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...