Blog 4.0

I remember being somewhat into the Eurovision Song Contest for a while in my teens. Love Shine A Light (the 1997 winning song from the UK) was played on Austrian radio for ages, and I was fourteen at the time. In 2000, I distinctly remember watching the event with the TV muted and the radio tuned in to a sarcy commentary show that was just making fun of everything. It already seemed like a crazy over-the-top show back then, though the winning song that year, Fly On The Wings Of Love , was just two middle-aged Danish dudes playing their guitars. The next time I remember paying attention to the event wasn't until 2014, when I had just started my job at my current employer, and Austria won the competition with a drag queen performing what sounded like a song straight out of a James Bond movie . Being the only Austrian in the office, I was naturally congratulated on "my" victory. When I looked up the song to know what everyone was talking about, I was mostly baffled.  Fast f...

I don't really like talking about religion nowadays since I've become an atheist for all intents and purposes, just not of the kind who enjoys telling everyone else about it. I have no problem with other people finding meaning, community and comfort in religion either. It's just not for me. I was however raised in the Roman-catholic church and never formally left it, so every now and then something related to that will still make my ears perk up. Such as the pope dying and a new one being elected. Oh the memes I saw on the subject... amazing (and yet never disrespectful, interestingly enough). I'm currently visiting my mother in Austria and she was switching TV channels yesterday just as the white smoke appeared, so we stayed on that channel to watch. I honestly thought it was hilarious how much the whole hubbub resembled a giant football event. They showed some people chanting "habemus papam" to the same tune to which they'd diss their football opponents ...

During my weekly phone call with my mother, the subject of politics came up, and at some point she said: "That X human is also terrible!" "Ex human? Do you mean Elon Musk?" "Yes, him!" "Yes, yes he is." It just amuses me that even my elderly mother in Austria who doesn't use the internet has heard of the guy at this point (and dislikes him).

I haven't written about work since September . The short of it is that our new website went live and was... surprisingly functional, considering the tight deadline for its creation. That said, in the back-end things were less great: there were write-offs due to messed up orders, and our customer ratings started to plummet. We all figured that it would be the business's number one priority to get our house back in order, but no... Instead they immediately dumped another project on us, to help with the migration of another website that we weren't at all familiar with, for another country and in a language most of us don't even speak. Can't say that particularly enthused anyone - but okay, we figured they thought we'd done such a good job with our own website and wanted us to help these other guys now that we knew how to do it. Except - we never got to talk to said other guys aside from one or two people. We repeatedly asked about this, because how can we help whe...

While talking about World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary , I've been finding myself thinking back to my university years (since I was in my early twenties when I first started playing WoW), which is a time period I generally avoid thinking about. In many ways those years were good times - I made friends online who actually shared my nerdy interests for the first time, and I got to visit different countries across Europe because of that. I was also still living with my mother and generally pretty carefree in terms of everyday things I had to worry about. However, over all of that loomed the shadow of causing parental disappointment and being filled with existential dread. You see, I was the Austrian equivalent of a straight A student, always succeeding at everything in school without having to put too much effort in. Then I graduated from high school and life suddenly got complicated, because I was supposed to pursue a career, and one that required a university degree please, as...

I was a Twitter user for over a decade, not because I truly loved the site, but because as far as social media went, it kind of felt like the best of a bad bunch to me. It still allowed you to just see a chronological feed simply containing the posts of people you followed (if grudgingly), it focused on text (even if images and videos were available) and it had a clean layout that wasn't cluttered with ads, games or other "features" I didn't give a damn about. Then Elon Musk came in and things degraded rapidly. An acquaintance gave me an invite code to Bluesky in July last year. It felt more like the Twitter of old again, but was very quiet. Still, I persisted and continued to post there, even if I was still checking Twitter as well. About three months ago, my Twitter account got locked down for not having a birth date tied to it, and since I was already annoyed with the site, I didn't bother to unlock it and switched to posting on Bluesky exclusively. There were...

I feel sorry for my American friends. More than anything though, I've got to admit I just don't get it. I watched a video of some analysts discussing the result and one comment that stood out was to me was something along the lines of: What everyone always gets wrong is that most people don't care about politics and don't pay attention to it. And I do get that to some extent. I'm not blaming people for not keeping track of all the crimes Trump was convicted of for example. But when someone goes out there and openly talks in his speeches about how he wants to let the armed forces loose on his internal enemies, roll back women's rights etc. - that's not complicated or niche. That stuff was broadcast globally and should have given people pause. How so many people can be either totally oblivious to what's in plain sight or just not care, thinking it won't affect them personally, is beyond me.

On the whole, it makes me sad to see my elderly mother diminish, get slower and weaker every year. However, there's one strange upside to her no longer being capable of doing anything that requires a minimum amount of strength or dexterity: I get to feel like a bloody hero for performing all kinds of simple tasks. Need a match struck to light a candle? A box with a slightly stuck lid opened? Batteries in the small torch need changing? Not to worry, I am here to save the day. It's a good thing I'm only visiting for a few days or it might go to my head.

Overheard our social media person at work trying to explain Gen Alpha slang to our brand person today. The latter, who is the older one, was entertainingly confused ("But what does Ohio mean?"), but what was really amusing to me was that I had heard pretty much all of the terms she was explaining before - which was weird in so far as I'm an elder Millenial and among the oldest people there (most team members are younger Millennials or older Gen Z). I guess it's something about my degree of online-ness? I'm not really sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I like understanding what people are saying, even if they are using terms I wouldn't necessarily want to adopt myself, but on the other hand it kind of makes me feel like that "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids" meme .

Tomorrow is the big day, when the new website is supposed to go live. You'd think with the event being mere hours away, I'd be able to speak with more confidence, but well... Last I checked, payments were still not working correctly. Just a minor thing for an e-commerce business. At one point during the testing, literally only one guy could get his payments to go through. At least my colleagues still had a sense of humour about it. "All future sales will just have to go through him then." "You'd like to pay? Please hold while we connect you to George." I wonder what I'll wake up to tomorrow.