Blog 4.0

In search of something new to watch on Disney+, I came across Rivals . I clicked on it because the name vaguely rang a bell, though I couldn't have told you what I'd heard about it, at what point or said by whom. It's very well produced, with great acting and music, and I found it compelling almost instantly. I'm now caught up to the current season, for which Disney won't release more episodes until winter. And yet... one of the most frequent comments I read about the show was that it was just jolly good fun to watch, and that hasn't really been true for me. I've been finding it compelling, yes, but in the same way a train wreck is compelling. Watching more episodes actually left me feeling actively bad sometimes, and even though I'm still not entirely sure why that is, I think the best explanation I have is that almost all the main cast members are so deeply flawed in ways that are just frustrating - either they keep making other people's lives mise...

Yesterday was apparently the hottest June day in the UK on record, and tomorrow is predicted to exceed it. Before I moved to the UK, I was always making fun of my English friends for being such wusses about the weather, complaining about the heat even at 25°C. Even twenty to thirty years ago, weather over 30°C wasn't unheard of in Austria in the summer, and while it wasn't exactly pleasant, I don't remember ever perceiving it as that bad either. But now that I've lived in the UK for over a decade, I get it. The humidity in the air here is just much higher than in central Europe, and it makes even lower temperatures feel really uncomfortable. Yesterday was a real struggle trying to work from home, as I just couldn't think at all with the temperature exceeding 29°C in our flat. Mostly I just stripped down when I wasn't expected to be on a video call, drank pint after pint of water and wandered the house in search of slightly cooler spots. I'm not looking forwa...

My husband has had chronic back problems pretty much as long as we've been together, so I'm quite used to being the one assigned to do any heavy lifting around the house. (Taxi and delivery drivers often look a little startled to see the woman in the relationship make a dash to pick up all the heavy items while the man shuffles his feet awkwardly.) Except... my time to also have back problems seems to have arrived at last. While I was visiting my mother last week, my back started to ache after a few days, and for the last couple of days of my stay I became pretty useless as merely shambling around the house was already enough of an effort. The husband blames my old bed, which makes his own back ache every time we visit together, but I figured, it's my old bed, surely it can't hurt me ?! But no, it seems my body has reached a point where spending several nights sleeping on a pretty hard mattress that felt perfectly fine to me in my twenties is no longer something I can ...

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...