time. Also, I’m in Berlin. It’s my first trip in two years. I’m visiting my father, who’s back in Germany after about a lifetime, and we do a lot of “normal” things together. Like, eating at restaurants, visiting museums, swimming and sunbathing ...

Not that I’m actually traveling anywhere; visiting friends in Tokyo had to be shelved for yet another year. But muting my Discord servers, funneling work-related emails into a quarantine folder, and having breakfast and stuff on the balcony does a pretty good job already of giving me the post-stress migraines I’ve been waiting for afte...

Finally, I got my second shot last Thursday. Do I feel safer already? Not yet. First, for maximum protection to kick in, I have to wait another fourteen days. Then, the number of people has noticeably increased who no longer wear their masks properly where they should, and the number of people who care about it, particularly those whos...

Thankfully, I’m living in an area that’s neither susceptible to wildfires nor to floods, and the water in the basement merely rose to one inch, maybe two. For my part, it merely damaged my late uncle’s tax filings box. If you’re fully or partly self-employed and file your tax returns in Germany, ten years is the legal retention period ...

Last week, I stepped hard on the gas with developmental editing for my current writing project. What is developmental editing? Here’s the rough guide. You check if everything’s fine and consistent with your dramatic structure, theme and motifs, and, if applicable, genre expectations. Then you check if your first page, first scene, esca...

Recently, the global weather has picked up on the contrast shower fad—and as the good fitness & health fanatic that it is, it adopted the most extreme version, alternating between intense 130 °F droughts and bouts of torrential rain. Meanwhile, humans set the Gulf of Mexico on fire, blasted Romania’s largest oil refinery, and turned Eu...

If I understand this correctly, there’s a field test being carried out right now to assess how wide and how fast fresh Covid variants can be propagated by soccer fans. I’m looking forward to reading the paper! Meanwhile, we had our own second Covid scare around here. My SO, in order to go to the dōjō, took a rapid Covid test and tested...

Last week, I became so absorbed in my writing project (good!) that I haven’t written a single blog post (bad!). But I’m getting closer to finishing my current draft, and fast. A mere 1,500 words are left which I need to write from scratch (but I know what’s going to happen), and the closing scenes beyond that I already put down in what...

First off, everything checked out, I’m on Big Sur now. Beyond what I already anticipated, there was one unexpected hitch with NTFS for Mac, but it was my own fault as I’d mixed up some kernel extensions. And while I recognized and fixed the problem myself, I had fired off a support request to which Paragon’s support then reacted in a t...

Last week, I was critically preoccupied with readying my Mac for 64bit-only macOS 11 Big Sur. Why am I still on OSX Mojave? Workflows & pipelines! It took me two years to whittle down my enormous stack of 32bit-only apps to an acceptable degree. A few problems remain, and while they’re not trivial, I have to go on. Switching from Adobe...

My workload dropped considerably last week, I caught up with some sleep, the weather improved, and I even found the time to redecorate my side blog just drafts a.k.a. My Secret Level. Sadly, though, I caught two crushing migraines—my monthly one and a second one that was triggered by the constant drone of heavy gardening machinery outs...

Last week I was absorbed with preparing and executing final workshop sessions for two university courses, and I wanted these sessions to be an enjoyable experience. Now, when I was a student, particularly back at school, workshops came as group work or team paper preparations, and I hated both with a passion. So I always try to set up ...

Even though there was less work on my plate, it was an exhausting week after all. I felt tired, “worked” incessantly in my sleep on my projects, and comprehensively failed to relax during the weekend. And while it’s not merely the situation in Israel, as there are many other things going on in the world that can leave you tired of exis...

Another packed week passed by, full of lectures, meetings, and miserable weather. Yet today, suddenly, the sun’s out! 82 °F! And it comes with a fresh breeze! All working together to deliver a massive throwback to good old times and great memories, back when I spent every summer season living on a yacht, roaming around with a motorbike...

In the spirit of last week’s topic, there was a job posting from a German health office for a courier with a scooter to deliver COVID-19 documents received by fax to another part of the building for further processing. But rejoice! More and more health offices are switching right now from hand-written lists to an app out of hell where ...

In Germany, public health departments work with handwritten lists which are transmitted by fax, manually typed into Excel sheets, and printed out for use. I’m not kidding.* It’s not as if software didn’t exist—one app was even developed in Germany and is used worldwide with great success! But most German health offices rejected using i...

The weather has improved around where I live, which is good. Otherwise, the staggering amount of political callousness, neglect, greed, and incompetence from those who’re in charge of handling the pandemic in Germany is something to behold—a toxic jumbo cocktail whose hangover will haunt everyone for a decade. Which is also already put...

Last week I was swamped with a torrent of lectures with up to eight academic hours per day; one and a half migraines and a sore throat; and sudden hailstorms between bouts of snow. Yup, April. Thus, regrettably, I didn’t finish any blog posts. But I published two more albums on Flickr, Stuttgart I and Stuttgart II, and I also started t...

Unsurprisingly, things look every bit as bleak in terms of prevention and vaccination in Germany as experts have predicted—where by “experts” I of course mean actual experts, not shady rent-a-scientists like you-know-who. It’s pretty weird to experience a major crisis in a country that’s comprehensively underorganized and overregulated...

Not much has changed since last year this time, except that the virus has become more varied and more viral; that Germany dropped the ball in terms of prevention and vaccination; and that the world doesn’t look so well in general, even though one of its most destructive forces is off the board since January 20. Besides all that, March ...

Evidently, today isn’t Friday—I decided to push this newsletter’s regular release date to Sunday. To have more time to get stuff done, that’s one thing. As another, it feels better to let these little retrospectives not end the old week, but start the new one! In the U.S., Japan, Israel, and many other countries, Sunday is the first da...

If one thing has become clear during the past weeks and months of the pandemic, it is that Germany's government agencies and political parties are singularly inept at doing the right thing, and that everybody—barring a miracle—can kiss their summer vacations 2021 goodbye. One of the most outrageous things happening with regard to the p...

Some of you may have noticed that I have a new* email address j.martin@hey.com. Essentially, HEY.com is a paid webmail service. But you get an incredible amount of mileage out of your bucks, trust me! Remember how I always told you, use messaging, don’t send me emails? That’s history. Email’s become fun again! So don’t shy away any lon...