Blog 4.0

I've been washing my dishes by hand for more than sixteen years now. At first I didn't mind it too much, but as the years have gone by I've increasingly soured on this particular chore. Part of it was that whenever we visited someone else, everyone and their mother seemed to have a dishwasher, reminding me of what I'd left behind. However, the bigger part of my frustration was probably that my husband developed chronic back pain and (justifiably) noped out of doing the dishes ever again, leaving it to me at all times, even when he was on holiday and I was working - meaning I still had to also do the dishes at the end of a tiring work day, and I hated it. I started talking about getting a dishwasher and was always shot down with the argument that "the landlords would never agree to getting the plumbing for that in", which was probably true, but I couldn't help being wistful about it. The other day I was watching a Technology Connections video about dishwas...

As of yesterday I'm officially on my Christmas break, which at over two weeks long is my longest holiday of the year. I've really been looking forward to it, and this year I think I also really needed it. After my mental health hiatus things at work initially got a bit better. To my employer's credit, they did take the whole thing seriously and made some changes to alleviate the worst of my issues when I came back. Things were a bit awkward for a while, but at least not quite as bad. Then Black Friday/Cyber week came around and all hell broke loose again. Lots of unpaid overtime and artificially created stress. The only thing that helped me power through that one was that I knew it affected others just as badly and that at least there was a definite end date to this particular craziness. On my penultimate day of work, the leader of the division back at HQ gave what was supposed to be a Christmas speech, broadcast to several hundred people at once, and it was some of the mo...

I was pretty enamoured with Hazbin Hotel last year, so I've been looking forward to the second season this year. Amazon released it two episodes at a time over the course of the last month, which I thought worked pretty well... except for the freaking ads! Usually my adblock protects me from that stuff everywhere, so having to sit through 5 minutes of ads for every 25 minutes of episode was surprisingly aggravating. I ended up really liking this second season regardless, though I thought the first two episodes were relatively weak. However, after that, every batch of two was better than the last, culminating in a pretty awesome finale. The songs, too, started out a bit weaker than season one (in my opinion anyway) but got better in later episodes as well. Clean it up had me laughing out loud at my screen and Easy is stuck in my head on endless repeat right now. If I had to pick a favourite and least favourite thing about this season, my favourite would probably be Vox's arc....

Remember me complaining about work a few months ago? Things unexpectedly came to a head this week. On Monday (a working from home day) I had a good cry at the end of the day, but I didn't think too much of it yet at that point because I'm what you could call a naturally weepy person and sometimes a good cry is just the mental equivalent of clearing out your sinuses. I figured I'd feel better on Tuesday in the office, since being around my colleagues often tends to cheer me up. Not this time. By ten I was hiding in the toilet and crying again. I can't be doing this in the office , I thought to myself and vowed to pull myself together. Yet an hour later I was back in the same bathroom stall, once again crying, hyperventilating and shaking. By this point I could tell that this was untenable, and I told my manager that I was not okay and if I could please go home for the rest of the day. He was of course fine with that and I took a train home, quietly sniffling to myself f...

There's a new Netflix show by the creator of BoJack Horseman, in a similar - if more grounded - style. I only know about this due to watching a YouTube video called " The BoJack Horseman Creator Made a New Show! " Long Story Short focuses on a Jewish family over the course of several decades, with non-linear storytelling jumping back and forth to show us snapshots of their lives at different points in time. I hear that Jews find it very relatable, but it still worked for me as someone who's not Jewish and only has minimal knowledge of Jewish culture. For example, the first episode focuses on oldest son Avi bringing his girlfriend Jen home for his brother's bar mitzvah, and I'll say the experience of being the new girlfriend getting introduced to a loud and boisterous family is captured spot-on (as that's something I have also experienced). I was actually sad that there are only ten episodes, and I hope they make many more. I imagine that the non-linear s...

Look, I'm not even talking about the environmental impact, even though that's huge. I'm putting copyright concerns aside, even though those are also huge. But just... the general insanity of it all is getting to me. I'm now running into people in real life who will insert "I asked ChatGPT and" into regular conversation and expect me to treat this like it's something normal and insightful. At this point just seeing or hearing that phrase from someone I know triggers a visceral response of revulsion in me and it's getting tough to deal with. At work, we use the Microsoft suite, and the moment I noticed it, I turned CoPilot off. Since then, Microsoft has decided that my lock screen needs two separate ads for CoPilot on it, and added a greyed out button for it to my Outlook UI - which is otherwise customisable, but this new button for a feature I've turned off can't be removed. If these chat bots are so great, why are you so desperate to shove them...

Work has been getting me down a lot lately. Earlier in the year we got two new websites dumped in our laps, after the entire local staff that used to manage them until then was laid off. Our department manager, who'd been with the company for twenty years or so and was the heart and soul at the core of everything we did, also decided to leave the business. (Incidentally, that's the same guy whose departure I really dreaded in this post from over a year ago. And then it really did happen.) Since then our routine has seemingly turned into a constant stream of alternately being chided for not having enough sales on the three websites we're managing simultaneously (when a year ago we were a bigger team and only had one to look after) and being told that no, we cannot have any more resources or do more discounts or basically anything else that might actually help us achieve the growth they keep asking for. In-between I get emails from complete strangers working in other countri...

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).