Butterflies This week I went to Alaris Butterfly Park again. It has been several years since I was last there. It’s a greenhouse at the edge of Lutherstadt-Wittenberg, about two hours from Berlin by train. It’s full various butterfly species that fly around freely inside where they are easily observable, an amazing photo opportunity. And this time I brought a proper macro lens. All of these are…
About a year ago I built a new PC, for the fist time since 2006, to use it as my main computer, replacing a Mac Mini at the time. I also ran Linux on it from the start. Now, after one year, I want to look back on the experience a bit and maybe say a few things that are on my mind about desktop Linux more generally in 2025. For some context: I’m very much not new to Linux. I’ve been administrating…
About a week ago I did something I wanted to do for years: ride along the Berlin Mauerweg by bike. It’s a trail following the path of the former Berlin Wall, all around what was formerly West Berlin. According to berlin.de it’s about 160km long. The GPX track they provide is 168km but that’s probably due to GPS inaccuracies. Anyway, it’s quite long. 160km is perfectly doable on a road bike without…
Building This week I built and painted a tabletop miniature for the first time in ages. I wanted to do something calm, meditative, and relaxing, so I visited Battlefield Berlin, a local tabletop games shop, and got myself this “Skaven Warp Grinder” set from Warhammer. I don’t actually play the game, although I did play 40K for a little while 20 years ago, which let me just pick a miniature based…
Powerlifting vs bad eating habits I want to write this up as its own post. I haven’t had the time for it yet but wanted to get some of it out. I’ve long had some unhealthy eating habits and when it got bad maybe “disordered eating” would have been the right term too. Whatever to call it, it wasn’t a healthy relationship with food. I would go an entire day without eating and then slip into bursts…
Wheels I fulfilled a little dream of mine this week and got myself a cargo bike. I’ve wanted one for years but over the last few months the idea has been stuck in my head a lot more. The problem had always been that good cargo bikes are expensive, and the cheap ones are often very disappointing. During the time when I volunteered as a bike mechanic and repaired a lot of cargo bikes for a…
Here’s a fitness hot take: People who are, either admittedly or obviously, on anabolic steroids have nothing useful to say in terms of training advice outside of the context of competitive enhanced bodybuilding which doesn’t apply for the vast majority of people who are interested in learning about fitness. The advantages that enhanced lifters have over natural ones are so huge that they could…
Thanks algae I’ve probably been deficient in Omega-3 fatty acids for a long time since my everyday diet doesn’t really contain any typical sources of them. This wasn’t news to me but I never supplemented them because I only knew of omega-3 supplements based on fish oil, and as a vegetarian I don’t consume fish products. I always thought fish were producing them and there wasn’t really any other…
University My schedule at uni is starting to relax. I planned my courses to that all the big block seminars that fill a whole day and often need a lot of prep work for their respective projects were happening early in the semester. The idea was that I’ll have more time to study for my exams towards the end. I think this is working out as intended. Most of these seminars are over and the remaining…
Damn, it’s been a while since I wrote one of these journal posts. The last one is from about a year ago, but there was a time when I did these every week, back in 2022. I’d like to get back to that because it was really good to have a writing outlet what was a bit less frantic than things like Bluesky but also less involved than the articles I write on specific topics. I just want a place to…
I used to have a pretty large collection of MP3s when I was younger. I started accumulating them pretty much as soon as MP3 became widely available and I had a PC that was capable of handling them at all.Before flash-storage based MP3 players became cheap, I used to burn CDs full of MP3 files to listen to on an MP3-capable portable CD player. It was horrible because the CD would constantly skip…
The new US administration is taking a lot of valuable information offline in what can only be called a fascist purge of knowledge that will likely continue. Online archives like the Web Archive’s Way Back Machine are a good resource to still access those pages but ultimately, saving things offline is the safest way to keep them available and doesn’t depend on any online service to stay up.…
Contents Introduction Getting off my ass Some theory Where does strength come from? Energy Oxygen Muscle mass Nervous system efficiency Technique Bodybuilding vs Powerlifting Nutrition Praxis Gear 5/3/1 Accessory movements Cardio Food Recovery Conclusion Introduction Three months ago I got the idea in my head that I should do some serious exercise. At the time I was using my bicycle to get around…
CW: alcoholism, mental health It’s the 20th of May 2024, Pentecost/Whitsun weekend for those who observe it, and on this weekend ten years ago I had my last alcoholic drink. Pentecost is also when the annual goth festival “Wave Gotik Treffen” in Leipzig happens and that’s where I was back then, at a Hamferð concert (great band, btw.), having a beer, and deciding that it would be my last one. Ten…
Whenever the design of user interfaces comes up, one quality is almost always mentioned: it should be intuitive . What does “intuitive” mean here? Easy to learn from the ground up? Difficult to make mistakes with? Simple? Maybe any combination of these and more. If I had to summarize or define this vague requirement of “intuitive”, I’d probably say somethings like “a person using this thing should…
(The 6D I had until a couple years ago) In the last 15 years I’ve shot on Nikon and Canon DSLRs, as well as Sony and Olympus mirrorless cameras and after a few years on Micro-Four-Thirds decided to go full-frame again and landed on a Canon 5DS, a camera from nine years ago that still holds up very well. This little chunk of history and buyer’s guide is based on my own experience with various of…
Spoiler warning for Dune, Part One and Two of the Villeneuve films, the original novel and the later entries in the series. TL;DR: Dune Part Two (2024) is an irresponsible film, just not very good, and kind of boring. Any adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune series that stays close to the source material will always suffer from the fact that it’s a Dune adaptation. Let’s be honest, Dune is full of…
There’s been quite a few good pieces of media in 2023 and it’s not always easy to pick a favourite. But I shall try. Movie: Godzilla Minus One Trailer on Youtube Ok, this was an easy pick. A late entry into this year’s movies, Godzilla Minus One is a truly outstanding film. Out of over 700 movies I’ve only given a 5/5 star rating to a total of ten and this is one of them. It’s rare that a movie…
Two major changes have happened in my life. I’ll start with the one that came unexpectedly. I’ve been riding bikes ever since I was a kid, even though I learned it relatively late. But for most of my life I’ve been a “bike person”. It’s my main mode of transport and a core part of my identity. I join protests for better bike infrastructure, I get into confrontations with reckless car drivers, all…
I’m sick and tired of the razor cartridge ripoff and I’m doing something about it. Content note: body/skin care, shaving, sharp blades I’ve been shaving basically my whole body from the ears down ever since I was 17 or so. Long before realizing how it was a part of my dysphoria, I just hated the feeling of body hair and I still do even though there never was much of it and now there’s far less…
Content note: sex, sex toys, genitals, dysphoria (no details), transition (I’m not being paid for this review and the Volta I own was not provided as a review unit. I just really want to talk about this thing and I hope this information proves useful for others.) As long-time readers of this website or my social media channels may know, I’m a trans woman who had “bottom surgery” (a combined…
In 2010 Chase Jarvis published “The Best Camera Is the One That’s with You” , a book about iPhone photography accompanied by an app and online community. It was a big deal at a time when smartphone cameras’ image quality was still quite bad and nowhere near a level where they could really replace a dedicated camera, not even a good point-and-shoot. Nobody took an iPhone seriously as a tool for…
I’m usually not a morning person, and even if I have to get up early for something, I rarely spend the very early morning hours outside. Those hours however have some pretty good light when the weather is right. So today I set my alarm for 04:00, had breakfast while it was still night, and headed out at 05:00, about an hour before sunrise. I took the subway to Hermannplatz and Mehringdamm, two…
Spoiler warning for The Last of Us 1 and 2, and by extension also the TV show Earlier this year I played The Last of Us Part 2 . I had played the first game years ago and it left quite an impression. Here’s a very quick summary: The Last of Us is set in a near-future where human society has collapsed after a fungus started turning humans into basically zombies. It is transmitted by biting and the…
I have an old analog SLR, a Praktica BC1. It was made in the 1980s and still works to this day. And I’d like to take it out and actually shoot pictures with it again after going digital for many years. It had an issue though: It would ignore your selected shutter speed and always use 1/1000 second which is not very helpful. I first assumed that something was actually broken but a little bit of…
This is an archived copy of two Twitter threads I wrote in 2022 about how I learned very late in life that my home town was host to a concentration camp during the Nazi era, how both east and west Germany failed to confront the past, enabling a resurgence of far-right ideas and violence. My home town in rural east Germany had a concentration camp and the local industry (which people were quite…
It’s been a minute. My last journal entry here is from December 2022. I don’t know why I stopped doing the weekly ones but once I had skipped two or three weeks it became much harder to motivate me again. But I do miss this form of writing that isn’t quite like on a social media feed but also not as work intensive as a full on article, this kind if grab-bag of random things that happened and links…
It’s often said that you can’t solve social problems with technology alone and there’s many reasons why this is true. Technology often reproduces the social systems in which it was created, it presents a kind of solutionism that fails to look at the root causes of the problems, and it has politics and economics embedded in itself that might be part of the problem, just to name a few. I want to…
Where do I even start with this year? When I try to look back on it, I feel like this should have been at least 3 years given how much has happened. But ok, I’ll go through things step by step. A New Face In February of this year I went to Marbella (Spain) and literally got my face peeled off (and then but back with significant alterations to my skull and other parts). Over the course of a few…
Content warnings: medical transition, surgery, scars, bruises, skulls I went through one of the most significant steps in my life in 2022. It changed on a fundamental level how I view myself, how I relate to my body and how I navigate the world. I’ll try to go through the whole process here, but let’s back up to about a year ago … Before This is what I looked like to most people about a year ago,…
This week I attended my first large concert in several years. Even pre-pandemic I hadn’t been to any major music events since at least 2017 and even then it was a rather cozy affair at a small venue. Now I got to see Within Temptation and Evanescence live on the same night. I had seen Within Temptation once before at WGT in 2014 (I think. Maybe it was 2013?) and that was at a tiny open air theater…
A few weeks ago this made the rounds on Twitter in various variations: The four stages of a Mastodon user: what’s a Mastodon I feel lost and alone how does this work oh wow this is actually pretty cool I’m an instance admin now Well, I’m at stage four. This week James and I launched strangeobject.space , a new general-purpose Mastodon instance that is explicitly sex/kink-positive. Registrations…
Some super-rich people like to paint themselves as “self-made”, meaning they claim to have amassed their wealth through hard work and smart decisions. This narrative on attractive because it opens up the imagined possibility that anyone could become a multi-millionaire, maybe even billionaire. And while there’s a non-zero chance that some very few will actually do that, for nearly every single…
We haven’t has real winter in Berlin for years, it’s always been more like a prolonged fall with temperatures around 5°C and high humidity. This time it start off very differently. It’s been several days now with snow that doesn’t fully melt and it’s often slightly below 0°C. The speed of the temperature drop reminds me of my first winter in Berlin. I had just moved here and gotten rid of a lot of…
In order to learn more about Rust, I’ve started last years Advent of Code and I think I’m making good progress. I’m now at day 12 and the puzzles are getting a lot more tricky. Doing them in Rust reveals more of the shortcuts I used to take in programming with other languages and that engages a certain part of my brain that’s very fun. I put my solution up on Github , if you want to take a look.…
It’s been about a week since Elon Musk took over Twitter and things have been chaotic as expected from that side. What surprised me a little was how quickly a lot of people gave up on Twitter as a platform. I don’t know how much of that is just a temporary over-reaction and how many of them will be gone permanently. I’m sure things will deteriorate at least in the mid-term future (on the scale of…
4.1 equivalent tons over 42100km. That’s how much. 😰 Flight shame or flygskam is an anti-flying social movement, with the aim of reducing the environmental impact of aviation. Flight shame refers to an individual’s uneasiness over engaging in consumption that is energy-intense and climatically problematic. (Wikipedia) I found this very handy R script here that estimates your carbon footprint from…
It has actually happened. Last week, Elon Musk acquired Twitter. He is now in pretty much full control of the company. This has been brewing for months in a drawn out back and forth but now it has become a reality. Reactions have been … mixed, even among just my peers which are mostly strongly left-leaning people, and queer folks. Some are immediately abandoning the platform either so withdraw…
This week I gave Hollow Knight another try. I had played it before but never finished because I got stuck on a boss fight and didn’t have the patience back then. This time I started from scratch and even made it past the point where I stopped last time. This game is still extremely beautiful and its melancholic mood is right up my alley. I even ended up drawing a little piece of fan-art about it.…
(This is going to be a bit of an aimless collection of thoughts with no particular point) There’s this popular concept of “power corrupts”, meaning that anyone who when placed into a position of power will ultimately abandon any altruistic ethics and act in a selfish way at the cost of others. This has ling bothered me and while I don’t know if it’s true in practice, I keep thinking about an…
It’s been a weirdly uneventful week. When I was thinking about what significant things happened, they were all in the week before or already kind of part of the next one. I guess it’s ok, not every week needs to have a lot of things to write a bout in it. I still struggle a lot with my creative writing. I had set myself a goal of writing a short story by the end of next week and so far I only…
I’ve done it. I finished Elden Ring. On my third attempt and about 65h I arrived at the “Age of Stars Ending” which seems to be the one I would have wanted based on what I know about the game’s lore and other endings. I started playing this game right when it launched and I had high expectations for it after enjoying several of the “Souls” games a lot. Dark Souls 3 after all is my favorite game in…
It’s been a difficult week again and I struggle to focus on anything productive. So, looking for distraction, I started a new run of Elden Ring. I still haven’t finished the game and my previous two attempts weren’t very promising. My first try with a melee dexterity build turned out to be extremely difficult, much more than any other Souls game I played before, and my second one using sorcery was…
Last weekend I skipped my weekly post because there was just too much going on and too little time for writing anything between dropping one date off at the airport and almost missing my train to visit another. It all worked out though. I went to Munich for a few days during Oktoberfest but it was much more relaxed than I had feared. I did see a few people in the traditional Bavarian costumes in…
If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, first let me compliment you on keeping the old ways alive, but also recommend you open this page in a modern web browser. It looks quite different than a week ago. After much procrastinating I went ahead and did a full redesign of this site’s look. It’s the third major iteration since it launched back in 2018 so here’s a short visual history: The first…
The image above was generated by a machine, DALL-E Mini (now called Craiyon ) to be exact. The prompt was several garbage dumpsters with faces that are arguing with each other in a parking lot I have complicated feelings about these “AI” image generators. I’m deliberately putting “AI” in quotes because I think it’s misleading to call these systems “intelligent” at all. They are highly purpose…
This week has been worse than the previous one and emotional exhaustion has become physical, to the point where I had trouble getting up the stairs to my flat. I was looking forward to a few good days with loved people but they ended up taking care of me mostly and catching me when I was at the lowest points. Then there’s waiting for medication to arrive while I’ve already run out of it. Legal,…
I spent a lot of this week crying and processing complicated feelings, both good and bad. From anxiety around the complex problems of polyamorous life to the joy of being accepted by small children in their home and family. This week has dug up all sorts of my own trauma, and I still need to work through a lot of it and maybe make some very difficult decisions that I’m not looking forward to. I’ll…
This week was incredibly hot in Berlin. Temperatures were consistently over 30ºC every day. That may not sound like much to people who live in much hotter regions but it gets bad when everything in your city is built for much lower temperatures, like most of central Europe is. This will likely continue in future summers and it’ll get worse. It’s manageable for now by reducing activity to a…
I’m in the process of completing my video setup. For that I need to solve audio issues, pick microphones and get them hooked up to my camera. Luckily, the Blackmagic PCC4K that I use has all sorts of audio input options so I’m not really limited in what I can use. I should have read the manual more carefully though. It has a stereo TRS connector for dynamic and self-powered mics as well as line…